Give the Gift of Compassion This Holiday Season
Link to article published on Everyday Mindfulness
December 7th, 2020
This year many of us won’t be traveling home for the holidays. We won’t be rushing off to parties to celebrate the passing of another year with our friends. We’ll find new pandemic-safe ways to get together with our loved ones – over Zoom, bundled up around a fire outside, masked inside our living-rooms with the windows wide open.
Managing our lives during a global pandemic has been stressful and emotionally draining. Having sacrificed so much already, it feels cruel not to be able to share the holidays with the people we love. In our sadness and fatigue, many of us might be inclined to withdraw and hunker down, but to retreat would be a mistake. The best gift we can give ourselves, and our loved ones, this holiday season is the gift of our compassion.
Before Covid-19 became a household word, we started asking ourselves what giving our compassion to others might look like. How do we make compassion not something we practice every once in a while, but the very foundation of how we interact with people? Scientific studies have shown that giving is a much more pleasurable and beneficial experience for us than receiving is. When we give our compassion to others, not only are we lifting up the people around us, we are also giving a very real boost to our own well-being and happiness.