Reddit mentions of The Compassionate Life: Walking the Path of Kindness

This.

If you aren't being facetious... start with these books:

• The Compassionate Life, by Marc Ian Barasch
  
  
• Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi.
  
  
• Anger, by Thich Nhat Hanh.
  
  These are all easy books to blow off. You can dismiss The Compassionate Life as a guidebook for letting other people take advantage of you. You can dismiss Never Eat Alone as the egotistical scrambling of a sleazy salesman. You can dismiss Anger as a hand-wavey tome of feel good nonsense. If you're tempted to do so, I urge you to suspend your judgment and pour yourself into them. Here's why:
  
  From Anger, I learned not to let my fear of feeling and sharing emotions prevent me from opening myself up to other people. The book is about anger, but it applies to everything: jealousy, fear, anxiety, confusion, even joy. It taught me to treat my negative feelings as a part of myself that deserved compassion and nurturing just like anything or anyone else I care about.
  
  From Never Eat Alone, I learned the value of trust and openness. The point of "networking" isn't to collect business cards and shine your teeth at people; it's to establish an extended family of people who you genuinely care about, and thus, through inevitable cause and effect, who genuinely care about you. You don't have to be married to someone or see them every day to love and care about them. You just have to treat them like a human being, and not hide the truth of your human-ness out of fear of being judged.
  
  Finally, from The Compassionate Life, I learned that I'm not the only one walking this path. It gave me the determination to continue walking, even in the face of judgment, ridicule, and skepticism from many people around me. It solidified my hunch that, in the right hands, compassion is a great strength, and not a weakness. It helped me learn to forgive myself and others, even for what felt like irrecoverable wounds or betrayals. More than that, it helped me learn from those wounds, and it helped me learn from the forgiveness. It gave me strength.
  
  That's all I've got for the moment!