To me, compassion is the awareness that we all suffer and wanting to help those one feels empathy toward :-)

Empathy is understanding, being aware of, and being sensitive to the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another at a particular point in time because one recognizes similar/common feelings, thoughts or experience in one's self.

So, I might feel compassion for children starving in Africa but probably only empathy when I see the skinny teenage boy down the block who never seems to get enough to eat living with his single mom on welfare. I grew up with 3 brothers and have 3 stepsons and know how hungry teenage boys get and how expensive they can be to feed :-)

An act of compassion could be sending money to an aid organization who will help the kids in Africa or finding odd jobs the kid down the street can do that take awhile so I can feed him a couple sandwiches and homemade cookies for lunch as well as pay him a few bucks :-)

For me, the empathy is more immediate than the compassion but the compassion's desire to help informs the empathy.

The empathy I feel for a friend (like the skinny kid or his mother) makes sure I don't embarrass or insult them when offering compassion. I think of a job the boy can do rather than hurting his or his mother's pride by offering food or money straight out to his mother, implying his mother isn't a good mother because she can't afford to feed the boy all he would like to eat. I think one of the reasons Free Cycle seems to work is because everyone gets to feel good and share what they have.

In therapy, hopefully a therapist listens with empathy. You cannot buy good listening. One pays for a therapist's time but, as we all know, there are "good" therapists and there are hacks selling their time :-) It is quality of the skills, the personhood of the therapist, their being "there" with you in your pain and struggle, that is being offered as an act of compassion. They too have usually been in therapy and know what it is like to be where we sit in the client's chair. Hard work and respectful attendance is what we offer the therapist in return. We share with them our struggle and allow them beside us as we work our way forward. Again, as we all know, the people we allow "inside" is very small and it is a wonderful gift we give when we share ourselves with our therapists in the act of therapy.