i'm sure TNH is a truly wonderful person and obviously far more advanced than myself -and I do understand this approach ....but it also seems very romantic and unrealistic. It appears to me that one needs to be a fairly advanced practitioner to have the penetrating awareness that encompasses a deeper non-emotional understanding of another person and their needs How many people are able to actually "go inside" another? Is there in the meantime a likelihood that we will be projecting our own ideas of how that person appears to us through the mist of our own emotions rather than the way that they actually are? As for compassion being to 'suffer with'...in the past, I've spent some of my time crying in private and ''suffering with'' others with difficulties of one kind or another when I've been working with them in a professional role,.. but that's not really compassion, its emotional attachment. Indeed personal suffering of that nature is the kind which surely we need to understand and overcome whilst still having the abiity to empathise with others. Additionally, in more personal relationships, if there is emotional (and maybe physical) abuse, sometimes one just needs to recognise and walk away from it rather than try to 'get inside' the other person and allow it to continue under the umbrella of "love". Through making the mistake of once wanting to 'help' and 'save' another in an abusive relationship I was involved in myself, I got dangerously near to losing my life.... which was a bit of a bummer whilst it was all happening! lol So do we need careful word choices, definitions and practice strategies in these areas ? I think so. Otherwise we're just swapping one kind of emotional activity for another. Additionally, if 'helping' others is clouded with emotional obscurations then we become a 'do-gooder' without wisdom - and then we're not helping others at all and even harming ourselves, because of our own ignorance. I'd be interested in hearing your own thoughts about love and compassion. hands