Compassion has a branding problem. Somewhere along the way it became synonyms for being pleasant, agreeable, and gentle in public, and most of us have quietly absorbed the idea that a compassionate person is one who never gets angry, never bristles, and always says the kind thing. In a short November 2026 video, the teacher Susan Piver takes that assumption apart. Drawing on the two forms of compassion found in Buddhist teaching, relative and absolute, she argues that real compassion starts with letting ourselves feel what we feel, including the anger, sorrow, and frustration we would rather hide. From there, the softening we practice toward our own experience can widen into something far larger than personal niceness: a commitment to the wellbeing of every being. Her touchstone is Shantideva, the eighth-century Indian scholar whose writing on the bodhisattva path remains one of the most influential texts on compassion in the Mahayana tradition.
The video opens with a confession rather than a doctrine. Piver describes a recent encounter that showed her how quickly her own heart can close. It is a familiar experience even when the details differ. Something lands wrong, a familiar irritation flares, and within seconds the body has hardened, the voice has tightened, and the mind has assembled a case against the other person. The description of the video frames this moment as the reason she returned to Shantideva, whose prayer helped her open the heart again. That turn, from the closing to the reopening, is where the teaching lives. It is also where most people get stuck, because we tend to believe the closing is a moral failure to be corrected, when Buddhist teaching treats it as information about where practice should begin.
Relative compassion is the form most of us know first. It is compassion as it operates in ordinary life, within the conventional world of self and other, pain and relief. Piver's framing starts here deliberately. Relative compassion, as she describes it, begins with letting ourselves feel what we feel. That includes anger, sorrow, and frustration, the emotions most spiritual self-improvement culture would have us bypass with a quick affirmation.
The logic is practical. You cannot soften toward a feeling you refuse to admit you are having. When anger is treated as a shameful intruder, it does not disappear; it goes underground and leaks out as judgment, coldness, or a brittle kind of politeness that fools no one, including the person practicing it. When we instead turn toward the anger with some tenderness, asking what it is protecting and how it feels in the body, the emotion loosens its grip. Piver's central claim is that this softening is not a private hobby. When we genuinely soften toward our own experience, we genuinely soften toward others. The capacity is the same capacity, pointed in two directions.
This is why compassion for others begins with compassion for ourselves, a highlight she names directly in the video's summary. The point is not self-indulgence. A heart that has never made room for its own sorrow has little room left for anyone else's. Relative compassion is the training ground: the place where we learn, one irritation at a time, that we can feel something uncomfortable without being swallowed by it and without turning it into an attack on someone else.
If relative compassion is the working form, absolute compassion is the form that does not depend on who deserves it. The description of the video says the softening practiced in relative terms can "expand and expand into the territory of absolute compassion." That word, expand, carries the weight of the idea. Relative compassion is still bounded by a sense of me and you: I feel for you, you are the one who suffers, I am the one who helps. Absolute compassion, in the framing Piver points toward, is an open-ended warmth that is not contingent on the other person being pleasant, grateful, or even aware of our care.
This distinction matters because it reframes what success looks like. Many people quietly measure their compassion by its results: whether the other person calmed down, thanked us, changed. An open heart does not need those returns to stay open. It can keep wishing well toward someone who has just irritated us, and it can do so without pretending the irritation never happened. In that sense absolute compassion is less a feeling than a direction, a steady turning outward toward the suffering of all beings rather than only the beings we find easy to love.
It is worth being precise here. Piver's description presents relative and absolute compassion as two stages of one continuum rather than two separate practices, and it is that continuity that makes the teaching usable. You do not have to become a saint to begin. You begin by noticing how you are actually feeling, and the widening is something that happens over time through repeated practice.
Shantideva lived in India around the eighth century and is traditionally associated with the monastic university of Nalanda. His major work, the Bodhicharyavatara, usually rendered in English as the Way of the Bodhisattva, is a poem that lays out how a practitioner can cultivate bodhicitta, the awakened intention to work for the benefit of all beings. It is a text that moves between lofty aspiration and very close attention to the mind's habits, which is precisely why teachers keep returning to it when they want to explain compassion without sentimentality.
In this video Piver turns to his Bodhisattva Prayer for All Humanity, which she describes as the thing that helped her reopen her heart after the closing she recounts. The video's own summary identifies the prayer as connected to the bodhisattva vow: the commitment to work for the liberation of all beings. A vow of that scale can sound abstract, even grandiose, to someone who is simply trying to get through a difficult afternoon. But prayers of this kind work by doing something small and specific. They name the wider field of suffering and place our individual reactivity inside it, so that a personal grievance is no longer the whole world.
That is a useful way to read the bodhisattva vow in everyday life. The vow does not ask us to feel an impossible love for everyone at once. It asks us to remember that the person who irritated us is also a being who suffers, who is also trying to be happy, and who is also caught in the same loop of wanting and fearing that we are caught in. Remembering that is not the same as excusing harm. It is the recognition that a closed heart narrows our own life, and that opening it is a gift to ourselves before it is anything else.
The last highlight in Piver's summary is the one that most directly challenges popular ideas: why an open heart matters more than being a nice person. The distinction is easy to misread. Niceness is not the enemy of compassion, and nobody is served by cruelty dressed up as honesty. But niceness, when it is a performance, can become one of the strongest forms of closing. A nice person who cannot admit anger, who smooths over every rough edge, and who keeps a tidy distance from genuine feeling has often simply built a more polite wall.
An open heart is messier and more honest. It can be furious and still wish the other person well. It can be disappointed and still stay in the room. It can say a hard thing without contempt because it has not hidden from its own hardness first. This is the quality the relative and absolute forms of compassion share. Both require that we stop pretending our hearts are always soft and instead work with the real weather of our minds.
There is also a reason this matters beyond personal comfort. Anger and sorrow are not failures of compassion; they are often its first signals. The anger we feel when we see someone treated unfairly is information about what we value. The sorrow we feel when a relationship falters is information about how much we care. Compassion that cannot tolerate these signals tends to become either denial or a kind of exhausted martyrdom. Compassion that can receive them, feel them fully, and then widen toward others has room to act wisely.
Piver's video is a talk rather than a step-by-step instruction set, so what follows is a reading of how her framework might be applied, not a summary of specific guidance she gives. Start with the closing itself. When you notice your heart tightening, name it plainly, whether as anger, hurt, or fear, without elaborating the story. Then, rather than trying to argue yourself out of the feeling, give it a moment of attention. Notice where it sits in the body. Let it be as large as it is.
From that small softening, you can try widening the frame. Ask whether the person in front of you is also caught in their own suffering, and let that possibility sit alongside your irritation rather than replacing it. If a line from a prayer or teaching comes to mind, such as Shantideva's vow to work for all beings, let it open the view rather than serve as a slogan to recite. The aim is not to feel warm on command. The aim is to stop letting a single reaction define the whole relationship and the whole of your intention.
Over time, this practice tends to change what counts as compassion in your own life. It becomes less about being agreeable and more about being present, honest, and willing to remain open even when that is uncomfortable. That is the distinction Piver draws, and it is the reason her video is worth returning to.
To hear Piver's reasoning in her own words, watch the full video, "True Compassion: Beyond Being a Nice Person," on her channel. Her description also points to her new book, Inexplicable Magic: Meditation for Mystics, which she presents as an exploration of the spiritual path through seven principles that run counter to conventional wisdom about mindfulness. It is available in print and audio through her publisher's page at https://openheartproject.com/inexplicable-magic-meditation-for-mystics/. For the original source of the bodhisattva ideas discussed here, Shantideva's Bodhicharyavatara is widely available in translation and rewards slow, repeated reading. Start with a single verse, sit with it for a week, and notice what happens the next time your own heart begins to close.
