
What is compassion?
Kindness and friendliness, for yourself and others, are qualities you can train. Compassion training was developed as a follow-up to mindfulness training to help people keep practicing mindfulness and kindness.
What is compassion?
Compassion teaches you to face up to difficult and stressful experiences with a desire to ease them, so as to make them easier to deal with. In the words of Jack Kornfield: 'Life is hard. How can we be anything other than kind?' Compassion is a human quality that everyone possesses, but which often, for all kinds of reasons, fails to fully develop.
This training will help you strengthen the qualities of the heart, teaching you to:
- adopt a milder and kinder attitude towards yourself, especially when you really need it
- gain insight into elements from Western and Buddhist psychology that relate to the practice of compassion
- develop helpful skills in dealing with discomfort, pain, or stress
- practical exercises to integrate into your day-to-day life
Different modules, same content
In the Netherlands, there are two types of compassion training that are widely given, i.e. Mindfulness-Based Compassionate Living (MBCL) and Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC). Both programs are made up of nine sessions and use mindfulness as a point of departure. These programs are similar in that they are beased on the same sources and exercises, yet there are some differences. MBCL, for example, draws more on participants’ ability to imagine situations, while MSC makes greater use of the group dialogue method. The differences however are minor compared to what these programs have in common which is the development of a kind attitude towards yourself.
A program with a scientific foundation
Like mindfulness, compassion training is rapidly becoming an evidence-based approach. A leading scientist called Kristin Neff has published an extensive bibliography on the efficacy of self-compassion training. Fellow developers Christopher Germer and Paul Gilbert have also published multiple studies on self-compassion.
Who it is for
You are interested in building on your mindfulness practice with the practice of compassion as one of the qualities of the heart. To develop self-compassion, you need mindfulness as a foundation. Therefore, you have taken the mindfulness training first. Only in exceptional cases - such as when you have an unusually strong inner critic - it may be advisable to do compassion training first. If you think this could be the case for you, ask your trainer for advice.