Broadening your compassion

- If you're interested in exploring the possibilities of difficult compassion, I want to encourage you to start with something that affects you in your daily life. In my experience teaching compassion, as soon as we start talking about having compassion for difficult people, a lot of folks want to jump to the extremes. It used to always be Hitler who came up first and then it was Osama bin Laden. And now it's ISIS. People want to go as far as they can to the edges of what feels like someone who might deserve compassion. And of course, if you have loved ones who survived the Holocaust or you lost a family member in September 11th, then this could be very real for you. And maybe that is the difficult compassion to explore. But for most people I find going to these extremes is about keeping the conversation intellectual rather than investigating the pain in their own heart. They try to think who's the most undeserving person…