How to Practice Compassion—the Buddhist Way

Buddhism offers deep wisdom to help us practice compassion every day, both towards ourselves and others. Try these five tools to develop greater compassion.

Empaths and Childhood Trauma (And What to Do About It)

Empaths often have a history of childhood trauma. Explore how empathy is both a gift and a challenge, and learn how to navigate your past experiences for a brighter future.

Spiritual Minimalism: Being All, While Schlepping Less

What would you carry in your spiritual minimalist backpack? Rabbi Rami Shapiro considers his own religious necessities after his recent conversation with Light Watkins for the S+H podcast.

Podcast: Susan Bauer-Wu, A Future We Can Love

How can we reach a positive future for all, despite the challenges of climate change? Susan Bauer-Wu shares lessons from the Dalai Lama, climate activists, and scientists to help start the conversation.

How Faux-giveness Creates Anxiety and Stunts Spiritual Growth

If you accept apologies even when you don't feel like it, you might be practicing “faux-giveness.” Learn how to change that pattern and live with less stress.

8 Ways to Ground Yourself Amidst Drama

Feeling stressed by other people's dramatic tendencies? A clinical psychologist and mind-body expert offers some solutions to ground yourself.

3 Reasons Why Healing Is Impossible Without Self-Empathy

Healing can often seem like an unclear process. Self-empathy is the perfect first step in any healing journey—explore three reasons why.

The Art of Fragrant Boundaries for Empaths

It can be hard for empathic people to establish boundaries that feel compassionate and healthy. Developing “fragrant boundaries” can be the perfect solution.

5 Protection Rituals for Highly Sensitive People

Highly sensitive people feel everything deeply. If you’re an HSP, learn how to cleanse and protect your personal energy to avoid overwhelm.

Toolbox: The Empath Survival Toolkit

Empaths have a gift for sensing subtle energies and/or emotions from people, pets, objects, and even the planets, which can lead them to feel overwhelmed or depleted. Whatever your sensitivities, these tools can help you embrace your gifts while keeping you grounded and focused.

How Shame Prevents Empathy

Shame prevents us from feeling and healing on a deeper level. Explore ways to move away from shame in your relationships and personal life.

How to Identify a Victim Narcissist

Are you dealing with a self-centered person? They may be a victim narcissist—explore how to deal with this personality type in healthy ways.

How to Communicate With Nature Through Ecosomatic Listening

Feeling out of touch with your environment? Experiment with ecosomatic listening to communicate with nature—and nature just may communicate back.

Growing Through Life's Challenges

Christopher Willard, the author of How We Grow Through What We Go Through, offers ideas for healing—and growing—after trauma.

Matt Kahn on the Importance of Holding Space

What does it mean to truly love other people, and how can we transform pain into compassion? Author Matt Kahn shares his wisdom.

4 Exercises to Build Trust and Confidence in Your Intuition

Whether you lean clairvoyant, clairaudient, clairsentient, or claircognizant, you can strengthen your relationship with your intuition.

Take This Fun Intuition Quiz to Determine Your Intuitive Style

Do antique stores unsettle you? Do you have a great sense of direction? An intuition quiz can tell you what these and other findings say about your intuitive style.

Becoming Trauma-Conscious

It may not be PTSD, but we all experience trauma. Recognizing this is good for everyone’s mental health.

Seeing Is Empathy

Mixed-media artist Morgan Harper Nichols explores how art can lead to empathy.

Four Small Lessons

“When opened enough, it’s hard to tell what you carry and what I put down. When opened enough, it’s hard to tell where the burden begins to lift and whose it really is.”

How to Stop Taking On the Energy of Others

You are made of energy at the cellular level and you are impacted and affected by the energy of other people and your environment.

In the Thick of It

“And it is the call of each generation to make sure that we choose love over fear and kindness over cruelty, one more time.”

How to Stop Enabling a Narcissist

Putting another’s needs ahead of your own to avoid their negativity and blowback is one sign you may be enabling a narcissist.

20 Affirmations for Empaths Who Feel the Pain of the World

Self-care reminder: Just because you feel it doesn’t mean you’re responsible for it.

Podcast: Michelle Cassandra Johnson, Finding Refuge

Author and activist Michelle Cassandra Johnson discusses generational trauma, yoga, beekeeping, and more.

Empathy and Artificial Intelligence

The ability to program empathy into AI could reap wellness benefits for humans and even the robots themselves.

Podcast: Neal Allen, Discover God Inside You

Author of Shapes of Truth, Neal Allen, discusses the 35 qualities of God that each human has within them.

14 Affirmations for Getting Along With People You Disagree With

Divisiveness takes a psychic toll on humanity. Affirmations remind us that we all want to be seen, heard, acknowledged, and respected.

From Separation to Connection

We are one. There is no separation.

Empaths & Animals: A Special Relationship

Authenticity, a minimal amount of emotional work, and the ability to gain trust are just some of the reasons empaths value their relationships with animals and with nature.

What to Expect When You’re in Love With an Empath

Loving an empath—who may be more sensitive to confrontation, more introverted, and can go overboard trying to please—is about affirming their individuality as well as your own.

What Does It Mean to Be a True Empath?

Empathetic people's hearts go out to others. True empaths feel others’ happiness or sadness in their own body, which can lead to emotional overload.

Asking Questions Is Most of Compassion

What is compassion? “We believe that the word represents something that we offer to others, or to ourselves. But is that accurate?”

Reframing Our World

When it comes to trauma, many misunderstand the true meaning of forgiveness. How can you forgive, move forward, and thrive? Discover the secrets to post-traumatic thriving.

Pain, Our Greatest Teacher for Growth

“Pain can turn our world and our internal compass upside down and shove us into darkness. Simultaneously, however, pain can shock us or catapult us out of everyday autopilot.”

3 Myths of Kindness

Kindness isn't just being nice—it's a superpower.

5 Gifts of Listening With Empathy

Listening with empathy allows you to deepen your relationships with loved ones and strangers alike.

Ho’oponopono: Digesting Pain and Inviting Forgiveness

Address your spiritual wounds with the traditional Hawaiian cleansing practice of ho’oponopono.

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.

Examples of Toxic Positivity and How to Reframe Them

Toxic positivity goes way beyond having a positive outlook. Consider examples of toxic positivity and how to reframe them.

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.

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.

Overcoming Polarization

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

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 Positive Affirmations for Releasing Guilt

These positive affirmations for releasing guilt can bring a sense of freedom—whether guilt is self-inflicted or coming from someone else.

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.

Clearing Unwanted Energy

Clearing unwanted energy from our system is one of the most important things you can learn, especially when doing Reiki.

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.

Coping Tips for Empaths

Being an empath is all about ‘feeling’ the emotions of others. Sometimes we need extra tools to help us stay grounded and connected.

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.”

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

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

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

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

Does Spontaneous Crying Mean I’m an Empath?

Does it ever seem like you’re crying for no reason? Spontaneous crying may be a signal that you're an empath.

The Art of Being Sensitive

We think we’re alone, but the largest hidden population in our society is the closet authentics.

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

Being Disconnected: Cellphones And Empathy

Cellphones may cause a lack of empathy.

Empathy: Medicine for a Wounded World

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

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

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 (by Making Them Your Friends)

Hating another person and being rage-filled is like drinking poison and assuming the other person will be poisoned.

Letting Go of Being Right

Excerpted from The Power of Forgiveness by Joan Gattuso

5 Questions for Emma Seppälä

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

42 Forgiveness Affirmations to Lift the Weight Off

Allow these affirmations for forgiveness to help wash away the pain of resentment and guide you into a more loving and joyful life.

We Are All Responsible for Shootings

Forgiveness from the Other Side

An excerpt from The Light Between Us

VIDEO: How to Have a More Compassionate Diet

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

Book Review: Altrusim

Heightened Sensitivity

Are you an HSP—a highly sensitive person? Explore these tips to help you manage your walk through life without getting 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

Compassion: Brain Food for Happiness

Can We Learn to Be More Empathic?

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

Compassion Made Simple

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

Self-esteem is the practice of seeing yourself as above average. And in a world that's constantly comparing, keeping a high level of self-esteem may feel more like a challenge than a relief.

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

How Does the Brain Process Forgiveness?

A Challenge to Forgive

Does Religion Divide Your Family?

Reading Between the Lines

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

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

We spoke to the Upaya Zen Center founder about her understanding of suffering, shamanic studies, and environmental activism.

Close to the Ground: Buddhaland

Carrie Newcomer's Latest Album: Kindred Spirits

The Politics of Loving Kindness

How to Avoid “Catching” a Bad Mood

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

What is Your Super Power?

Why We Are All Essentially Good

What Are Your Charms?

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

Create an Animal Healing Circle in Your Community

You May Not Put Down Your Chalk!

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

Got Compassion?

Empathic to a Fault?

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

The Art of Compassion

I Am

The Force of Kindness

Vengeance 101

Neurons of Compassion

Wired for Compassion

Four Awakenings to Compassion

Indulging the Totally Selfish Joys of Selfless Giving

Complicated/Simple Compassion

The Essence of Forgiveness

Forgiveness is not so much an act as an attitude.

The Magic of Dialogue

Real dialogue is more than just talk—it’s work. But the payoffs are incredible. One of America’s best listeners shows how it’s done.