Ok, the feeling... You don't need a feeling. Can you be sincere in your understanding and your attitude towards people? This practice does balance the emotional feeling of compassion. Sometimes it will come, sometimes it doesn't, but "a feeling" doesn't have to be there at all. The newspaper article we put up yesterday on the board - the man coming home, the wife and kids are dead. For a lot of people when they see that it is "uuhh, that hurts. That would be hard, that is heavy." Then there is an emotional feeling. As the maturity of our Compassion and Lovingkindness develops, we see that same article and we understand, that is heavy Dukkha, and we immediately bring in a wish, "I hope that guy learns some way to get out of it, I wish that didn't happen". We don't have to have a big emotional feeling.
This is a little example I like to give about where we are going in the practice, imagine you are sitting outside in front of the big building and you are looking across the valley there, the road of course is in front of you and you happen to notice a little 10 year old kid. The kid comes riding on their bicycle along the path there and they zoom by and they go back and forth and you can see they are having a lot of fun, You are sitting there, watching. Then all of a sudden they fall off their bike and they scrape their knee and they start crying. You see them and you are the only person around and you see them crying - would you cry? Would you laugh? What would you do?
Hopefully most, if not all of you, would go over and try to help the kid. You would not have any great emotional feeling, but you would have compassion for the kid, understanding their pain. You would have lovingkindness for them wishing to help them and you would actually understand the way out of that particular pain. It happened to you when you were a kid, I am sure, if not then I guess you never rode a bike. You ride a bike, you fall over, you cut a knee, whatever.
So you understand the situation, and you "feel with" it. You go over and want to help, that is very strong. It is a very strong mind, it is a very strong heart, a caring and really open mind, ready to go immediately to help. There doesn't have to be any big emotion with it, any big feeling.
Now if you find that the emotional feeling of compassion has reduced to a more balanced equanimity, that is ok. Yet we don't want it to go cold; we don't want it to go into indifference where you just don't care any more. If your compassion is starting to move that way, then you are doing something wrong and you have to bring it back. But otherwise to temper the emotion and that type of emotional feeling is quite ok, it will work.