If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. - Dalai Lama
Before we get into our new meditation technique, I wanted to teach you a bit of Buddhist etiquette. In Buddhist cultures, there is a traditional greeting that I'd like you to know. You put your hands together (as if in prayer) in front of your chest, then bow and say "namaste" (Nah' mas tay). then the other person does the same. This greeting basically means "I acknowledge the Buddha in you." In other words, you are acknowledging that the person in question has the same "Buddha nature," or potential to become enlightened, as you do. There are endless variations on this theme, but typically the junior (younger) person is expected to initiate the exchange - so if you meet someone from a Buddhist culture and you want to be very respectful, don't wait for them...:) Generally speaking, the higher the hand position, the more religious the gesture. So if you ever see someone do this with their hands above their heads, you know you are witnessing something very sacred.
Okay, so now we are going to move on to the second of the four divine abodes: compassion meditation. Just as loving kindness meditation seeks to help us experience, compassion meditation is designed to help us experience compassion for others. Compassion meditation is...different. It often seems to a beginner as if it's really depressing to wallow in the sufferings of others. I will talk more about the long term rewards later, but I wanted to say now that there is a short term reward as well. Basically, there is a cathartic element to it - kind of like watching a sad movie and having a good cry. It makes you feel much better sometimes to contemplate bad things, grieve over them, and then recover. I feel compelled to note that, if anyone had told me 10 years ago that I would be extolling the virtues of a good cry, I would have thought them crazy. I was never a touchy-feely kind of guy and still aren't. But I have improved my ability to feel compassion, which just proves that practicing these kinds of meditation techniques will, over time, change your perspective. So if you think you would be a better person if you felt more compassion for others, then you should not let the fact that you are currently bad at it get in the way of learning...
One more important thing to get on the table - compassion is not the same as pity. We are not trying to feel sorry for people or try to figure out how to help them. You can do that later if you wish, but in compassion meditation you want to focus as much as you can on feeling the pain of others. You want to put yourself in their shoes emotionally and imagine how they are suffering. That's your only job. One way this often plays out is that people have a very hard time feeling compassion for people they don't like. "He's a jerk," you think, "why should I feel sorry for him?" But look at it this way - the fact that someone is a jerk does not mean they don't suffer. Indeed, perhaps part of the reason for his jerkiness is that he suffers in certain ways and understanding this might help you deal with his jerkiness. But you can learn to feel his pain without necessarily thinking he's innocent or deserves your help or whatever. Understanding is value-neutral. It's simply data and what you decide to do with that data is an entirely different question that you are free to take up after you finish meditating if you so choose.
Right, so let's begin. We will meditate for 20 minutes divided into four 5 minute periods. In the first period, we will think about the sufferings of people in tragic circumstances. It doesn't matter that much who you select for this, and you don't have to stay with just one person or one group of people. The idea is to work with people in an undeniably terrible situation - earthquake victims, people with terminal diseases or who have just lost their children, etc. As always, we start with the easiest targets, and most people don't find it difficult to empathize with those in such dire circumstances. Then we move on to empathize with the sufferings of family an friends, which are not as severe as those in dire circumstances, but we can empathize more easily because we care about them. In the third period, we feel the suffering of neutral people. We do not know them well, but we certainly know that they suffer and we can think about the ways in which this might occur. Finally, we meditate about difficult people. As I said above, they too suffer, no matter how horrible them may be, and understanding this can help us understand them.
What you want to do is really try to put yourself in the position of the sufferer. Imagine yourself going through what they are going through, concentrating on the emotions this generates rather than the daily details of their life. So you might imagine your own hometown was exposed to a tsunami like the one that recently hit Japan and try to feel what it would be like to have your entire village and everyone you know washed away. As we discussed in loving kindness, the idea is to focus on emotions and to keep your thoughts relatively general so you do not provide traction for monkey mind. It's thus not about trying to plan how you would handle a post tsunami world, but just about how it would feel to be in that situation. It is not unusual to cry when you practice compassion meditation and this is actually a sign that you are succeeding, since crying is what we do when we experience powerful sad emotions.