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Compassion and lovingkindness are, in the Buddhist tradition, not merely warm feelings that come and go but qualities of heart that can be deliberately cultivated, like a muscle or a skill. Lovingkindness — metta — is the active wish that beings be well and happy; compassion — karuna — is the wish that they be free from suffering. The classic training for them, the metta bhavana, is a structured meditation in which you extend goodwill outward in widening circles: first to yourself, then to someone you love, then to a neutral person, then to someone you find difficult, and at last to all beings everywhere, without exception.
Two features of that training are easy to miss and worth dwelling on. The first is that it begins with yourself. Many people find this the hardest step of all — it is often easier to wish a stranger well than to extend the same kindness inward — but the tradition insists on it, on the grounds that a heart at war with itself has little genuine warmth to offer anyone else. Self-compassion is not indulgence here; it is the foundation the rest of the practice is built on. The second feature is that compassion is meant to be extended precisely to the ones who are hardest to love — the difficult person, even the person who has wronged you — not because their conduct is approved, but because withholding goodwill mostly poisons the one who withholds it.
Crucially, compassion in this tradition is active rather than sentimental. It is not a matter of feeling sorry for people from a comfortable distance, nor of being overwhelmed by the world's pain. It is a steady, willed orientation of goodwill that naturally expresses itself in how you actually treat the beings in front of you. The Dalai Lama has often summarized his whole religion in a single word — kindness — and the practice aims at exactly that: not a mood, but a reliable disposition to wish others well and to act on it.
The practice can begin with a few quiet phrases held in the mind — may you be well, may you be free from suffering, may you be at peace — offered first to yourself, then outward, person by person, to the ones you love, the ones you barely know, and the ones you struggle with. It can feel mechanical at first, and that is fine; the point is to incline the heart repeatedly in the direction of goodwill until the incline becomes its natural resting position. Over time, wishing others free of suffering stops being an exercise and becomes simply the way you meet the world.