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Compassion is the act of opening your heart. To live in a state of compassion means you approach the world with your emotional barriers lowered and your ability to connect with others intact... We do not all walk around with our hearts wide open all the time, however; doing so would leave us overwhelmed and in emotional danger. If I kept my heart open and exposed while watching the news every night, I would most likely never recover from the rush of helpless and hopeless feelings created by all the tragic stories. Sometimes it is necessary to keep your emotional barriers up as a way to protect yourself. The key to learning the lesson of compassion is realising that you are in control of the erection or destruction of those barriers that create distance between you and others. You can choose to dissolve those barriers when you want to connect with the heart of another human being. You can also choose to limit others' access to your heart when you need to, by forming judgments that separate you from that which you are judging.
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