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Areas › Anger › Growing empathy
The famous account of how mirror neurons were found gets retold with the wrong animals and with details that could not have happened as described. The practice built on it may still be worth doing, but the story should be told accurately or dropped. Losing credibility over a detail you never checked is an expensive way to make a point.
avoid making too many assumptions (Quran 49:12). The verse is about how we hold people in our minds, and the same care belongs in what we repeat about them.
الحجرات
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱجۡتَنِبُواْ كَثِيرࣰ ا مِّنَ ٱلظَّنِّ إِنَّ بَعۡضَ ٱلظَّنِّ إِثۡمࣱۖ وَلَا تَجَسَّسُواْ وَلَا يَغۡتَب بَّعۡضُكُم بَعۡضًاۚ أَيُحِبُّ أَحَدُكُمۡ أَن يَأۡكُلَ لَحۡمَ أَخِيهِ مَيۡتࣰ ا فَكَرِهۡتُمُوهُۚ وَٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ تَوَّابࣱ رَّحِيمࣱ
Believers, avoid making too many assumptions- some assumptions are sinful- and do not spy on one another or speak ill of people behind their backs: would any of you like to eat the flesh of your dead brother? No, you would hate it. So be mindful of God: God is ever relenting, most merciful
Qur’an 49:12read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A review of the main compassion-based programmes found the evidence supporting them is growing but uneven across programmes, with methodological limits in many of the trials. That is the honest position for this whole field: promising, worth practising, not settled. Saying so out loud costs far less than being corrected later.
Kirby JN. (2017). Compassion interventions: The programmes, the evidence, and implications for research and practice.. Psychology and psychotherapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
People stop trusting the parts of what you say that they cannot check, once they catch an error in the parts they can.
There is a particular relief in hearing a room of strangers admit the same frightened thing you have never said aloud. It is why groups reach people that advice does not.
Four ordinary things take the edge off a hot temper: being touched by someone you trust, eating with people, moving your body hard enough to breathe, and sitting still for a few minutes a day.
Closeness arrives much faster in a small group that keeps meeting than in a wide circle you see now and then. If you want to feel less alone, pick the small thing that repeats.