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In the last episode the topic was domestic violence and the term forgiveness was mentioned when talking about what comes after such an incident. Because we could not go into detail what notion forgiveness has in Buddhism we decided to dedicate a whole session to explore it. In this episode we try to dig deeper and ask why forgiveness is so difficult to achieve and how to practice it. We associate forgiveness with something we do for others but as we will discover it is an entirely internal process that one should complete for ones own sake.

In this episode we will talk about a very sensitive topic which is revolving around domestic violence. As a disclaimer upfront we want to express a trigger warning for parts of this episode because you will hear personal sharings of experiences concerning domestic violence which might bring up negative emotions. Our special guest that we have invited for this session was Bhante Sukhacitto, who is a german monk that has been fully ordained since 1990 in the Theravada tradition.

In this episode we have invited Anny, who is a co-founder of “The Mindful Movement”, which is a spiritual movement that offers workshops and retreats. Topics that she wants to push forward are especially social entrepreneurship, sustainable development and of course mindfulness. We will talk about her insights that she has accumulated from her work in modern spirituality and how she sees that buddhism relates and how both together can make spirituality more accessible to the modern world.

We will take a look at modern spirituality especially a movement called "New Age spirituality". Instead of monks and nuns being interviewed we have changed the roles and gave the them the opporutnity to learn more about our stances on modern spirituality. We have asked ourselves if those ancient traditions are outdated and whether they can learn something from this newfound interest in modern spiritual practices.

Compassion which is the capacity for empathy and especially the ability to feel the suffering firstly, of other sentient beings is one of the most important aspects of Buddhism. Especially, we are going to investigate questions such as "how we can be compassionate with others when they are not compassionate with us" and if we suffer when we solely act out of compassion.