Fleet MaullThe Entrepreneur’s Zen Master

Alleviate suffering with compassion. Dr. Kristin Neff at the Art of Meditation Global Summit! 🌎

7 Jul 2024 · 1 min

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A short excerpt of a YouTube talk by Dr. Kristin Neff (Art of Meditation Global Summit) explaining that compassion aims to alleviate suffering and requires two complementary approaches: accepting oneself and one’s emotions when appropriate, and changing harmful behaviors or situations (including drawing boundaries). The speaker emphasizes balancing acceptance and change.

Chapters

So compassion is concerned with alleviating suffering. And there's two main ways to do that. Sometimes we need to accept ourselves or our emotions. Sometimes we need to change our behaviors or situations. It's not self compassionate, for instance, to stay in a toxic work environment or to allow people to abuse us or be unfair to us. You know, sometimes we need to draw boundaries or say, no, that's a self compassionate thing to do. Or it's not self compassionate to, you know, engage in behaviors that are harmful to ourself or others. We don't want to just accept those behaviors if they're harming us. You know, the compassionate thing to do is change them. And then. So really, it's both. I mean, it's like yin and yang. We need both.