Rick Hanson

When that happens from them, you benefit.

Turn it around and you give people that gift yourself.

You are helping them immensely.

Second, even if

Your compassion for suffering does not change anything out there for those other people.

It changes you as it moves through you.

It opens your heart.

It illuminates your mind.

And over time, it purifies you.

And so that increasingly you rest in this stream of lovingness as your own identity.

Those are profound benefits.

And then there's increasing research that shows the ways in which, speaking of multipliers, that compassionate acts and other related pro-social acts ripple through social networks, touching one person who touches another person who touches another person in turn.

And I find it helpful to appreciate

That there is so much in the world that we cannot change.

It's beyond our control.

What is in our control, going back to Viktor Frankl, who John quoted earlier, is how we relate to the conditions that we're dealing with out there in the world and inside our bodies and inside our own minds.

How do we relate to them?

What's our relationship to them?

How do we practice with them?

And to me, it speaks to the most fundamental of human freedoms, that no matter how bad it is outside, deep down inside ourselves, we always have a choice in how we respond to it.