Compassion at the Edge

Being compassionate is no easy undertaking in a world so full of suffering. Those of us who are most driven by the motivation to alleviate suffering—who may have even built careers around it as healthcare professionals, educators, social workers, therapists, and more—are confronted daily by obstacles to acting with compassion. We’re often taught that having too much compassion could threaten the boundaries of our professionalism or cause us to become infected by the suffering of others. And all too often, our experience has been one of overwhelm and burnout as we struggle to care for those around us.

But what if the problem is not that we care too much or too little, but that we’ve been going about compassion all wrong? Joan Halifax, PhD, a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and pioneer in the field of end-of-life care, has spent her life in the service of others. With the help of research by colleagues in the fields of social psychology and neuroscience, she has uncovered that compassion is actually composed of multiple non-compassion elements, all of which are trainable and none of which require us to sacrifice our own well-being or the well-being of those we love and support.

In this course, she reveals the basic anatomy of compassion and shares G.R.A.C.E., a practical five-step process for cultivating the qualities and skills that give us the ability to serve others with an open heart. You can be compassionate without burning out and this course from one of today’s preeminent thought leaders and teachers will show you how.