Manifestation expert, Dr. Joe Galenberger, distilled decades of wisdom about creating your dreams into a quick and effective meditation exercise called Liquid Luck. It gives people a simple, fun, and quick way to access heart-based manifestation and to see immediate results.
Compassion training programs are revealing how we can boost feelings of compassion in ourselves and others. Here are some excellent tips that emerged out of those programs, as well as other research.
- Look for commonalities: Seeing yourself as similar to others increases feelings of compassion. A recent study shows that something as simple as tapping your fingers to the same rhythm with a stranger increases compassionate behavior.
- Be calm and centered: When we let our mind become fearful in response to someone else’s pain, we inhibit the biological systems that enable compassion.
- Encourage cooperation, not competition, even through subtle cues: A study showed that describing a game as a “Community Game” led players to cooperate and share a reward evenly; describing the same game as a “Wall Street Game” made the players more cutthroat and less honest.
- See people as individuals not abstractions. When presented with an appeal from an anti-hunger charity, people were more likely to give money after reading about a starving girl than after reading statistics on starvation—even when those statistics were combined with the girl’s story.
- Don’t blame others for their misfortune, when we do this we feel less concern for them.
- Understand that we are capable of making a difference even if just by praying for or sending good energy to the person. If we feel powerless we tend to curb our compassion.
- Notice and savor how good it feels to be compassionate.
- Research suggests compassion is contagious, so if you want to help compassion spread, lead by example and start by modeling kindness, particularly to children.
- Curb the ego’s tendency to see yourself as superior to others. Research suggests that as people feel a greater sense of status over others, they feel less compassion.
- Hold your own energetic space. When we completely take on other people’s suffering as our own, we risk feeling personally distressed, threatened, and overwhelmed. In some cases, this can even lead to burnout, apathy, or callousness. Instead, be receptive to understanding other people’s feelings without adopting those feelings as your own.
