Rick Hanson

James Kirby and others in Australia, for example, have done work on this, how to expand your circle of moral concern to include more people.

Recognize similarities.

You know, meditations like this, like me, you will suffer and one day die.

Like me, you love your children.

Like me, you enjoy chocolate.

Like me, you're a sports fan.

Similarities.

Two, can you find some sense of liking them or anything?

along the lines of wishing them well, even if you don't like them, can you wish them well?

Third, can you recognize that whatever they've done to you is part of a much larger whole, in which, yeah, they have their part.

You're opposed to them politically and otherwise, but there's more to it than that.

And fourth, can you see the ways in which their actions towards you

are the result of another wider, complicated collection of actions that don't relieve them of moral responsibility, but contextualize it in a much better way.

Now, these are cognitive efforts, but they're quite helpful.

And then just to finish, we have a lot of influence.

over how we feel, period, and how we feel toward others.

We have a lot of influence over how loving we can choose to be.

I had an experience personally, I'll spray the details, in my 20s where someone I loved had betrayed me and I had to decide what to do about it.

And I just made a choice to love it well for a while and then see what she did over time.

I was willing to give it some months wasn't going to be years but during those months I was going to love it well and I realized that the heart emotionally is like a muscle you can exercise it strengthen it and there's a certain within a range of what's available to you are you going to the high end or defaulting to the low end of your range of what's authentically available to you mobilizing an affective response to others in addition to the more cognitive four things I've said so