How to Practice Compassion for People You Struggle With

In my last blog post, we explored gratitude and how a simple shift in attention can rewire your baseline emotional state. This week we’ll go deeper, exploring the practice that may be the most challenging and the most transformative: compassion.

Most of us have encountered some version of loving-kindness meditation. It begins with yourself, then expands outward to loved ones, acquaintances, strangers, and finally to all beings everywhere. It’s a beautiful practice, and research consistently supports its benefits for emotional regulation, stress reduction, and even physical health.

But after years of practice, I noticed that my golden circle still had gaps in it. There were specific groups to which the love simply would not flow. For me, if I’m honest, it was fundamentalism—any area of thinking where certainty is used to justify exclusion and curiosity disappears.

That gap bothered me. Not because I thought I was a bad person, but because I knew that a practice built on selective compassion is still a practice built on judgment.

So I built something different. I call it the People Pie.

Imagine a pie divided into eight slices. Each slice represents a dimension along which we commonly judge other human beings: politics, religion, sex, economics, education, health, ethnicity, and age. These are the fault lines of our social world, the categories where bias, fear, and contempt take root most easily.

Now imagine each slice has concentric rings moving outward from the center. The innermost ring represents the darkest end of the spectrum of regard: active hatred or contempt. Moving outward, the rings graduate through dislike, pity, sympathy,

empathy, compassion, and finally love.

The practice is simple, but not easy.

You sit. You bring to mind a specific group. You honestly locate where you are on that ring. And then you do the work of moving, even slightly, toward the outside.

You’re not pretending to change your perspective. You’re not manufacturing false warmth. You are simply noticing where your compassion stops, and gently encouraging it to take one more step.

This is where the practice requires honesty. Most of us can love humanity in the abstract. The People Pie asks us to love it in the specific, where growth lives.

This week's practice: Draw your own People Pie. Eight slices, seven rings.

Pick the slice where your ring sits closest to the center. Sit with that group for five minutes and see if you can move one ring outward. 

This is how we grow our compassion: one outward expansion at a time.