the.com/compassion
strength wearing soft gloves, choosing to feel the weight instead of looking away
means the deep awareness of another's suffering coupled with the wish to relieve it, not just feeling for someone but feeling moved to act.
from From Latin compassio, built from com- 'together, with' and pati 'to suffer' — literally 'to suffer alongside.' That pati is the same root that gives us 'patient' and 'passion' (in its older sense of suffering, as in the Passion of Christ). The Latin term was likely shaped as a deliberate echo of the Greek sympatheia ('feeling with'), and it traveled into English through Old French in the medieval period — so the word has, from its very birth, carried the idea that you don't ease pain from a safe distance but step into it beside someone.
- brain wiring
- Empathy hurts, compassion soothes — different neural circuits entirely
- latin roots
- From 'com pati' — literally to suffer alongside
- vagus nerve
- Warm feelings physically slow your heartbeat down
- trainable
- Eight weeks of meditation measurably reshapes compassion regions
- darwin knew
- He called sympathy our strongest instinct, beating selfishness
mother teresa — worked with dying poor in calcutta for 45 years, founded missionaries of charity in 1950
nicholas winton — rescued 669 children from czechoslovakia before holocaust, arranged trains to safety in 1938-1939
paul farmer — physician who founded partners in health, treating tuberculosis in haiti and rwanda from 1984 onward