How can I be more compassionate and forgiving?

Stop drinking coffee, eat less sugar, have a deadline for your computer use so that you always get a good night’s sleep. If you do this, you will transform into a much calmer person and you don’t have to suck energy from others. Instead, you will have energy to give away at the same time your emotional state is more stable.

 

Practise empathy, walk a mile in their shoes.

 

Treat yourself as you want to treat the others. Oh, it works as ‘treat others as you like to be treated’ too!

Be kind and compassionate to yourself. Forgive yourself to know how to forgive others. It’s not easy, it’s a balance between your needs and other people’s needs. If you are compassionate with others when they are not compassionate with you/themselves, you’ll create dissonance and that will make you angry and resentful.

(I’m now taking advice from myself too :| )

 

Contemplative Exercise...

1) Begin with a pen and paper and then for each of them write what you believe the definition of each is. Write from your understanding.
2) now compare your answer with a few different dictionaries in order to hone your definition.
3)Next identify all the times in your life you were each of these. Compassionate; forgiving. Toward someone or something.
3) Now write all the occasions you received compassion and forgiveness from some one else.

 

In a way compassion and forgiveness is not a matter of 'more' - because both involves acceptance. With compassion for ourselves many have found the affirmation of 'being enough' is helpful. With forgiveness it's both about leaving behind the past as well as equanimity. A lot of times people have issues with resentment because of codependency and expectations where they are in an enmeshed mindset with another, equanimity is good for clear boundaries.

 

Basically forgiveness is most beneficial for you. It sucks to get hurt but holding a grudge makes you a miserable and bitter person and will ruin your life. I've been through this and it held me back in many areas of my life but part of overcoming many of my problems, improving myself and finding the courage to work on letting go of drugs and PMO came from admitting I was bitter over some things and letting it go. Once I began to think like this I became less and less angry and I was walking around feeling 50 lbs lighter.

I'm Christian ( honestly striving to live like a real Christian). In the bible it says that God forgives you for all the things that you've ever done and then you screw up again and he still loves you but he expects you to extend the same courtesy to everyone that hurts you. If God can forgive me for my continuous disrespect and broken promises then I can let it go when people offend and hurt me. God understands we are flawed.

Mature people should be able to understand that other people are flawed and that people who have been hurt, hurt other people. Mature people should be able to come to the point where they don't take things so personally. When someone acts like an idiot or behaves in a rude hostile manner, their behavior is usually caused by some type of hurt, pain, deficiency, ignorance, self loathing or lack of maturity in their life and not ruminate on it.

 

@J-CAT I recently learned that gratitude influences your attitude and attitudes drive your behavior. My recommendation would be to start with a gratitude journal. I do mine daily, but I recently read that 2x a week gets better results.

 

Never thought about how to become more compassionate but letting go of PMO, vices and social media seem like good steps. When you're always focused on pleasing yourself it becomes an obsession that consumes you. When I was on my longest streak of no PMO and no Drugs, I related to people better and enjoyed them way more because I wasn't focused on useless trash. I don't know if it made me any more compassionate though.

 

(Its worth repeating)