Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

Here are Karen Armstrong's "12 Steps to a Compassionate Life":

1. Learn about compassion: Study the place of compassion in the world's major faiths.
2. Look at your own world: Start with compassion for your community, and assess the potential for change.
3. Compassion for yourself: You must love yourself before you can love others.
4. Empathy: Allow life's suffering to invade your heart and mind so you can feel empathy for others.
5. Mindfulness: Observe your own behavior and see that the cause of your suffering is not others, but rather your own anger.
6. Action: Start to act in accordance with the golden rule.
7. How little we know: Make place for other views and feelings in your mind and heart.
8. How should we speak to one another? Learn to express a strong conviction with compassion.
9. Concern for everybody: Contemplate the world's interdependence, and make room for the more distant "other."
10. Knowledge: Immerse yourself in another culture and learn to appreciate it fully.
11. Recognition: Examine your world, find a need that only you can fulfill, and start to help.
12. Love your enemies: The final step signals an end to tribalism and a move to selfless compassion.

Joan Mooney is a Washington, D.C.–based writer. Her reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun and many other publications.