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    Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
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    Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
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    Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
    Audiobook6 hours

    Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    One of the most original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world-author of such acclaimed books as A History of God, Islam, and Buddha-now gives us an impassioned and practical book that can help us make the world a more compassionate place.

    Karen Armstrong believes that while compassion is intrinsic in all human beings, each of us needs to work diligently to cultivate and expand our capacity for compassion. Here, in this straightforward, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book, she sets out a program that can lead us toward a more compassionate life.

    The twelve steps Armstrong suggests begin with "Learn About Compassion" and close with "Love Your Enemies." In between, she takes up "compassion for yourself," mindfulness, suffering, sympathetic joy, the limits of our knowledge of others, and "concern for everybody." She suggests concrete ways of enhancing our compassion and putting it into action in our everyday lives, and provides, as well, a reading list to encourage us to "hear one another's narratives." Throughout, Armstrong makes clear that a compassionate life is not a matter of only heart or mind but a deliberate and often life-altering commingling of the two.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateDec 28, 2010
    ISBN9780307881755
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

    4/5

    97 ratings18 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Brilliant. This wise book cannot be read or consumed. It must be carefully studied.
    • 5/5
      Excellent. Everyone has to listen or read Karen Armstrong's work to cultivate compassion, love and understanding. who else can say it better than someone with vast experience and better than the preachers out there.
    • 4/5
      While I finished the text, I have no doubt that I will be re-reading this. None of these ideas are anything I have not heard before, but I really appreciate the way Armstrong presents the language in an ever-expanding circle starting from the self and moving to the world.
    • 5/5
      Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong is most pertinent for the 21st century. Armstrong uses the Golden Rule as the foundation of her discourse on what it means to live compassionately. She envisions twelve steps, but thought that such an approach to one’s life could take a life time. In the introductory remarks to the text readers are introduced to the major faith traditions and their concepts based on compassion.Later Armstrong weaves these steps carefully by explaining what people ought to do to benefit from them. At each step readers are presented with a discussion about how to use each proposal. These compassionate goals are carefully calibrated, and based on the teachings of the major religions. Although every goal could stand alone, Armstrong though was able to integrate the goals of each proceeding affirmation with her explanations that followed.This book as a true gift was able to relate each topic to the contemporary issues of the day. Armstrong recognized all of us have problems with which we are struggling. She explained further how important it was for us to transcend the thinking about ourselves and tribe. She wrote that people should reach out to the good and bad alike. We should treat others the way we would like to be treated. This dictum should also include our enemies who are suffering just like us.Armstrong’s work was formulated like that of the Twelve Steps Program for Alcohol Anonymous. Her vision of compassion grew out of her TED talk in 2008 on compassion for which she won a $100,000 prize. This achievement led her to focus her thinking as a religious historian and interfaith advocate in the promulgation of the Golden Rule and compassionate living in the world.
    • 1/5
      Very confusing, I couldn't follow the writer, she is mixing between different eras, myths, fictional stuff and religions.
    • 3/5
      I liked this book, but I'd hoped to love it. Perhaps I didn't spend enough time with it...of course, I didn't do the prescribed exercises...does anyone really do them all? Lovely ideas here, but I think I've lived in macho-posturing Texas too long to have any real hope that compassion will take hold of our people. I will press on with the exercises; one must try.
    • 4/5
      This is an immensely thoughtful book, and it is hard not to appreciate Karen Armstrong's project here: to outline a very practical, ethical path by which readers can develop compassion and empathy, and ultimately make the world a far better place. That said, if you are already familiar with world religions - and especially if you are more interested in what makes each distinctively itself, rather than in how to blend them together - Armstrong's exercise is likely to seem somewhat tedious. I skimmed the book twice, and suspect I'll have to be in the right mood to find it a compelling read. One of the details in the background of Frank Herbert's Dune series is a sort of universal religion, cobbled together by religious leaders from multiple terrestrial faiths, with a core text known as the Orange Catholic Bible. Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life feels like a one-author Orange Catholic Bible, with all the wisdom and yet also the ersatz quality that implies.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book a lot. In it religious historian Karen Armstrong suggests a series of simple and easily achieved mental exercises that can help one increase one's capacity for compassion. Armstrong offers justification for these exercises by way of copious examples from the history of religion. Some of the examples I was familiar with from her longer and more detailed The Great Transformation, about religious development during what is known as the Axial Age (900-200 BC), though the impetus here is on personal transformation. Basically, and I don't mean to be reductive for the book is filled with intellectual riches, but the two key lessons here are, first, The Golden Rule -- Do unto others as you would have them do unto you -- and second, the discipline of mindfulness, which I know from my Buddhist studies but which has parallels across the religious spectrum. The book seeks to be practical. Armstrong's great gift is for showing how religions agree on certain principals across cultures and broad spans of time. She then prescribes simple exercises for instilling these helpful habits into one's daily life. It's really rather wonderful. I think, however, that the exercises themselves might have been set out typographically because they tend to get buried in the text. But this is a quibble. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      Armstrong knows a lot about many religions, and shows convincingly the common values of these. Conservatives of any of the religions probably wouldn't like the book.
    • 4/5
      Ideas for how to live a more compassionate life drawn from mythology, philosophy, poetry, classical literature, and the world's major religions.
    • 1/5
      I tried to listen to this cd, but did not succeed, during a long road trip. I couldn't make it through the first cd. From almost the beginning the author was pompous in tone and presentation, such as how DARE anyone take into account both the good and the bad of individuals like Mother Theresa or Martin Luther King Jr? Then when she talked about the artist's intent for those who painted in the caves in Lascoux as though it were fact, I couldn't continue. Unless you have a time machine there is no way to know what that individual was thinking. Heck, what contemporary artists report for their intent is still suspect since people lie. With Armstrong's academic background she should know better. It's too bad, too, since I was really hoping to like this book.
    • 3/5
      A well-structured and systematic programme encouraging people of all faiths to practice conscious compassion in the same way we would learn any new skill. Armstrong’s belief that humanity has an innate capacity for goodness, which can override the baser instincts of the “crocodile brain” is reassuring. Her twelve steps provide a simple enough guide and, based on Socratic dialogue, ask questions that challenge the reader’s known perceptions. Containing what seems like common sense to people who have already struggled with the concept of forgiveness and compassion this book will be a good place to start if one is just beginning the journey of enlightened (or compassionate) living.Although she touches briefly on the need to apply the Golden Rule (to love our neighbour as we love ourselves) in families and neighbourhoods, the focus was more on the universal than the personal. Given Armstrong’s background as a strong advocate of interfaith dialogue, this is understandable, but I would have gained more if there’d been deeper discussion on the challenges of living a compassionate life in my ordinary day-to-day existence before I start worrying about healing breaches with people across the oceans. Yes, we live in a global village, but as Armstrong herself points out, compassion has to start at the very centre of our personal lives before it can spread to the outer reaches of the larger world we live in. Still, any book that emphasises the need for love and compassion in our current world is a worthwhile read. I turned the last page feeling more hopeful for the souls of the human race than I have in a long time.
    • 3/5
      I appreciate Armstrong's efforts, and I want them to succeed, but I felt that this was mostly Buddhism for those those too trapped in their own religion to research Buddhism confidently or earnestly.
    • 5/5
      An excellent, thought provoking and inspirational read. it has helped me tremendously on the path to my spiritual development.Cant wait to read mor of her books.One to read and reread.
    • 4/5
      An excellent and thought-provoking book arguing that the core value of all the great religions is, at base, the Golden Rule, and providing some some tips for applying it on a personal and even national level. It's not exactly a self-help book, but more of a philosophical book. Perhaps it's a self-help book for those who, like me, don't like self-help books. It's very learned and intelligent, and well-written. The last chapter, which tries to apply the principles of compassion to the international or political arenas, didn't really hang together to me, but that doesn't undermine the lessons of, and the motive behind, the book.
    • 4/5
      Compelling case for compassion, accompanied, as would be expected of this author, by historical basis among the major religions. Readers of other books by Armstrong may be surprised as the "easy" reading style of this volume.
    • 5/5
      Karen Armstrong uses her broad understanding of major world religions to explain the importance of compassion. The book includes practices from many traditions to become more aware of our own attitudes, treat ourselves with compassion and finally, extend that compassion to the world around us by increasing our knowledge and understanding of others? cultures and beliefs. While it was Gandhi who said, ?Be the change you wish to see in the world,? it is Armstrong who has written the how-to handbook.
    • 4/5
      Twelve steps to create a better you and a better world. Karen Armstrong takes the Golden Rule and follows it through major religions to find a better way to live. She suggests that all follow the same Golden Rule and that by doing so make a better world. Karen Armstrong has written many books on religion and has received the TED prize. Worth the time to read, time to think and time to put into action.