Considering Compassion

In light of the numerous challenges posed by globalization, living together as humanity on one planet needs to be reinvented in the twenty-first century. To create a new, peaceful, just, and sustainable world order is vital to the survival of us all. In this regard, humankind will have to expand the limited scope of its moral imagination beyond the borders of family, tribe, class, religion, nation, and culture. Will the cultivation of compassion, as scholars like Martha Nussbaum and Karen Armstrong, and religious leaders like the Dalai Lama maintain, contribute to a more just world? A global movement to cultivate and extend compassion beyond the immediate circle of concern may indeed find inspiration from many different religious traditions. The question at the heart of this book is whether the Christian legacy provides us with sources of moral imagination needed to guide us into the global era. Can the Christian practice of faith contribute to a more compassionate world? If so, how? And is it true that compassion is what we need, or do we need something else (justice, for example)? In Considering Compassion, colleagues from different theological disciplines at Stellenbosch, South Africa, and Groningen, Netherlands, take up these challenging questions from a variety of interdisciplinary angles.

Don't be so hard on yourself – use compassion focused therapy as your guide It's often said that we're our own worst critics—and it's true. Compassion Focused Therapy For Dummies offers straightforward and practical advice that helps you view yourself through a more sympathetic lens. This motivating text covers the key principles of compassion focused therapy, which guide you in caring for your wellbeing, becoming sensitive to your needs, recognising when you are distressed, and extending warmth and understanding to yourself. This transformative resource provides you with metrics that you can use to monitor your progress, including sensitivity, sympathy, empathy, and overall wellbeing. Initially developed to assist people experiencing high levels of shame and self-criticism, compassion focused therapy increases your awareness of the automatic reactions that you experience—and motivates you to combat negative reactions with kindness and affection. Used on its own or in combination with other therapeutic approaches, the value of compassion focused therapy is supported by strong neuropsychological evidence. Understand how to handle difficult emotions with greater ease—and less stress Transform difficult, potentially damaging relationships into positive aspects of your life Encourage and motivate yourself to continually meet your goals, rather than criticise yourself for perceived failures Stop being so hard on yourself, and appreciate yourself for who you are Compassion Focused Therapy For Dummies is a wonderful resource if you are seeing—or thinking about seeing—a therapist who utilises compassion techniques, or if you would like to leverage the principles of compassion focused therapy to manage your own wellbeing.

Social Workers and Compassion is designed to assist social work students, social workers, social work managers, social care workers, and lecturers in developing knowledge, understanding, skills, and values related to various aspects of compassion. Focussing on social work in the UK, the various elements of compassion – compassion, compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction, self-care, self-compassion, and mindfulness – are clearly located in a systemic, organisational, and structural context. The chapters draw upon evidence-based and evidence-informed sources and present critical perspectives that are linked to existing practices in social work education, social work, and the author’s own experiences. Drawing upon literature from social work and health care, social, organisational, work, and positive psychology, and from sociology and social policy from various parts of the world, the book will be of interest to international social work readers as well as professionals and professionals in training in the criminal justice, health care, counselling, and clinical psychology fields. It will be essential reading for social work students, lecturers, social care workers, social workers, and their managers.

This Element provides a fresh look at humanitarianism by integrating gender, emotions, senses and experiences as central elements of care.

Organizational compassion provides a multitude of benefits at individual, team and organizational levels. These encompass heightened positive affect, trust, engagement, loyalty, performance, resilience, and recovery. This important book provides an accessible yet scholarly overview of key academic findings and theories on organizational compassion. It equips readers with tools for reflection, awakening and practical application of compassion within the workplace across dyadic, team and organizational contexts. Historically, compassion work has been largely unacknowledged in official organizational discourse. Yet, wherever there are human beings, there will be suffering; where there is human suffering, one can often find human responses infused with kindness and compassion. This observation holds true across industries, professions, and communities. The book explores the complexities of organizational compassion, analyzing the factors that enhance organizational compassion capabilities, as well as those that make compassion falter and fail. The primary aim of this book is to foster the cultivation of organizational compassion by providing a provocative, stimulating and engaging foray into the academic study of organizational compassion for readers, ranging from undergraduate to postgraduate and executive students, as well as reflective practitioners. In a world marked by suffering and challenges, a research-based understanding and fostering of compassion at work, offers a path towards a better future.

Paul Gilbert brings together an international line-up of leading scholars and researchers in the field to provide a state-of-the-art exploration of key areas in compassion research and applications. Compassion can be seen as a core element of prosocial behaviour, and explorations of the concepts and value of compassion have been extended into different aspects of life including physical and psychological therapies, schools, leadership and business. While many animals share abilities to be distress sensitive and caring of others, it is our newly evolved socially intelligent abilities that make us capable of knowingly and deliberately helping others and purposely developing skills and wisdom to do so. This book generates many research questions whilst exploring the similarity and differences of human compassion to non-human caring and looks at how compassion changes the brain and body, affects genetic expression, manifests at a young age and is then cultivated (or not) by the social environment. Compassion: Concepts, Research and Applications will be essential reading for professionals, researchers and scholars interested in compassion and its applications in psychology and psychotherapy.

"In this beautifully written book, esteemed clinical psychologist and therapist Stan Steindl takes us on a personal journey into the ups and downs of what it is to be human and reveals both the challenges and the joys of building one’s compassionate mind.” — Professor Paul Gilbert OBE, Founder of Compassion Focused Therapy and bestselling author Life can be complicated. And sometimes, really very difficult. We may struggle with many common life challenges: in relationships, parenting, and work, just to name a few. We can end up suffering from stress, anxiety, and depression, or loneliness, isolation or shame. But did you know that a lot of that suffering comes from within? Rumination and self-criticism are uniquely human thought processes, developed over hundreds of thousands of years. Our brains evolved into an impressive and complex organ that helped us to survive a primitive world, and yet today may yell at us with harsh and hostile criticism, sometimes even over the smallest thing! In fact, critical self-talk is very common. And it flies just under the radar of our conscious mind — condemning and undermining us with its inner voice. This book will show you how to do better — to turn anguish into delight through the use of our Compassionate Self. Through a clear series of steps and practices, noted clinical psychologist Dr Stan Steindl explains how compassion evolved as a vital part of our nature and thought, and the way we look after one another, and even ourselves. He then shows how to use our compassion as a key to a healthier mental life. With personal vignettes illustrating the therapeutic benefits of compassion focused therapy, practical exercises that use mindfulness and imagery to help us develop attention to the present moment, and a wealth of guidance on self-criticism, shame and forgiveness, this book can change your life.

Throughout history, compassion has stood at the base of the radical cry to change the world order and remedy injustices. It has also been a political tool for society's power-wielders, who have exploited the sense of calling compassion arouses to hide the repressive, belligerent, and manipulative nature of society's power structure. This book analyzes four models of compassion, each representing manifestations of compassion in different cultures and eras: Judeo-Christianity, Buddhism, Modernism, and the author's alternative, a response to neocapitalist postmodernism-radical compassion and its imperative to take action.