A Force For Good

A Force For Good is a universal call to turn our compassion outward and use it to improve ourselves and the world around us in science, religion, social issues, business and education.

One of the most important aspects when it comes to being mindful or having lots of willpower is being able to pause when emotions rise inside you. Feelings are the strongest motivators of human behavior, so whenever we feel strongly about something, we’re tempted to act on this feeling. However, this is often a short-circuit in our internal wiring, leading us to not consider the consequences of our actions well enough.

The Dalai Lama has mastered the art of taking a step back and thinking first. For example, during the 2008 Tibetan unrest, he imagined the Chinese officials who caused Tibetans pain and grief, but decided not to be absorbed by their negative energy, instead choosing not to act out of anger, being compassionate and controlling his feelings.

However, controlling your feelings is not the same as suppressing them. The former helps you make better decisions, the latter leads to uncontrolled outbursts.

A very simple thing you can do to improve in this regard is ask yourself this question when you recognize negative emotions inside you: “Are my feelings in proportion to the situation I am in?”

For example, if you’re angry that Donald Trump won the US presidency today and you ask yourself this question, you’ll quickly find that not much in your life will change for quite some time and that this is probably not worth being frustrated about. Then you can get back to work as usual much faster, and not spend the day in angry frustration.

There are countless fables, metaphors and religious stories that make a case for compassion, such as Jesus’s famous “turn the other cheek” or the zen story of the farmer who wouldn’t divide his days into lucky and unlucky ones. In fact, compassion is such a central part of most of the major religions, that we tend to think the idea of it could have originated from religion itself – but that’s not true, the Dalai Lama thinks. He says compassion is separate and actually superior to religion, as it’s grounded in biology for several reasons. First, even animals can be compassionate. Think of a dog keeping another dog company when he feels miserable, or wolves mourning the loss of another wolf through howling. Second, humans can hardly survive without positive emotions like love and joy and compassion is a way to deliver those to others. Lastly, one of the biggest sources of human motivation is having a mission that’s larger than oneself, and compassion is exactly what gets…