Counselling, Supervision, Training, Research, Teaching, Writing. Providing therapeutic services to the people of East Lancashire and beyond.

Friday 2 September 2011

Joan Halifax on Compassion




Twitter promotes serendipity - one of my favourite words - to make fortunate discoveries by accident. I was sat at my desk, doing some lesson planning for the upcoming academic year, when I just happened to check my Twitter feed. I found a post from @psychoBOBlogy which contained a link to a video of Joan Halifax giving a short talk at a TED conference.

She talks about compassion and she says that compassion means, "To see clearly into the nature of suffering". She says that compassion is to desire the transformation of suffering but that compassion is not being attached to an outcome, but instead to be "fully present to the whole catastrophe". I think this credo could be a guiding light for counsellors and psychotherapists, sometimes we need a guiding light to guide us home, and then we can stop fixing things and be fully present to the whole catasrophe.

Well I watched Joan's passionate and moving presentation and I wanted to share it with you on this Blog. Maybe someone here will stumble across it by accident and be moved to share as I was moved.

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