Think about your past and try to remember the time in your life when you felt the greatest pain and suffering. How long did it last? Did the meaning of everyday life seem any different to you? Can you remember how you thought differently about the future?

There always is a possibility that you have been lucky in your life so far and had no major pain or suffering. However, many, if not most, adults have experienced either physical or mental anguish from the death of a very close friend or a hospitalized grandparent. Didn’t their suffering lead you to want to do something compassionate for them? Chances are that if you suffered a lot at some point, people acted compassionate toward you. This is consistent with psychologist Dacher Keltner’s research in his book The Compassionate Instinct.

From a sociological perspective, suffering deserves our attention because reducing the suffering of others is the most human act possible. What makes us more advanced than all of the other earthly beings is our ability to take the role of others (take on the thoughts and feelings of others) and from that build very complex societies in which the needs of the individual and all others are in balance.

Since alleviating suffering is so important to human wellbeing, the contemplation of suffering serves as essential ground work for compassionate action. As evolved humans who care about and actually alleviate the suffering of others, we necessarily have to understand the severity of different kinds of suffering and to develop abilities in detecting suffering and how best to respond to it.

Perhaps best of all, caring and caregiving in the sense of reducing suffering is the most meaningful and gratifying ways to live our lives. Research increasingly shows that altruistic, compassionate, and caregiving actions tend to result in greater happiness and life satisfaction. If we act having first attained self-compassion, altruistic compassion is the activity that can give us the most gratification and satisfaction in life.

There are many different types of suffering discussed in the literature on human suffering. However, from the standpoint of personal decision making there are two main suffering: one type of suffering is the loss and hurt felt from having been subjected to major physical pain; the other type of suffering is the agitation or dis-ease produced from negative emotions like anger, anxiety, fear, and worry. Buddhism describes the source of these negative emotions and the suffering that remains as “craving.” Several spiritual traditions describe the foundation of this type of suffering to be self-centeredness. Thus, the two types of suffering can be said to be pain-centered suffering and self-centered suffering. Pain-centered suffering included mental illness where the source of the pain appears to be mental rather than physical. Both types of suffering many yield a similar mental condition such as depression.

People, who want to improve the human condition, must necessarily be concerned with both types of suffering, pain-centered and self-centered. But the latter is treated with mental therapy or a change in values and practices. The former, pain-centered suffering, must be attacked with social and political policy and well as individual acts of compassion.

With regard to policies that reduce pain-centered suffering, it is most helpful to contrast preventable from unpreventable suffering. In the latter category are “acts of God” like natural disasters of all kinds. But a huge share of pain-centered suffering results from acts of human beings or communities of all sizes. Preventable suffering causes include wars, intentional killings of every kind, defective technology or practices, e.g., oil spills or operator-produced transportation injuries and fatalities. Preventable suffering also includes chronic illness and any other major illness for which a cure is known but for a variety of reasons, the cure is not accessible or available for the victim.

In fact, many types of preventable suffering are not 100% preventable. For example, a cure for a chronic illness may be known to be only 50% effective. In such instances, there are both preventable and non-preventable components of the suffering. Never-the-less, for purposes of setting feasible goals for the reduction of suffering, it is possible to categorize suffering as preventable, unpreventable or mixed. A careful examination of calamities or traumatic events will find that most major causes of severe pain and suffering are in fact preventable. Humans have known methods for eliminating most severe pain-produced suffering. People have figured out ways to stop all of the following suffering-producers: war, road fatalities, maternal deaths at birth, HIV illness, impure drinking water and hunger. The problem is that most societies consider the saving of all life from these types of life-threatening situation is not worth the cost of doing so.

The principal impetus behind the investigation of suffering is its vast global prevalence and the burden this places on human progress. Interest in suffering also is driven by its implications for compassionate caregiving and its link to meaning and purposeful living. Compassion by definition is a human response to suffering. Without suffering, compassion becomes the equivalent of kindness.

The argument is made that suffering offers a potentially more effective paradigm than poverty, public health and even development for commitment to humanitarian goals. It is the depiction of severe suffering such as the catastrophic events of Hurricane Katrina and the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11/01 that releases mass waves of empathy and compassion, followed by widespread relief assistance and monetary donations. If the world’s poverty and problems of health and lack of economic development were cast in terms of suffering, people around the world would be more likely to compassionately share their resources so that severe, preventable suffering would be dramatically reduced.

In modern societies, where resources are scarce, people have discovered that communities feel fewer obligations for the severely suffering, if their condition is described as hunger, under-development or even poverty. If those who suffer greatly are defined merely as poor, then it is easy to argue that they are poor because they are lazy. Whereas, it is much hard to convincingly say that a person feeling intense, prolonged pain is suffering because he or she is lazy.

Suffering unfolds an array of deeply human ironies. Every major religion calls for compassion and aid for our fellow humans who suffer, yet the number who struggle with severe suffering continues to enlarge. Some argue that suffering is necessary in order to achieve spiritual growth. Arguably, the noblest human emotion, compassion, cannot exist without suffering.

It is useful to be aware that the definition of suffering varies across communities and cultures. For example, in end of life care, called palliative or hospice caregiving, suffering is synonymous with the dying process. Suffering is not limited to the dying person but encompasses those who mourn or feel deep loss, distress, or sorrow. Palliative care seeks to minimize suffering by techniques directed at all of the possible needs of the patient and family such as physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering. “Spiritual suffering” is not just a matter of religion or morals but includes any loss of meaning emerging from the death process.

Several major religions teach that suffering did not exist before evil, for which humans are partially responsible. And some teach that a time will come when evil and suffering will go away. The problem with this doctrine is not the mythology upon which it is based as much as the belief that we cannot do much to get rid of suffering. From that belief, it logically follows that alleviating suffering is not a high priority human value.

Psalms 41:1 says “Blessed are those that consider the poor or helpless…” In all of the variable translations of this text from the Old Testament, the emphasis is on the poor or the helpless. The message is clear: a moral obligation exists to relieve the suffering of others.

However, the word suffering is so mixed up with notions of evil and rewards for sin, that the humanitarian obligation for those of Judean-Christian-Islamic faith can all too easily become forgotten.

Suffering in Word Pictures: While we generally associate extreme poverty with other parts of the world, it can be found in tragic proportions in wealthy countries, especially the United States.

Award winning author William Vollmann spent years interviewing poor people around the globe, compiling hundreds of their stories in the 2007 volume Poor People. Here is a glimpse of the suffering in a New York City rundown apartment building. This conversation was with a teenage girl who had just used the sixth floor bathroom, stinking with no lights or toilet paper.

“Them toilets, let’s just say they’ve got so bad I just piss on the floor. Gotta go see my friend on the first floor….. Her baby died.”
“What did it die of?”
“Natural causes.”
“They said she flushed it down the toilet,” explained one of the kids. (Poor People, p 255)

At the end of such heart-rending stories, Vollmann’s book contains 128 photos taken from 25 countries around the globe. Eleven were taken in the United States, but it’s impossible to tell who the Americans are. Both his stories and photos demonstrate vividly that the face of poverty is the same the world over. The social context changes but the misery remains surprisingly constant.

“For me,” Vollmann wrote in Poor People, “poverty is not mere deprivation; for people may possess fewer things than I and be richer; poverty is wretchedness. It must then be an experience more than an economic state. It therefore remains somewhat immeasurable.”

Suffering in Statistical Bullet Points (Source)

• Poverty is projected to peak in 2013 at 14% of United States 306 million people. One in five US children already lives in poverty. (Projections by OMB, CBO, and EIU.)
• Almost half (50%) the world’s 6.8 billion people live on less than $2.50 a day.
• The number of chronically hungry people in the world rose in 2009 above 1.0 billion, which is a sixth of the global population. (UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization report, 2009)
• An estimate of 25,000 children die each day due to poverty. (UNICEF)
• 300 million children have no access to health services.
• Less than one per cent of what the world spends every year on weapons is needed to put every child into school.
• Nearly 2 billion people do not have nearby water but consume around 20 liters per day. Americans consume an average 600 liters per day.
• Indoor air pollution resulting from the use of solid fuels kills 4,000 a day, half of which are under age of five.
• For every $1 in aid a developing country receives, over $25 is spent on debt repayment.
• Yearly suicides each year worldwide is 600,000.

These statistics imply vast global suffering. Failure to alleviate this suffering is a matter of priorities, not resources. World spending on illegal drugs last year was $214 billion USD ($31 per person. World military spending last year was $736 trillion USD ($108,000 per person).

Ingredients

     Compassion is the ultimate and most meaningful embodiment of emotional maturity. It is through compassion that a person achieves the highest peak and deepest reach in his or her search for self-fulfillment. (Arthur Jersild, eminent child psychologist)

Developing and authentically practicing compassion is an ongoing evolution. It takes hard work, self-awareness, and a willingness to fail. It also takes courage and commitment because suffering is everywhere: from the woman down the street sitting alone day after day, to the businessman on Wall Street edging toward suicide, to the child in Darfur facing another day without food.

     As the writer and former Catholic nun Karen Armstrong says, “Compassion is the essence of all religion, all life. For Armstrong, the Golden Rule is the most succinct definition of compassion, Do not do to others what you would not have done to you.” When you take compassion apart, it is made up of nine distinct and familiar qualities that, when combined, allow us to do the extraordinary help create a better life for another human being. And in so doing, we personally reap the long-term benefits of compassion: a sense of purpose, a mind-set of contentment, and yes, even feelings of happiness.

    The qualities we need to nurture in ourselves if we want to live a life of compassion are empathy, kindness, generosity, forgiveness, peacefulness, integrity, responsibility, self-compassion, and wisdom. Depending upon how broadly or narrowly one defines these qualities, the number of ingredients will be more or less than nine ingredients. This set of ingredients emerged from reviewing over two dozen books on compassion. Not all of the books mentioned these nine qualities as essential ingredients of compassion, but something like a consensus emerged that these elements were key to sustaining a consistent pattern of compassion.Without the nine qualities, our behavior risks what has been called “idiot compassion,” by the well know Buddhist nun and prolific author, Pema Chodron. Acting compassionately for your own selfish reasons is “idiot compassion.”

    With these elements guiding our actions, we can help one life at a time and perhaps our actions can create fertile ground for more compassionate policies everywhere: locally, nationally, and globally.The paragraphs below look more closely at these personal qualities that we call “ingredients for compassion” and explore why they are so essential.

At the end of this article, you’ll find these elements of compassion again, in a table, along with the attributes that support them or stand in their way. You’ll also see examples of how these qualities manifest in how we feel and act. This table can be viewed as a touchstone to explore our own emotions and motives, and it can be used in both individual and community decision-making.

    Again, the nine most essential ingredients of compassion are empathy, kindness, generosity, forgiveness, peacefulness, integrity, responsibility, self-compassion, and wisdom.

Empathy

“Empathy is what happens to us when we leave our own bodies… and find ourselves… in the mind of the other. We observe reality through her eyes, feel her emotions, and share in her pain…”
-Khen Lampert (philosopher and author of Compassionate Education)

Sometimes very poor people station themselves by traffic signals. If you dare to look into their eyes while waiting for the light to turn green, you might feel an uncomfortable kinship. The barrier between you has thinned and that person’s despair touches something familiar in you. That’s empathy.

Being able to connect with another on this level is an essential ingredient for compassion, for without empathy, we stand apart from others, unable to experience our common humanity.

Yet empathy is different from compassion because it doesn’t necessarily make us care enough about another’s suffering to do anything about it, just as we can feel our own suffering, yet continually turn away and deny it. Fortunately, we can cultivate empathy, as the “Roots in Empathy” program has shown.

In this program, a neighborhood infant and parent regularly visit a school classroom. An instructor coaches students to observe the baby’s development and to label the baby’s feelings. At the same time, the instructor helps the children identify and reflect on their own feelings and the feelings of others. This attention to feelings makes them less likely to physically, psychologically, and emotionally hurt each other.

Empathy is the seed of compassion, but it’s not enough. Compassion needs other emotions and values to help it fully develop.

Kindness

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
-Philo of Alexandria (Hellenist Jewish philosopher at the time of Christ)
Some people think being kind is the most revolutionary act there is. It is absurdly easy to do, yet nothing leaves you as vulnerable. Kindness softens your skin, makes you let down your guard, opens you up to ridicule, or worse. It carries no sophistication or complexity, needs no great intellect to carry out. It is as simple as a loving touch.

Aldous Huxley was even a little chagrinned by how basic it is when he said, late in his life, “It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than “Try to be a little kinder.”

Kindness demands action: you hold a hand, you walk more slowly to match your grandchild’s stride, you give money to a stranger, you say thank you. Even just a kind thought translates into action by criticism and gossip withheld, for example, or giving an encouraging smile.

Kindness has come out of the closet lately. Countless web sites are devoted to it, people tweet suggestions for acting kinder, and descriptions of great acts of kindness fill valuable billboard space.

It is even becoming a legitimate subject of scientific research. A community of psychologists and social scientists investigated the causes and consequences of kindness, often called compassionate love, and their findings can be found in The Science of Compassionate Love.

Swedish doctor Stefan Einhorn in his book, The Art of Being Kind, argues that acts of kindness give the giver good feelings and “good deeds spread out like ripples on a pond. Societies with widespread kindness and ethical wisdom,” he says, “function far better.”

There can be no compassion without kindness.

Generosity

Generosity is a mindset. It shows itself when we are more eager to give than we are afraid of giving something up. And it manifests in all kinds of gestures.

Giving money and time are the most obvious signs of generosity, but no less generous is to believe that people do the best they can in the circumstances in which they find themselves. In other words, when we give people a break, we recognize their humanness and our collective struggle.

The Qur’an asks, “What actions are most excellent?” And then it answers its own question, “To gladden the heart of a human being, to feed the hungry, to help the afflicted, to lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful, and to remove the wrongs of the injured.” These are the timeless acts of generosity.

Not content to simply know the power of generosity, science has set out to prove its value. In Why Good Things Happen to Good People, Stephen Post and Jill Neimark describe numerous studies that support that our brains may be wired to benefit from reaching out to others. For example, Stephanie Brown at the University of Michigan followed 423 older couples. After adjusting for other variables, she found that those who provided significant support to others were more than twice as likely to remain alive during the five-year period of the study.

If something is good for us on such a profound level, it’s easy to believe it’s the best way to live, individually and as a culture. But it’s hard to know if generosity is a natural inclination, or if it must be learned. Whatever its origins, when we don’t act generously, our hearts shut down and we become miserly as we hoard our natural surplus of goodwill and love.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is one of the world’s most misunderstood qualities. People say that there are unforgivable sins, that forgiveness is weakness, or that when we forgive, we just open ourselves to more pain.

Yet Bishop Desmond Tutu offers a more practical view of forgiveness: “Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously, [but] drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens our entire existence.” Forgiveness is not just for the well-being of the other person, it is also for our own.

The book Picking Cotton chronicles the story of a woman, Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, who mistakenly names a man, Ronald Cotton, as her rapist. He was sentenced to life plus 50 years. Thompson-Cannino says that if he had been sentenced to death, she “would have gladly pulled the switch.” After 11 years, more sophisticated DNA testing exonerated him and the real rapist was convicted.

It’s not such an unusual story: an innocent person sent to prison, but what makes it astonishing is what unfolded after Cotton’s release. He forgave Thompson-Cannino and helped her forgive herself. Their coming together in forgiveness and eventually friendship seems nearly impossible, but it happened, and they have used that grace to help others do the same.

Few things have produced such misery as the inability to forgive. Yet when we can forgive, we change not only our little piece of the world, but the world at large. And every time we do, we strengthen the foundation of compassion.

Peacefulness

Forgiveness is just one response that can break the cycle of anger, hatred, suffering, and violence. Another is peacefulness. In a thesaurus, “passivity” is listed as a synonym for peacefulness, but living out of peacefulness takes hard work and is anything but passive. After all, the alternatives are the easy, sanctioned, knee-jerk emotions: hostility, rage, and aggression.

As a 19-year-old, Jarvis Masters was sent to San Quentin for armed robbery. Nine years later, he was sentenced to death for allegedly participating in the killing of a guard. He remains on Death Row. Masters converted to American Buddhism in prison and took a vow never to knowingly harm others, but to try to help them. In his book, Finding Freedom, he describes how difficult it can be to practice nonaggression in prison.

One day an inmate started to throw something at a seagull in the prison yard. Masters, without thinking, put out his hand to stop him, which angered the inmate. He demanded to know why Masters did that. Again, without thinking, Masters said, “I did that because that bird’s got my wings.”There was something in that answer that stopped the inmate’s need for retaliation, and the crowd, that was itching for a fight, started to laugh.

Both of Masters’ responses were peaceful reactions to potentially violent acts. And Masters understood the urge toward violence in himself. “All of us can practice nonviolence,” says the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. “We begin by recognizing that, in the depths of our consciousness, we have both the seeds of compassion and the seeds of violence.”

For compassion to work on any scale, peacefulness has to be part of it: both the desire and the capacity for it. We must try to cultivate an inner peacefulness that can override our instincts and allow room for compassion to flourish.

Integrity

Integrity is all or nothing; there are no degrees. If we lose it, we have to start all over to regain it and then work ceaselessly to hold on to it. Integrity is the subtlest of all the ingredients of compassion and it defines our character. Although integrity is greater than the sum of its parts, a few of those parts are honesty, honor, reliability, respect, and a sense of justice.

When Senator Ted Kennedy died in August 2009, his whole life was in the spotlight and the American public got a chance to reflect on who he was, what he stood for, and how he lived his days. What emerged was a stunning example of a person who lost and won back his integrity, time after time. He did shameful things and redeemed himself. In the end, he died an honorable man. He had integrity.

Although Senator Kennedy and conservative talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger were worlds apart politically and culturally, her remarks on integrity would be something they could have agreed on: “Don’t worry so much about your self- esteem. Worry more about your character. Integrity is its own reward.”

Integrity is one of those moral compass points, sitting at true north along with a handful of other qualities that give us something to hold to and steer by. Without integrity, we cannot be fully compassionate. Our actions will fall short, be suspect, or be compromised.

Responsibility

Responsibility can be a weight on our shoulders, especially if others demand it of us. Or it can be a source of freedom, like the Existentialists wrote, by being the one thing in our control that we can either accept or deny.

Do we need to be responsible to be compassionate? That’s an arguable question, but if being truly compassionate involves assuaging pain and stepping up to the plate to do what’s right, then, yes, we have to be responsible to be compassionate. Without responsibility, we are unreliable, a quality that can leave havoc in its wake. Taking responsibility for our own actions requires that we know and care about their consequences on others: that takes empathy, and empathy leads to compassion.

The responsibilities of nations toward their citizens are defined in terms of human rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, established in 1948, lists the rights to freedom, justice, privacy, social security, education, freedom from slavery, and freedom from torture. A nation that adopts these rights has the responsibility to uphold them.

The responsibilities of an individual toward herself, the people around her, and the larger world are defined in terms of personal commitments. A person who pledges, formally or quietly in herself, to live by the things she believes in, then has the responsibility to uphold them.

Sometimes we become over-responsible, thinking we have to help the whole world, and then often we do nothing because the task is overwhelming. The American writer and essayist Gail Hamilton wrote that, “Every person is responsible for all the good within the scope of his abilities, and for no more.”

The permission she gives us to keep our responsibility human-scaled, and humanly feasible, reminds us that even acting responsibly within the limited circle of our own possibilities is enough.

Self-Compassion

When flight attendants give their pre-takeoff safety speech, they always say, “in the event of a drop in cabin pressure, put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.” Self-compassion is a prerequisite for compassion toward others. We’re really no good to anyone if cannot feel our own self-worth.

Of all the ingredients of compassion, self-compassion is perhaps the most difficult for those of us in the Western world to cultivate. We are not experienced at loving ourselves unconditionally. It feels wrong somehow. Some religious traditions teach us that we are flawed, that we are sinners. Even if we no longer believe these things, they often remain deeply ingrained in our psyche.

To truly embrace a life of compassion toward others, we have to break this grip and dare to have compassion for ourselves. It takes courage to treat ourselves with the kindness and generosity we may so easily show others. Like compassion for others, developing self-compassion is a practice, and it takes time and commitment.

Self-compassion provides motivation for taking care of our physical and mental health. The healthier we are, inside and out, the more effectively we can act compassionately toward others.

Self-compassion and gratitude go hand in hand. When we truly are thankful for the everyday gifts of life, we automatically lower our demands upon ourselves to unreasonably improve ourselves. Furthermore, research has found that when people feel gratitude, they are more likely to be generous with others.

Wisdom

We don’t have to be of a certain age to be wise. Sometimes startling wisdom comes out of a five-year-old. Wisdom is simple and can be intuitive. It happens when we cut through life’s clutter and see clearly. It’s also crucial to compassion because it allows us to make good decisions, to act out of our best intentions, and to understand when things may not work out the way we planned.

Truly listening and being fully awake to those around us nourishes wisdom and so improves all future attempts to reduce the suffering of others.

As we become wiser, it’s a good idea not to pat ourselves on the back too much, because pride leads to arrogance, which is an even greater stumbling block to compassion. A chief of the Iroquois Confederacy’s Onondaga tribe, Oren Lyons, said that, “We are, after all, a mere part of the creation – and we stand somewhere between the mountain and the ant.” Humility is the healthier companion to wisdom. If we begin to think ourselves better than others, compassion doesn’t have a chance.

Compassion in our future

Most us weren’t brought up to believe that compassion should be the major purpose of our lives, but if we choose to see it that way, it can slowly become that central focus. All we need to do to get started is to commit to improving each of these nine components of authentic compassion. We can pay attention to them, watch when we act out of them, and notice what challenges make us turn away from them.

Practicing one component or ingredient of compassion reinforces or sustains other ingredients. The “sustainable compassion” diagram depicts this interdependence of the ingredients. The more we practice all of the ingredients in concert, the more we experience the self-sustaining nature of authentic compassion.

Karen Armstrong, who also was the chief architect of the Charter for Compassion , said that, “Compassion is hard work, all day and every day.” However, over time compassion becomes easier and easier, in part because we begin to notice the gratifications of compassion more and more.

The human race today has more ways to destroy itself in than past centuries. Depletion of natural resources and growth of high-risk weapons put us all in greater and greater danger. Concurrently world problems of hunger, disease, crime, and war continue to swell. Compassion, for ourselves, for those around us, and for those all over the world, is essential if we want to move forward as a species. It is time for each of us to reflect on our values and explore new solutions, tending, especially, to the deep center of our hearts where the ingredients of compassion wait to be of service.

Appendix: Ingredients of Personal Compassion

*All boldfaced words are negative emotions that block or undermine compassion.

Contemporary human suffering is the focus of Independent Lens PBS film documentary, Half the Sky, named after the book by Kris Kristof and Wu Dunn. This documentary aired on PBS, and might  be viewable online. The 2009 book, Half the Sky, is available in hardback, paperback, and Kindle format. The DVD is generally available for purchase or rent.

The Half the Sky film relates a story of a three-year old girl arriving at a clinic with clear evidence of rape. The picture on the right captures the suffering with horror that young girls must feel when they are hunted down like prey by men seeking to sexually abuse them. In many failing societies, the boys learn that it is OK to use weapons and whatever violence is necessary to gain control over the lives of innocent females.

Kristof and WuDunn make the claim, in both the book and the film that while the last two centuries were devoted to ending human slavery as the most serious humanitarian disorder, this century will be struggling against violence toward women and girls as the single greatest humanitarian disorder of the global community today.

Half the Sky claims that violence toward women kills more women between age 15 and 45 than die from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined. And a far greater number of women and girls suffer from sexual violence but remain alive, often with mental impairment.

Both the book and the film feature more stories than statistics. For example, in a chapter on “Rule by Rape,” they give the story of Ethiopian teenager Woineshet, who was severely beaten and raped many, many times by her would-be husband, but the local judge would never convict the man because their village tradition is for girl to be subjugated and punished by her male suitor or husband.

They tell a nearly identical story about Zoya in Afghanistan, except in this story the would-be mother-in-law was the one that repeatedly beat the young girl. From one beating, Zoya was not able to walk because her mother-in-law strung her upside down and beat her feet until they were useless. Their social customs approve of this type of violence intended to pass on traditions that preserve the status quo.

Other evidence that Nicholos Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have dug up includes their estimate that there are over 100 million “missing girls” lost to abortion and other rejection procedures due to the fact that, especially in Asia, boys are thought to be socio-economically much more valuable than are girls (UN Study On The Status of Women).

Globally, at least one in three women and girls is beaten or sexually abused in her lifetime (UN Commission on the Status of Women, 2000). According to the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women in 2008, approximately 100 to 140 million girls and women in the world have experienced female genital mutilation/cutting, with more than 3 million girls in Africa annually at risk of the practice. Worldwide, up to 50 percent of sexual assaults are committed against girls under age 16.

Even in highly developed countries like the United States, gender-based discrimination is surprisingly prevalent. Not only do women earn lower wages for the same job as do men, but women who work are also expected to do more housework and family maintenance than men do. These types episodes of mental suffering probably account for the higher incidence of depression among women compared to men.

Violence against females is an astounding problem in the United States. The National Violence against Women Survey (NVAWS) found that 17.6 percent (one out of every five American women) and 3 percent of surveyed men were raped at some point in their lifetime. Over 30 percent of female rape victims reported being injured during their most recent rape. Fifty-four percent of female victims and 71 percent of male victims were first raped before their 18th birthday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2003 reported that in America, the annual costs of intimate partner violence against women exceeded an estimated $5.8 billion. About two thirds of these costs are medical and the remainder due to lost work and productivity.

So, what is the answer to the question that we started with: “Is violence against women the biggest cause of human suffering today?” While we don’t know how to quantify all of the dimensions of gender-based suffering, the data available point to the distinct possibility that gender-based violence and discrimination seem to add up to the greatest source of human suffering today. This topic most certainly deserves more attention and research.

Sisters Camrey, 5, and Anaiah, 9, from a small town in Georgia, near Atlanta, each school day held hands and ran or skipped across the street to catch their school bus. On a rainy day in February, they were half way across the street before Anaiah saw a truck bearing down on them. Without thinking about her own safety, she pushed her little sister away from the truck but took the full impact herself, breaking her neck and both legs.

Her mother who had been watching from their house rushed over and found no pulse. The school bus driver arrived in time to revive her with CPR, but Anaiah lost a leg and a kidney and was hospitalized for a month.

Anaiah suffered through five surgeries, losing a leg and a kidney but she had saved her little sister’s life. After more than a month in the hospital, Anaiah returned home to a heroine’s welcome. Anaiah told an NBC Today Show’s Brian Williams  on March 23, 2011 that, “When it happened, I had just one thought; my little sister Camrey is too young to survive this. I love my sister more than anything.”

, which inspires us to do likewise. However, love and compassion can be expressed in much less demanding ways. Sitting listening to a lonely friend for 20 minutes might provide just the compassion that your friend needed. And he or she might be inspired to pass it on to someone else. Walking to the store to get food for a sick neighbor might seem trivial to you, but to the person suffering, it might be a huge and generous gift. Good deeds do not have to be large to count as love or compassion.

Nancy McGirr, a professional war photo-journalist for Reuters News Service, while on assignment in 1991 in Guatemala found hundreds of children living and scavenging in Guatemala City’s huge garbage dump right in the middle of the city. When she loaned her camera to one of the children, she was so impressed by the pictures, that she solicited corporate donations of cameras and photo processing supplies.

Beginning with 6 children but rapidly expanding to 23 children aged 5-12, she taught them all photography skills and soon their work was exhibited all over the world. The children began earning money from sales of their photos and for the first time, their parents could afford to send them to school.

In 1993, another woman helped teach the children writing skills. From this combination of children’s photos and essays, a book, “Out of the Dump,” was published featuring many touching essays and poems illustrated in heart-rending black and white pictures.

Nancy McGirr first called the educational project Out of the Dump, and the project is still going strong under the name Fotokids (www.fotokids.org). Over the years, hundreds of impoverished children from all over the city have benefited from the program. Many of the students have gone on to college and entered successful careers, which was formerly impossible for children whose families survived only by every family member scavenging the dump. Now the school has expanded to Nicaragua, and includes workshops in design. (See www.design4kids.org .) Ms. McGirr continues to recruit instructors twice a year from North America to travel to Central America to teach professional workshops for the advanced students.

Nancy McGirr spent many years away from her professional career helping the “dump” children learn to take artistic pictures, start going to school, and begin career tracks. When asked “what’s in it for you,” she said “I love to see the children grow; I’m really happy for them. I want the best for them; that’s what keeps me going.”

Nancy McGirr has become a role model for innovative, compassionate and loving dedication to reducing the suffering of impoverished children. And she admitted that she felt happy from the sacrifices she had made.

In her December 2011 newsletter, she says “For me, the compassion I see in them (the children) and their desire to give back is how I measure success.” (More information can be found on Nancy McGirr’s blog .) A second photo book has been published entitled To Capture Dreams 20 Years.

Below is a poem-like story by photographer Marta Lopez, age 10, about her living quarters next to the Guatemala City Dump.

“Our Alley”

By Marta Lopez

Three little houses
guard our alley.
Three little houses
full of children;
five in my house,
three behind
four across the alley.
We share the alley;
it’s where we play,
where we walk
Where we listen
to people who fight.
We share the alley
but the clothesline?
No.
My sister climbs a pole
to hand the wet clothes.
Later
she stands guard
so no one steals
the clothes.
We share the alley,
but the clothesline
is ours.

The program has spread to several other countries, with life changing impacts on many students’ lives. Nancy McGirr could have used statistics to measure success but instead she views evidence of contagious compassion as her standard of accomplishment. Imagine, if everyone used this criterion of success, how much more kind and fun life would be.

Without compassion, the American McGirr never would have done anything for the children struggling day to day in the miserable dump. Once she got to know the Guatemala City children on an intimate basis, she acted out of love for them, not just compassion. Some of the children died in the dump. Others, McGirr followed through their schooling and helped them find jobs. Like many dedicated teachers, her students became an extended family. Without empathy and altruism and a sense of responsibility, Nancy McGirr would not have been able to sustain her commitment to expanding the learning community of child photographers that she began two decades ago. Role models for loving compassion often are women, but men also inspire us to follow their loving compassion pathways.

In June 2012, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released a series of new gender indicators, covering the presence of women in top corporate jobs and parliaments, the gender wage gap, and entrepreneurship.

Despite efforts in many countries to promote their participation on boards, women are still under-represented in top corporate jobs. On average, women make up 10% of board members. The United States is only 2% higher at 12%. Quite a few countries do better. The highest is highest is Norway, at close to 40%, due to a mandatory quota introduced in 2006. In Sweden, France, Slovak Republic and Finland the proportion of women on boards is between 15% and 20%, while in Germany, Japan and the Netherlands, it is less than 5%.

Spain, Iceland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy have all introduced laws to promote gender equality on boards, setting targets of between 20% and 40%. While there is no conclusive evidence that a company’s performance is boosted by having more women on the board, it is increasingly recognized that greater gender diversity in firms would increase the talent pool for top executives.

The percent of women in the U.S. congress and senate is 17%, which is about 10% lower than the average of OCED countries parliaments. In the past ten years, the average proportion of women in US Congress and Senate has increased slightly as shown in the chart below.

Entrepreneurship is still highly gendered. The percent of women has been rising, but this is largely due to an overall decline in male entrepreneurs during the past 11 years. Entrepreneurship, which is the percent of people who run a business that employs people, is still highly gendered, as can be seen in the next chart showing an overall decline in entrepreneurs during the past 11 years in the United States. However, the decline is among men whereas the percent of women business owners as a percent of the total employed population has been flat at about 1.7%. This is considerably lower than the OCED average and most European countries. Two thirds of OCED countries studied had a higher concentration of women as entrepreneurs.

If one considers lack of participation in power positions of business as well as government to be indicators of injustice due to social processes like glass ceilings that prohibit advancement, then the U.S., as well as the rest of the OECD countries, have a long way to go to reach gender justice, both informal and formal.

From these charts of data from the United States of progress from 2000 to 2010, a simple linear projection would predict that women’s and men’s wages would be equal in about 150 years, women will have equal representation in Congress and the Senate by about 2060, and we don’t have enough data to project gender equality in corporate boardrooms.

Most studies find that women tend to make compassionate choices more often than do men. Given that, do we not want to speed up the slow progress of filling seats of power in government, as well as in corporate boardrooms, much more rapidly than the current pace of change.

An excerpt from Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic Between Buddhism and Christianity by Jean-Yves Leloup : “In Christianity as well as Buddhism and Sufism the goal of meditation is to purify our hearts and minds so that we become receptacles or spotless mirrors for pure light. When human beings are able to welcome this clear light, which is the radiance and the presences of uncreated Being, it instills in them a state of peace which is independent of circumstances, a state of peace that is not merely of the psyche but spiritual or ontological as well. It is the experience of this reality that early Christians called hesychia, the origin of Hesychasm.”

A few important steps:

1. Posture. To meditate is to have a good posture.

2. Orientation, both external and internal, with a straight spine. To meditate is to be properly oriented.

3. Breathing. To go the very end of the exhalation, to allow the inhalation to come of itself. To meditate is to breathe deeply, and “en pneumatic.”

4. Invocation: the Name of Yeshua or a short invocation that calms the mind and gathers our dispersed thoughts. Meditation is the invocation of the name, which brings peace.

5. To discover our center. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this is the heart, the meeting place of the mental (which needs to descend) and the vital (which needs to ascend). A life without a center is a life without meaning. To see and act from the heart. To meditate is to be centered.

6. To be unafraid of silence and solitude-not in order to live apart from others, but to join them inwardly by the bond, which unites all that lives and exists (Logos) and communicates peace to all (Hesychia). To meditate is to be capable of silence and solitude.

7. Patience and repetition. These are necessary if we are to become simple and naturally open by the grace of the Holy Spirit, for meditation is a practice that requires strong motivation, great patience, and perseverance. To meditate is to be patient and to persevere.

8. The experiences, which accompany meditation, are not to be sought for themselves. Beyond all the psychic effects, which may accompany an assiduous practice (heat, light, tears, surges of joy and pain, and so forth), the spiritual effects are far more important: transfiguration, understanding the meaning of scriptures, Hesychia, peace, a plenitude independence of circumstances, humility and love of our enemies. This humility and love of our enemies are the realization of the “lineage” in us. In the Spirit that unites Father and Son, we become alter christus, another Christ (as St. Gregory said of those he baptized). Thus we become “a further incarnation,” inasmuch as our own feelings become those of Christ, and we participate through compassion in the salvation and well-being of all that lives. Meditation is for the salvation and well-being of all that lives.

Robert Putnam defined the social capital as the “collective value of all social networks and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other.” In other words, social capital is the sum total of compassionate interrelations within a community or society. These interrelationships have two components: the actual and the potential. Some of the compassionate interactions are ongoing and others are potential. Those that are potential will not be put into place unless a crisis arises or another need for help emerges.

In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), Robert Putnam compiled evidence that social capital had been declining in the United States during the previous 25 years. His indicators of this decline were fewer family dinners, less visiting with friends, and declining association memberships.

Communitarianism

Partly as a response to this change in American society, the communitarian movement gained ground. Communitarians seek to bolster social capital and the institutions of civil society. Civil society refers to voluntary collective action around shared interests and values. These actions create democratic institutions that are distinct from the family, governments, and markets.

Communitarians revere community and oppose exalted forms of individualism.
The Communitarian Network, founded in 1993 by Amitai Etzioni, is the best-known group advocating communitarianism. In the area of family policy, communitarians have worked for policies to strengthen families and discourage divorce. They have led in devising fresh, incentive-based policies designed to discourage a casual approach to marriage and to promote “children-first” thinking and family stability. Other premises of communitarianism are spelled out in the Responsive Communitarian Platform.

Communitarian thinkers are in the forefront of the Character Education movement, led by the Character Education Partnership in the United States, which is fostering a return to the teaching of good personal conduct and individual responsibility in thousands of public schools around the country. Likewise, communitarians have been playing a role in the new community-based approaches to criminal justice, which are showing solid success in restoring neighborhood order and achieving real reductions in violent crime.

Communitarian ideas and policy approaches are consistent with the community compassion and compassionate principles advocated on this website. How to buy Viagra one of the most popular search in google.

A case in point is the emphasis placed on individual and social responsibility in the Ingredients of Personal Compassion. In contrast to conventional “right” or “left” approaches to social policy, Western societies need a more compassionate balance between rights and responsibilities. Strong rights presume strong responsibilities and the pendulum of contemporary Western societies has swung too far in the direction of individual autonomy at the expense of individual and social responsibility.

The Appleton Compassion Project is a community art project involving over 10,000 Appleton art students. Participants received a six-by-six art panel to show their idea of compassion. All of these panels on the website and  at The Trout Museum of Art.

At the website, linked above, you can see students’ submissions and the statements they have written to go with them. In one of these statements, a student writes “I believe that we need to start small if we are ever going to have a world full of compassion. I believe that you should start weaving compassion into your friendships and acquaintances.”

The project was inspired by Professor Richard Davidson, at the University of Wisconsin, who found that individuals who practice compassion have healthier brains. His research also shows that compassion can be learned, and can be practiced, as a skill.

Leave comments if you know of other places to find computer-inspired art.