Reflection Paper On Compassion

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In a world filled of pain and suffering, compassion is arguably one of the most important qualities to hold. Compassion is the ability to be conscious of the suffering that other people may be experiencing, along with the desire to alleviate others from such suffering. Although there is debate about whether compassion involves literal action to alleviating suffering, being compassionate allows for one to understand the pain.
Specifically, in Western philosophy there are three main components to compassion: suffering is legitimate, pain is not self-inflicted, and we must be able to see ourselves in the same unpleasant situations. Simply, the legitimacy of suffering lies in the truth that we all suffer. As humans, suffering is a part of our lives …show more content…

For the loving-kindness meditation, I laid down and listened to the 30-minute audio session, in which the beginning consisted of relaxing our body and becoming in tune with ourselves. By the observation of our body, I noticed similarities with common guided meditations that I’ve listened to before. Although, the middle of the meditation seemed to divert focus on showing ourselves love, which I enjoyed because I found myself calmly connecting to myself. Further, this meditation allowed me to extend my practice of loving-kindness with a neutral person through phrases of love towards this person as Professor Neff also stated that loving-kindness consisted of. After this meditation, I felt at ease and great compassion towards myself and the neutral person that I chose. Secondly, I chose a guided compassion meditation from YouTube, which was very similar to the loving-kindness meditation. This exercise began with breathing exercises followed by a focus of giving ourselves and others compassion. Specifically, this meditation repeated the phrase, “May I be free of suffering. May I experience joy and ease.” This part was interesting to me because it seemed like such a simple phrase that brought me comfort. This phrase is something I believe that everybody wishes to experience and simply telling ourselves this

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