Wiser: A Neuropsychiatrist on Consciously Increasing Wisdom

Dilip Jeste, MD, offers ideas for increasing wisdom through empathy, compassion, and belief.

Brokenness Expands Our Capacity for Non-Judgment

Empathy and non-judgment lie at the heart of the therapeutic experience. “Strength and brokenness are not opposites.”

The Hearts and Souls of Candidates: Character Matters

A political candidate's character matters just as much, if not more than their policy proposals and political philosophies.

12 Reasons to Yawn Every Day

Is a yawn simply a silent scream for coffee or is it something more? Understand why yawning is a spiritual practice, and how you can include more of it in your daily routine.

Azim Khamisa, the Tariq Khamisa Foundation

“Azim is a living example of how goodwill can lead, eventually, to peace: He found it in his heart to forgive the person who murdered his son. After extending this extraordinary act of forgiveness, Azim began a journey to promote the power of compassion, forgiveness, and restorative justice.”

4 Lessons on Forgiveness From a Rescue Dog

Maggie the Wunderdog was shot, attacked, and left for dead, but, thanks to a rescuer, survived, is thriving—and is loving. Here are four lessons on forgiveness rescue dogs like Maggie teach us.

How to Forgive Yourself by Practicing Restorative Justice

“Learning about and trying to practice a form of restorative justice can help you work toward self-forgiveness.”

Compassionate Conversations: Advice From Three Experts

Leaning how to have real conversations about important topics with people you disagree with is a skill. These days, it's more important than ever. Diane Hamilton, Gabriel Wilson, and Kimberly Loh offer useful advice and powerful stories in their new book Compassionate Conversations.

7 Steps to Emotional Perspective and Transformation

Difficult conversations are a powerful time to learn to handle strong emotions. It's not an easy practice, but it is worth the effort.

4 Steps to a Good Apology

Time doesn’t heal all wounds. Here is how to address what still nags at you, and to finally right those long-standing hurts.

Being Mindful of Toxic Positivity

There's a crucial difference between a positive outlook and toxic positivity: "It’s very easy to become so focused on staying positive that you end up denying any and all negative experiences."

Escape the Trance of Busyness: A Conversation With Tara Brach, PhD

S&H's Stephen Kiesling sat down with Tara Brach, founder and senior teacher of the Insight Meditation Center of Washington and author of Radical Acceptance, to explore her RAIN practice: Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture.

Dreading the Next Family Gathering?

Getting together with family, especially during the holidays, can cause a lot of stress and anxiety—even if it’s all love. In this week’s The Soul of Therapy, psychologist Kevin Anderson, PhD, gives us the tools to cope.

Overcoming Polarization

We all have a tendency to divide things into categories: “us” and “them,” “right” and “wrong,” “worthy” and “unworthy.”

Book Review: Walking Through Anger

Conte’s approach hinges on the principle of Yield Theory: the idea that anger is best defused when we meet other people where they are, as opposed to where we would like them to be.

Asking for Forgiveness During Elul

Rabbi Rami explains why he encourages everyone to take part in asking for forgiveness during Elul, whether they practice Judaism or not.

Not My Problem: A Compassionate Mantra

“Becoming clear on what is our problem and what is someone else’s is revolutionary.”

Compassion Cell Credo

Kevin Anderson offers a call to action: My membership in the human race is my truest belonging.

4 Ways to Increase Your Empathy

“Empathy will not heal the hurt world overnight, but can at least make life more interesting. Try these strategies.”

Woking Up With Forgiveness and Compassion

"I worry sometimes that outrage, even when completely justified, can blind us to spiritual values such as forgiveness and compassion, and that fury can drive us to sacrifice offenders on the altar of social change rather than treat them as individuals with the capacity to learn, grow, and reform."

The Moments That Make Us Human

"How many of us have entered a doctor’s office only to be met by an unemotional individual with very little time for us who mostly stares into a computer screen?"

10 Affirmations for Releasing Guilt

Release the guilt and be free.

Guided Meditation: Opening Your Heart to Compassion for Yourself

In this guided meditation, take a true self reflection of gazing into yourself with love.

The Grace of Forgiveness: Transforming Heartbreak

Adapted from The Way of Grace: The Transforming Power of Ego Relaxation, by Miranda Macpherson.

Book Review: The Empathy Effect

7 Neuroscience-Based Keys for Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Work, and Connect Across Differences

The Power of Practicing Forgiveness

Establish a new beginning with a refreshed outlook that can help you in your quest to release the past and embrace forgiveness.

The Power of Fierce Gentleness

Gentleness with ourselves and our others sometimes means pushing back.

How to Reveal Your Blind Spots

The Practice of Compassionate Unmasking

Clairsentience and Compassion

A 3-step approach to cultivating compassion and overcoming empathic sensitivity.

Meditation for Listening to Your Many Selves

An audio meditation to open our understanding of our different voices.

3 Steps to a Kinder Mind

How to cultivate and strengthen our capacity for kindness and compassion.

Fearless Compassion in the Face of Violence

The willingness to face suffering can give rise to compassion.

5 Ways to Deal with Difficult People

Feeling like you might throttle someone? Try these tactics instead.

Enough Is Enough

Excerpt from the book More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us.

Listen with Your Heart

Use this guided meditation as a way to practice listening softly through the lens of your heart.

Our Walk in the World: Original Steps

The life of a community depends on how we care for the ground we stand on and how we step lightly, walking side by side.

The Art of Caring: An Interview with Frank Ostaseski

"In Buddhism, we often talk about enlightenment or awakening, but words like that feel far away to me. I speak about intimacy."

(We're reposting our interview with Frank Ostaseski from 2017 after we received news that he's recovering from a stroke. Our thoughts are with him and his loved ones.)

5 Self-Love Exercises

Here are five self-love exercises to incorporate into your weekly routine.

Portals not Problem Solvers

As caregivers, we need to be more than problem solvers. We need to be portals to a larger possibility.

How to Overcome Stress by Seeing Other People’s Joy

If you’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed, don’t cut yourself off from other people, says Kelly McGonigal. Instead, double down on your capacity for connection.

Our Walk in the World: Distributing the Weight

I was moved by our conversation last night. I understand how you feel the presence of suffering always in the background, juxtaposed against the peaceful times and moments of abund…

Simple Human Kindness

Caring is a natural expression of our humanity.

When Is It Kind to Make Someone Feel Bad?

Sometimes, the nicest thing we can do for someone is to make them feel bad.

The Dark Side of Forgiveness: The Goddess Tara

Tara is one of the most famous and widely beloved goddesses in Buddhism. She was formed from a single tear shed by the sage Avalokiteshvara when, just before he ascended to enlight…

Radical Spirit

How Loving God Helps Us Become Better People

The Uncanny Practice of Entrainment

This key tool is employed, often unwittingly, by exceptional teachers, health care practitioners, clergy, and devoted guardians or parents.

The Empowered Empath

3 steps to get you healthy, grounded, and empowered to create a compassion revolution and save the world.

How to Be Empathetically Present for Another Person

Excerpted from Ordinary Goodness

Do Animals Have More Soul Than We Do?

Not only do animals live, they have lives—with “undiluted purity and clarity…”

The Christmas Bird

Excerpt from Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver

Book Review: A Plea for the Animals

A Plea for the AnimalsThe Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with CompassionBy Matthieu RicardShambhala PublicationsAccording to a statistic cite…

Being Disconnected: Cellphones And Empathy

Cellphones may cause a lack of empathy.

Empathy: Medicine for a Wounded World

Here are eight ways to shift your thoughts to develop deeper empathy and help raise the vibration of our world.

Empathy for the Detestable, Compassion for the Callous

Most deeply spiritual people, regardless of their ancestral religion or their chosen path, esteem human beings who exhibit certain qualities, such as empathy, compassion, lovingkin…

The Observer

Excerpt from The Missing Element: Inspiring Compassion for Human Condition

Receiving Compassion and Generating Your Compassionate Self

An excerpt from Overcoming Destructive Anger by Bernard Golden, PhD.

How Mindfulness Can Help Us Forgive Betrayal

Is it possible to forgive infidelity and to overcome the emotional pain of betrayal?

Compassion for Dating in the Technological Age

Recently I had a young man working with me who showed me the Tinder app as a means of finding dates. Here, you could rifle through a series of pictures like speed dating online, an…

The Intelligent Heart

Excerpt from The Intelligent Heart

The Mechanics of Emotional Contagion: Who Affects Whom?

An excerpt from How the Art of Medicine Makes the Science More Effective: Becoming the Medicine We Practice

If You Find It Hard to Meditate…

Try the difficult path to enlightenment

Destroy Your Enemies. (Make Them Your Friends)

Abraham Lincoln said that the most effective way of destroying enemies was to make them friends. Sounds so wonderful and wise, doesn’t it? But what about in actual practice? Honest…

Letting Go of Being Right

Excerpted from The Power of Forgiveness by Joan Gattuso

5 Questions for Emma Seppälä

Researcher (and new S&H columnist) Emma Seppala, unpacks the latest studies on happiness and offers a new way forward in her new book The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Scie…

Waking Up is Hard to Do: The Dark Side of Enlightenment

What does it mean to wake up, to be a fully realized human being? For those of us who might consider ourselves everyday people with a spiritual inclination, enlightenment can sound…

42 Forgiveness Affirmations to Lift the Weight Off

Here are some affirmations to help wash away the pain of resentment to a more loving, healthier, fresher, lighter, cleaner and joyful life.

We Are All Responsible for Shootings

When I was a school counselor, there was a girl in the sixth grade who was absent more than present. When she did make it to school, kids called her “Dead Girl” because of her mono…

Forgiveness from the Other Side

An excerpt from The Light Between Us

VIDEO: How to Have a More Compassionate Diet

My decision to go vegan was the result of a long journey which began with the decision to stop eating red meat. After cutting out chicken and fish, the last and hardest step was gi…

What the Woman Who’s Embraced Over 34 Million People Knows About Love

Her real name is Mata Amritanandamayi, but if you’ve ever heard of her, you probably know her as Amma (“Mother”). The name was given to her when she was just a girl because of her …

5 Self-Love Exercises

When I was a therapist, I met with many clients who nurtured others but spent a minimal amount of time offering love or care to themselves. A former client I’ll call Dave worked h…

Book Review: Altrusim

AltruismThe Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the WorldBy Matthieu RicardLITTLE, BROWNThe idea that personal interests motivate all human actions—termed “universal selfish…

Heightened Sensitivity

Help for the overstimulated

Humanity in Animals

The Evolution of Empathy, Altruism, and Even the Soul

So All May Eat

Excerpted from Grow: Stories from the Urban Food Movement

A Practice to Heal Prejudice

How loving-kindness meditation taps the roots of empathy

Why Evolution Made Forgiveness Difficult

Nature endowed humanity with both revenge and forgiveness as tools of conflict resolution. But why does one seem so much harder than the other?

Book Review: A Fearless Heart

A Fearless HeartHow the Courage to Be Compassionate Can Transform Our LivesBy Thupten Jinpa, PhDHUDSON STREET PRESSCharles Darwin’s ideas have often been used to portray human…

Compassion: Brain Food for Happiness

Did you know that compassion, the act of recognizing someone else’s suffering with the inclination to want to support them, creates important activity shifts in the brain that are …

Can We Learn to Be More Empathic?

An excerpt from Empathy: Why it Matters and How to Get It

Compassion Made Simple

When you’re focused on any activity, whether it’s your email, listening to a friend or sitting in a formal meditation practice, your mind is bound to wander. In The Now Effect I in…

For a Positive Body Image, Choose Self-Compassion over Self-Esteem

“Beauty is perfect in its imperfections, so you just have to go with the imperfections.” —Diane Von Furstenberg A new study by researchers at the University of Waterloo has …

How to Practice Self-compassion

The secret to empowered action is learning not to beat yourself up.

The Real Roots of Vengeance and Forgiveness

To become more forgiving, we first need to understand why we crave revenge.

Empathy: It's a Win-Win

At a family holiday dinner last week, it finally dawned on me that certain people I consider smart and beautiful consider themselves stupid and hideous.Granted, I spent most of my …

How Does the Brain Process Forgiveness?

I recently attended a four-day mediation certification course. It was an eye-opening experience. In class, I studied the historic context of conflict resolution, learned mediator s…

A Challenge to Forgive

Are you hurt and suffering? As Desmond and Mpho Tutu write in their new book The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World, "Until we can forgive, we…

Does Religion Divide Your Family?

This week in Restorative Empathy: How can a former atheist tell his conservative Catholic family he's Protestant? Dear Angela, After years of obstinate atheism and combative agno…

Reading Between the Lines

New studies find that getting lost in a good novel actually makes us more empathetic in real life.

Why We Forgive

By letting go of past hurts, we can heal not only ourselves, but our families, our communities, and our world.

Music Review: The Unchanging

The UnchangingDonna De LoryDe Lory MusicDonna De Lory’s new album, The Unchanging, is a devotional banquet. Some of the flavors and fragrances here come from De Lory’s gratitude to…

You Are a Part. Not Apart.

The ideal spiritual practice fosters compassion, justice, love, and a sense of unity.

Cultivating the Values of Your Practice

Rabbi Rami shares his personal practice for elevating awareness and compassion to bring thoughts, actions, and values into alignment.

"A History of God" Author Karen Armstrong

The faith and spirituality expert shares her insight into the unifying practice of compassion.

Roshi Joan Halifax on compassion, women in Buddhism, and altruism

The founder and abbot of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Roshi Joan Halifax has been a socially active leader in Buddhism for more than 40 years—as a civil rights activis…

Close to the Ground: Buddhaland

She was sitting on a bench outside the grocery store where I shop. It was 8 a.m. and drizzling—typical for spring in Eugene. I watched her sip coffee out of a well-worn Starbucks c…

Carrie Newcomer's Latest Album: Kindred Spirits

 With lyrics like “God walks around in muddy boots” and “a summer tomato is a cause to rejoice,” it’s clear Carrie Newcomer has a knack for finding the transcendent in the eve…

The Politics of Loving Kindness

I remember the day I awakened to the idea that yoga was inherently political. I was sitting in a class when one of my teachers said that yoga is inherently political because the pr…

How to Avoid "Catching" a Bad Mood

Tips to become depression-proof, because misery does love company.

What is Your Super Power?

About a year ago, I was leading a creative writing class and I gave the students this prompt: “If you could be a superhero with one power, what would that power be?” Instantly, sni…

Why We Are All Essentially Good

The most important thing for me now is reminding people that they are good. We are all essentially good. That is why we admire people like Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela so much. …

What Are Your Charms?

Several years ago my husband and I decided we wanted to buy a home in a really nice part of Maui. The house we chose was all glass and wood and had a beautiful ocean view. We set o…

Gabor Maté: Why We're a Culture of Addicts

We're a culture of addicts, says Canadian physician Gabor Maté, whose controversial ideas just might heal us all.

Reflections on Judgment

I’m too judgmental. It is a bad habit (there I go again!), one I learned from my family, where criticism far outweighed compliments. I went to a liberal arts college to learn criti…

Create an Animal Healing Circle in Your Community

Shiri Joshua, M.A., is a psychotherapist, “animal whisperer,” and director of the Shiri Joshua Centre for Human & Animal Healing in Vancouver, British Columbia. Each month she hold…

You May Not Put Down Your Chalk!

“You may not put down your chalk. You may not return to your desk until you have correctly solved the math problem!” bellowed Sister. Once again, I was losing the math relay for my…

Neurons of Compassion: Have we found the basis for empathy and altruism?

Like most great scientific breakthroughs, the discovery of the human mirror neuron system (MNS) was a complete accident. What may end up being the most important neuroscientific di…

Got Compassion?

Let’s skip the judgment and step into love.Sometimes when I speak to people of the importance of compassion, I see a look in their eyes that I interpret as, Why? All day long we he…

Empathic to a Fault?

Therapists Seana McGee and Maurice Taylor explain the dark side of compassion.

The Art of Compassion

Our local sangha wasn’t able to have our four-hour sitting yesterday because of a huge snowstorm, which knocked out power at the Unitarian church where we meet. I just got back fr…

I Am

The Shift is About to Hit the FanBy Tom ShadyacFilm director Tom Shadyac had it all — a successful film career (Ace Ventura; Liar, Liar; Bruce Almighty), a series of California man…

The Force of Kindness

Change Your Life with Love and Compassion By Sharon Salzberg There is a thread that runs through all the world’s great wisdom teachings and religions, crossing the barriers of ti…

Vengeance 101

Throughout history, we’ve had an insatiable fascination with stories of vengeance. From the earliest Greek tragedies, to the Bible, to Shakespeare, to recent movies like Atonement,…

Neurons of Compassion

Have we found the basis for empathy and altruism? Like most great scientific breakthroughs, the discovery of the human mirror neuron system (MNS) was a complete accident. What may…

Wired for Compassion

In the mid-seventies, psychologist Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., left teaching at Harvard to write "The Brain" column for Psychology Today. He then joined the New York Times, where he mad…

Four Awakenings to Compassion

In 1965, a marine biologist named Roger Payne found himself relaxing on the stern deck of a sailboat on the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Headphones snugly in place, he recorded th…

Indulging the Totally Selfish Joys of Selfless Giving

Here’s the science behind creating a chain reaction of goodnessThough economists and grumps have long argued to the contrary, many spiritual traditions teach us that, at our core, …

Self Compassion: How to Value Yourself

The secret to empowered action is learning not to beat yourself upStrive for more, work even harder, aim to be the best! We live in a society that regularly sends us such messages.…

The Essence of Forgiveness

Forgiveness is not so much an act as an attitude. As an act, forgiveness raises the forgiver above the forgiven; it empowers the one even as it disempowers the other. I know this…

Complicated/Simple Compassion

“This compassion thing is so much more complicated than I thought,” said Mary Elizabeth as our local group continued with the chapter in One Dharma on “Compassion.” We think we’ll …

Finding Freedom in Forgiveness

The capacity to forgive reveals a soul that is free of anxiety, one that is mature and equal to the complexity of human interaction.

The Quest for Justice

As any detective knows, when something is missing that should be present, a void where there should be a plenum, it is an important clue. Like the archetypal philosophical detective Socrates, I set out to discover what had happened to justice. Had it disappeared from modern minds, hearts, and conversation? Or merely from the consciousness of New Age pilgrims?

The Forgiveness Teacher’s Toughest Test

Everett Worthington taught others how to forgive. One night, he had to become his own best pupil.