Compassion practices

Healthcare providers seek to access a power of sustainable, inclusive, and unconditional care and compassion for self and others beyond empathic distress, secondary trauma, and burnout. To support that goal, in this chapter, we present three compassion meditations that serve two purposes: 1) to empower the ability to be with your own difficult emotions and feelings in a healing way, and 2) to extend empathy and compassion to others with increasing sustainability and inclusivity. Providers can practice these meditations themselves and carry forward that practice into clinical work, both in their embodied presence to their patients and, if appropriate and beneficial, by explicitly sharing these practices with interested patients.