Why Compassion?

So — why compassion, and not concern? Or sympathy? Or empathy? Aren’t they all basically the same thing?  

— Wes Grooms

If we’re to change minds, we’ve first got to touch hearts. 

— Wes Grooms

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries.
Without them, humanity cannot survive. 

— The Dalai Lama

 
So — why compassion, and not concern? Or sympathy? Or empathy? Aren’t they all basically the same thing?

While they are in fact related, they are not at all the same as one another. More accurately, they are stops along the continuum of awareness, understanding, feeling, and desire to help.

Concern, Sympathy, Empathy

Concern is simply relation to someone or something. It is awareness that you’ve experienced the kind of pain or misfortune you see someone else experiencing. Perhaps you learn a co-worker is angry because they have received an unnecessarily harsh reprimand from your manager for being late to work. If you’ve experienced the same sort of reprimand and think to yourself “been there” (you relate), but you don’t experience any emotional distress or desire to help your co-worker, this is an example of concern. 

Sympathy adds care and sorrow about another’s misfortune to concern. Imagine the same scenario from above, but, if along with your thinking to yourself “been there,” you were to experience a suffering of mind (care) and sadness (sorrow) for that person, you’d be displaying signs of having sympathy for the other person. With empathy, you experience the same feelings as another. So, in this example, you may or may not experience the concern and sympathy discussed above, but if you are to experience empathy, you would have to experience feelings of anger, just as your co-worker is experiencing.

Compassion Wraps Them Up

Compassion, however, wraps up all of these characteristics and crucially adds to them the intense desire to alleviate the distress experienced by the other. With compassion, it is the feeling of another’s pain in your heart that leads to the desire, in your mind, to act to end the other’s suffering. It is this desire to act to end the suffering or misfortune of another that makes compassion the proper goal for achieving positive changes in our lives.

Referring back to our example, if you were to experience compassion, you would, as Ari Cowan of the International Center for Compassionate Organizations writes, “experience an emotional connection to your colleague’s suffering, take action to prevent or respond to your colleague’s suffering, and make some sort of 'payment' (physically, emotionally, mentally, environmentally, and/or spiritually) in taking the action intended to alleviate or prevent your colleague’s suffering.” In other words, not only would you relate to your co-workers experience, you would experience suffering of mind and sadness. Additionally, you would experience the same distress as your co-worker — in this case anger. And, critically, you’d have the intense desire to alleviate your co-worker’s distress. This desire might manifest itself in your attempting to soothe your co-worker in one way or another, or it might propel you to have a conversation with the human resources department about the manager’s harsh practices.

Responding to Suffering

Ranging from climate change to social inequity; severe income inequality; unhealthy diets and lifestyles; bullying; and the like, extreme suffering exists in the world today. “Those in the grips of this suffering,” notes Cowan, “lead, work, volunteer for, or otherwise participate in organizations. People struggling with the loss of their job or home, a death in the family, chronic illness, threats from bill collectors, violent crime, discrimination, failure, a devastating childhood and/or experiencing a bleak existence will deal with workplace challenges differently than those who are not plagued by similar torment. Recognizing and responding to organizational and personal suffering is an important element in moving organizations toward greater ethical, financial, and sustainable success.”

It is the desire to alleviate suffering that makes compassion the critical element in a vision of positive change for our society. This vision is what fuels my compassion advocacy – raising awareness about the nature and need for compassion — for both individuals and organizations.

Join me! 

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of the International Center for Compassionate Organizations.

Wes Grooms is a Doctoral Graduate Research Assistant in the Department of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, KY, USA

Copyright © 2014 by Wes Grooms • Published with permission