Hello and welcome to the Being Well podcast. My name is Forrest Hansen and I am here

today joined by Dr Rick Hansen. How are you doing dad?

Hi Forrest, it's always funny to hear you refer to me as doctor.

I'll try to get used to it.

It's not how we normally talk to each other around the dinner table.

That's fair enough.

So today we're going to be talking mostly about the strength of compassion, focusing on the theme, as it's kind of broken out in the Foundations of Well-being program, of being for yourself to kind of set that up. In the overall structure of your work, why do you want to start people with compassion?

Well, that's a great question. The great wisdom traditions of the world and lots of individuals start with suffering. Where does it hurt? You walk into the doctor, where does it hurt? And so there's something very poignant and human here that we start with feeling stressed, worried, tired.

It's not the whole of our life. It's not gloom and doom, but it's a really important part of our life.

What feels torn in a relation? do, but it's a really important part of our life.

What feels torn in a relationship?

What calls for mending?

What are you still carrying around with you into adulthood that's left over from childhood, but you're still lugging it around like a

like an invisible stone you carry every day.

So it's really important to recognize difficulty, strain, irritation, stress, suffering in the broadest sense.

And then what do we do with it?

Do we just stare at it differently?

Do we jump up and down yippy suffering? No. We want to feel for the difficulty

in other people or in ourselves. We want to have empathy for, that makes us humans, not ants. And the essence of that response,

that's a sensitivity to suffering, broadly defined, and a movement to help if you can, that is the essence of compassion.

So in our own journey of well-being, if you're going to start somewhere, start with compassion.

And then inside of that, under the general heading of compassion it's this

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