Tricks for Compassion

[Tannhauser]

What are some concrete, practical tricks that we can do to become more compassionate and empathetic of other people?

And I mean specifically practical tricks, not intricate philosophical meditations and abstract narratives. Let it be the assumption that such things are futile.

One thing I read in a book about Buddhism: picture the life time of the other person. In particular them being born, then them as small children, etc. Finally, them taking their last breath as an old person. It is powerful to do that with someone you dislike or even hate.

edit: this is the actual quote:

Start with the friend. Imagine her as a newborn baby, covered in blood. Slowly follow her as she grows from a toddler to a child to an adolescent to a young adult to the moment you first met her. Try to picture what her hopes and longings were before she even suspected your existence. Think of her now as someone who values her own ideas and feelings in the same inscrutable way you hold on to yours. Then look into the future and watch her age, fall ill, grow old and die.

Turn to the enemy and stranger and do the same, until three human beings sit before you: equal in birth and equal in death.

Does this perspective affect the way you feel about each person? Are you able, even for a moment, to witness these people in all their autonomy, mystery, majesty, tragedy? Can you see them as ends in their own right rather than means to your ends?

from Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor

 

[Black Rose]

If you choose to make a connection the first is with your own suffering. I tell myself its not my fault and it is no ones fault. Life has pain in it and you want to help. Do you want to help. I want to help.

 

[Pyropyro]

Volunteer at compassionate organizations like churches. If you're not religious then you can go for animal shelters or soup kitchens instead. Ive learned a lot about compassion from the NF's that frequent there.

 

[Minuend]

What do you want to accomplish? Sympathy isn't always useful or needed

 

[nanook]

tonglen meditation. breathe in the suffering of the world, of others, accept it as being your business somehow, then breath out virtues that are soothing to suffering, that are supposedly your own, know to you, anyways - imagine the world is receiving what you breathe out. it isn't abstract. it is a nerological training of the circuit of giving and receiving, both opening the heart, meaning both are potentially removed from attachement, control. i haven't done it often. i have found that it helps with social anxiety. it gives a natural self-confidence that isn't about boundaries or self-images, but about participation, involvement, showing up, without list, with authentic creativity instead. depends on how you visualize what you can give or receive, i guess. i find that spontaneous imagination of it is automatically rather authentic. some people seem to do it somewhat sensually, breathing in black mud or something like that and breathing out white light. but for me, more specific ideas will usually be available.

 

[Tannhauser]

What do you want to accomplish? Sympathy isn't always useful or needed

To get rid on my pointless, wasteful, pathological cynicism.

 

[Deleted member 1424]

To get rid on my pointless, wasteful, pathological cynicism.

Sympathy or empathy won't necessarily help with that.

sidenote:
If you're having issues with anger and frustration; apathy works wonders.

 

[Puffy]

Try to picture and understand people's actions from their perspective and try to relate to it. They have their own motivations, faults, and virtues, like you.

Did someone hurt you? Think of a time you hurt someone.
Does it annoy you that they're incompetent? Think of a time you really struggled at doing something.

I find it difficult to sustain enmity or anger towards another person, even if they wrong me, because I understand that ultimately people have their own reasons for everything they do, and have a history that has resulted in them becoming the person they are. I don't default to blame, but rather assume there are a lot of factors about that person and their situation I don't understand, that if I did understand would make them comprehensible/relatable.

Norm Kerth's prime directive is pretty good. I sometimes write it up on the whiteboard in retrospective reviews if I'm leading a project with others:

"Regardless of what we discover today, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."

In essence, don't default to attacking/ blaming people, attack/ blame the processes, and analyse the context/situation. For one thing, you can't change people, but you can change the latter.

 

[Ex-User (13503)]

Something else that helps that's in line with the OP and the input of others thus far is to ask someone how they reached a conclusion or came to gain a certain perspective (for INTPs, especially if their conclusion or perspective seems irrational). It lets you match up a decision tree with various other aspects already mentioned like life history, basically identifying their heuristic. And then you can better predict (and prepare for) and influence their future actions and perspective, which undeniably makes them more tolerable and hence yourself less hostile in interaction.

 

[Architect]

Ne works for me. Don't try to be compassionate or empathetic per-se, you can't, it'll just come off as supercilious or false. So use your strength in a way that accomplishes the same thing. By using Ne you are exploring other people and their problems (or whatever the situation is). Information gathering; show interest, ask questions and listen more than talk. Try to understand their situation and how they got there. You'll find it interesting and they'll have somebody to talk to.

That's enough, in fact that's already more than what most people do. But I wouldn't recommend trying to help. At least it always backfires for me - always. I don't know why but I suspect it's playing on my weakness. I don't have any natural ability to help others, so when I try I do it wrong.

The only way it has worked is when I give people information of something I've figured out. Usually they won't pay attention, but I've had it happen that years later they'll realize I was right and they followed my ideas.

 

[Ex-User (13503)]

Ne works for me. Don't try to be compassionate or empathetic per-se, you can't, it'll just come off as supercilious or false. So use your strength in a way that accomplishes the same thing. By using Ne you are exploring other people and their problems (or whatever the situation is). Information gathering; show interest, ask questions and listen more than talk. Try to understand their situation and how they got there. You'll find it interesting and they'll have somebody to talk to.

That's enough, in fact that's already more than what most people do. But I wouldn't recommend trying to help. At least it always backfires for me - always. I don't know why but I suspect it's playing on my weakness. I don't have any natural ability to help others, so when I try I do it wrong.

The only way it has worked is when I give people information of something I've figured out. Usually they won't pay attention, but I've had it happen that years later they'll realize I was right and they followed my ideas.

I would say try to help only if you're confident you'll be successful, and refer elsewhere if they ask and you doubt your competence. Nothing new there, really.

I also suspect that you personally don't recognize when you do successfully help others, which is probably either you missing some signal from them or due to the types of people you help. Teaching someone a skill you're competent in, for example. I mean, I've heard that there's a massive thread out there titled "Ask Architect" or something to that effect....

 

[Auburn]

@Architect - I think Tannhauser's interest in compassion is to relieve his own cynicism, not so much to try and be helpful to others.

I think that's the best approach to the question, actually. Because (as you noted) we can't easily anticipate or decipher what people would need. But it sucks if we're the ones making ourselves miserable through constant frustration at the environment.

@OP

I don't know if you might relate... but as someone who approaches emotions from the intellectual front, it rarely helped me to try to apply emotional methodologies (i.e. ...try to feel what they feel). My innate resistance toward 'feeling' makes these methods off-putting.

Instead, I gain compassion as a side-effect of my understanding of life and humanity as a whole, in the universal sense. Emotions adjust to conceptual realizations. Such as...

• The dispassion of an absurd universe
• The senselessness of placing blame in a deterministic universe
• The senselessness of holding ill feelings in general
• The realization that the most rational position is the most neutral, and that pessimism or cynicism is me being tinged by an emotional weight. (cue process of detangling why I feel hostility)

Things to this effect... though it's by no means a complete list. It's my assumption that a truly rational being would, by default, also be compassionate in the general sense --- by understanding causation and results, rather than having any sort of accusation principle/moralism.

I suppose for me compassion = understanding + non-blame. Others might differ in their definition. Dunno if this helps at all, but.... $0.02

 

[Sinny91]

Stop believing your own bullshit.

Like you, I live and breathe cynicism, but unlike you, I don't believe my own bullshit.

We're all just shitty meat suits, stuck on a chunk of rock, suspended somewhere in the bowls of the abyss ...

We're all in the same game, just at different levels , all suffering the same hell , just battling different devils.

 

[Architect]

@Architect - I think Tannhauser's interest in compassion is to relieve his own cynicism, not so much to try and be helpful to others.

I know, but if he wants to try to relieve it by some form of compassion then that's the best way I found. Also might put things in perspective.

I would say try to help only if you're confident you'll be successful, and refer elsewhere if they ask and you doubt your competence. Nothing new there, really.

I also suspect that you personally don't recognize when you do successfully help others, which is probably either you missing some signal from them or due to the types of people you help. Teaching someone a skill you're competent in, for example. I mean, I've heard that there's a massive thread out there titled "Ask Architect" or something to that effect....

Thanks ... ok I'll restate it's sometimes helpful to people when I give them information for them to decide. But when I try to do something helpful for people (or what I think is helpful) is when it fails.

 

[Architect]

Another is the Woody Allen approach. I'm 98.3% sure he's an INTP, been on a Woody kick here for a while. I thought for a while he might be ISTP because he works so much, but everything else about him is INTP. Especially he's got horrible existential angst. So you know why he works? To avoid the angst. When he's involved in a movie he doesn't sit around idly thinking so much.

Which is a trick I learned too. I'm constantly working on something because it keeps me from getting cynical or existential. So this is what I'd recommend; always be involved in a project.

 

[EyeSeeCold]

Sympathy or empathy won't necessarily help with that.

sidenote:
If you're having issues with anger and frustration; apathy works wonders.

and if apathy doesn't work there is esc

Compassion is being honest and forthcoming with human needs and circumstances, it requires no tricks. The mind+society is already doing the tricking for you.

 

[Yellow]

I have to be compassionate as a job duty, which is what did it for me. It is/was my responsibility to facilitate positive outcomes in the life of a hitherto stranger. It meant seeing their barriers, struggles, and strengths, and finding a way to overcome them in a collaborative manner.

Even if I don't give a fuck about the person, I care very much about being the best at whatever I'm doing. Now, sometimes I feel myself kind of caring about people I'm not paid to care about. It's usually fleeting, but it's there, and that's something.

In terms of becoming less cynical, it's helped and it's hurt. I can see now that things aren't so cut and dry for people. As a rule, I only work with people who are conventionally "bad people". The dregs of society, if you will. Putting yourself in their shoes, abandoning your own viewpoint and seeing through theirs, it's like building an annex on your soul (if there is such a thing).

 

[Shieru]

@OP - In my experience, one of the best ways to develop compassion is to come to understand your own human limitations, and therefore those of others in large part.

If you think of the psychology of compassion, it really relies a lot on understanding - as @Auburn mentioned. One must have a concept of another's predicament if they are to relate with it, and one must be able to relate in order to consider another in a compassionate light. And so, to have a general compassion, one must understand the general predicament of humanity.

If I know the reality of human nature is that we're all unconscious animals beneath a thin veneer of organized rationality, then the whole idea of accountability - and therefore blame - becomes kind of absurd. And if I understand my condemnation of others is due to my own primal will for self defense, then the idea of hatred seems all the more irrational.

I've found the best antidote to cynicism is to hold one's self accountable for it, rather than holding others accountable for inciting our bitter feelings. In my own journey, I found that cynicism was an escape from facing my own irrationality by projecting it outward onto a human race I didn't adequately understand.