Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love.

THICH NHAT HAHN

Can you genuinely understand someone else’s suffering?

Or do you just think that you can?

When we are oblivious to that which others around us are experiencing, we are able to operate in our own autonomous universe, separate and apart from anything that anyone else might be enduring.

But, if we are more prone towards compassion and we are capable of extending ourselves in their direction, we become all the more potentially empowered by our own unique sense of connectivity to others.

Within the walls of our own mental framework, we are able to empathetically extend ourselves in the direction that another party might be feeling.

Our ability to genuinely connect to them, strengthens the bond between both parties and facilitates the ability for those tangential interconnections between us and others to mature in ways that bring a deeper sense of whom we truly are.

It helps us to build the proper bond that will carry that person into a slightly higher state, knowing that there is another party who is experiencing, on some level, that which they are feeling, and gives them a certain degree of companionship, in a very tough circumstance that they are being forced to weather alone.

Our ability to master such a skill creates a compelling reason for others to bond with us, because they are able to sense a certain degree of authenticity which we display through this type of behavior, and which ultimately creates a deeper reason for a relationship to mature.

When you are capable of giving from your heart, you are perhaps providing the greatest gift that money can never buy.

Love.

Happy Sunday!