legacy How to exercise your compassion muscle BY JERRY WITKOVSKY My friend Miriam was recently watching her 10-year-old grandson, when he came to her with a troubled look on his face. "This is getting really mean," he said. "I think my friend is really upset." It had started innocently enough, with a group text. Someone had posted a cartoon picture of a pig. But then someone said the pig looked like his classmate. By the time Miriam's grandson came to her, the texts had escalated and were now outright mean about his friend and her weight. Everyone seemed to forget the friend and were just trying to "out joke" the other. But Miriam's grandson could tell the friend was taking it personally. "What should I do?" He asked. "You need to call her right now so knows she has a friend," Miriam advised. What does compassion look like? Compassion is the concern for and willingness to help someone who is suffering. With empathy, you can feel what the other person is feeling. It's about feeling sad when your friend or a loved one feels sad. Compassion goes a step further, with a desire to take-action on that feeling. There's also an element of the "intercultural golden rule" here: Do unto others as THEY would have you do unto them. It's not questioning if something would make YOU sad or hurt. It's acknowledging and accepting how the other person feels and compassion looks like. One way is to start with a personal story-talk about a time that someone showed you compassion. Share a story about a time that you were responding. sad or suffering, and how someone helped you. How wonderful for Miriam that her grandson's "compassion reflex" kicked in. What's important there is that he knew he could talk to her to ask what to do. Because they had talked before about compassion before. Compassion is acknowledging that sadness How to have a rich discussion about compassion with your grandchild. There are plenty of ways to talk to grandchildren of all ages about what 36 GRAND SEPT-OCT 2019 " or suffering is real for the person experiencing it, even when it's yourself. Continued on next pagehttps://www.facebook.com/GRANDmagazine/ https://www.twitter.com/grandMmagazine