The article below is about mindfulness and compassion. It also recommends a book which I have linked to below.
Historically, that is for over 2,500 years, mindfulness has always been taught along with developing compassion. Compassion is different to sympathy or empathy. It’s about understanding someone else’s pain and wishing to help.
When mindfulness exploded because of the work of John Kabat-Zinn, his famous book, “Full Catastrophe Living,” was purely focused on the mindfulness aspect of the traditional approach to mental training. This approach was taken to make mindfulness more acceptable within the environment he was working.
Most of the meditation and mindfulness research is just focused on part of the story. Today the compassion side is being studied further. There are traditional meditations for building compassion. When people practice these there seem to be even greater health benefits than mindfulness offers.
Bringing compassion to the workplace is an obvious route forward for enhancing our lives and other people’s.
The article linked below is to provoke you into thinking a little more about how to be compassionate to yourself and to others.
Mindfulness And Compassion: Two Key Ingredients For A Strong Workplace Community
Leah Weiss teaches compassionate leadership courses at Stanford University and she recently wrote the book ‘How We Work: Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity and Embrace the Daily Grind’ Weiss’ book is based on her Stanford courses which combine neuroscience research with ancient Buddhist techniques At GCUC in NYC this year, we learned that wellness is the new black and that the workplace community and environment can have a big impact on our physical and mental health The boundaries that once divided our professional lives from our personal lives continue to vanish as new technologies empower individuals to work remotely.