What are Compassion and Kindness?
Compassion
Compassion and kindness are often thought of in similar ways; however, they are separate concepts with individual definitions that have some overlap. Such that some acts of kindness are seen to be compassionate and being compassionate towards someone can be seen as kind.
Compassion though is more related to our feelings, where being compassionate involves being able to connect emotionally with the other person either through sympathy or empathy. Sympathy is recognising that another is suffering and offering them comfort, support and encouragement. Empathy is sharing the feelings with the other person by understanding (often because of prior similar experience) what they are going through. Compassion can often lead us to doing things in order to reduce the suffering of the other person and it comes from Latin literally meaning ‘suffer with’ .
Kindness
Kindness is the quality of being friendly, generous, helpful and considerate; it is often most noticeable in the things that we do and is commonly associated with an action e.g. helping someone who has dropped their notes on the floor. Often people can find being compassionate and kind to others comes more naturally to them and feel that less things ‘get in the way’ than when we try and be compassionate or kind to ourselves.
Aims
We hope by the end of this topic you will have
- Grasped what compassion and kindness are.
- Considered what self-compassion is and identified what can get in the way of being compassionate to yourself.
- Had the opportunity to try out two exercises that help to foster self-compassion.
- Recognised the positive impact of acts of kindness to overall wellbeing.
Consider more:
1) How easy or hard do you find it to be compassionate towards yourself and others at the moment?
2) Which parts of this topic are you most interested in?
You might want to make notes at this point. These may help you remember things, work out what you want or see how much you’ve changed if you read them again in a few years’ time.