After sitting and walking meditation, we watched part of a video with Tara Brach titled "What's It Like To Be You?". In it, she explores compassion, what blocks us from offering it, and what we can do to cultivate it:

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    Empathy is the ability to feel what other people feel… compassion includes empathy, and it also has the quality of caring and concern that wants to help. Compassion means “to suffer together,” but it is really defined by a quivering of the heart that wants to help. 
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Brach offers some common blocks:

• Flight response - Pain of feeling the suffering of others, pulling away, dissociate, not feeling with.
• Identified - Feeling with but caught or stuck in the pain.
• Fight (judgement, anger) - Happens in couples, sharing leads to blame v. blame instead of opening to suffering.
• Default network - Mind wandering, distraction, unable to stay with or keep focus.
• Self-absorption - What about me? Caught up in our own story.

She goes on to observe that mindfulness provides the space that turns empathy into compassion. One practice for bringing mindfulness into play is RAIN: Recognize-Accept-Investigate-Nurture.