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For the past three weeks, we’ve been exploring compassion. We’ve covered how mindfulness fosters compassion, how to make metta meditation easier by starting with someone you love, and how to strengthen your capacity for self-compassion. Today, it’s time to address the toughest part of compassion meditation: generating feelings of loving kindness for people we don’t like. I want to address the value of this practice and to give you another tool that can help.

Having compassion for a difficult person is hard, especially if that person has caused you harm. It can even be tough to send goodwill to people for whom you have neutral feelings, that is people you don’t know.

But, why even bother? What’s the value of this practice?

Let’s apply mindfulness to this question. Difficult people are difficult because they are suffering in some way. They have negative emotions and they don’t have the skills required to manage those emotions effectively.

For example, a person who is manipulating you might be suffering because they perceive their needs aren’t being met. They manipulate, because they don’t have other, more effective ways to get what they want. Another example is the confrontational person who experiences anger without knowing how to manage it, so instead, they dump anger and blame on you.

To be compassionate is to see things from the difficult person’s perspective and to care about their suffering. If you can empathize with them, you can see they’re just people trying to do the best they can. After all, every person wants happiness, love, health, and well-being, even if the way they go about getting those things makes life difficult for you.

If you can empathize, you can begin to understand their position - notice I say “understand,” not “agree with.” If you can care about them, that is feel compassion for them, you might be able to identify ways that you can communicate with them in a more meaningful way and understand them even better.

You might even be able to find ways to help them resolve their problems, or resolve your mutual problems in ways that serves you both. By the way, I’m not suggesting that every solution is some form of happily-ever-after scenario. Sometime the solution is to agree to disagree, or to walk away from one another forever. But imagine reaching such solutions out of empathy and compassion instead of out of anger and misunderstanding.

Peaceful Moment of the Week: Canadian Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly

 

And there’s more. When a difficult person receives compassion and understanding, they might become a less difficult person. Support can sometimes go a long way toward making a person feel happy and secure, and those positive feelings can foster better reactions on the difficult person’s part.

Then there’s the personal benefit of compassion for others. One of the biggest benefits of mindfulness practice is it teaches you  ways to manage your own strong emotions such as the emotions sparked by a difficult person. Face it, you think the person is difficult because they’re negatively affecting you, causing you to generate strong emotional reactions. Learning to show that person empathy and compassion helps you manage your own negative reactions to their behaviour, leaving you happier and healthier, even if you don’t succeed in making them feel better.

How to teach yourself to care more

Compassion meditation helps you generate feelings of loving kindness for others, including people you don’t know, people you don’t like,