In my Buddha book and at Buddha class there is a meditation approach to cultivating love for the whole world and developing a real bodhicitta (wish to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all living beings), wherein you think to yourself how much you want to remove the full range of suffering of everyone you love, and then eventually extend this wish to the whole world. Once this is sincere and you really get it then you are starting to get somewhere.
This is a helpful way of viewing the world for me sometimes. Like if there's a pushy person at the bank or something who might make me roll my eyes and think what a jerk they are - instead, I can think to myself that I wish for their suffering to end, for their feeling of impatience, their feeling that they have to be aggressive on their own behalf, for any feeling making their trip to the bank so negative to go away so they could be happier. I think it's a fair assumption that a host of unpleasant mental functions are contributing to people's behavior, since this is my personal experience too. I can cultivate a little compassion for people by referencing my own craziness, like when I want the line to move faster and someone decides to write a check, I might feel impatience swell up in me (not that much though because I am an exact-change-counter-outer in lines which takes a bit long sometimes so I am happy to hang for check-writers). For some people that impatience just rolls right out of their mouths or makes them push and shove or whatever. I can genuinely wish for their suffering to end the same way I wish all my trips into the world could be free from suffering.
Okay so there's the good side of this way of thinking. But there's a dark side. I am really challenged by my feelings of dislike for someone that I have to maintain a pleasant relationship with, and calling upon my "may your suffering end" technique has taken a dark turn. It feels like pity in my mind. I'd like my thought to be something like "I see a grain of my own suffering in your experience, and through us the suffering of the world, and I wish for your and the world's suffering to end, forever, amen." What it comes out as is more like "I wish for your suffering to end, because you are so freakin' insufferable and so unlikable that I feel bad for you, and I also feel kind of bad for me that I have to be around you, and if your suffering ends then maybe it would be less painful for me to be around you, amen." So that's the bad side of this way of thinking.
I'm just noticing how my own ego can corrupt a gesture of love and compassion into a way to feel superior to people - especially people I don't like, because believing they are lesser than I am by pitying them makes their unlikeability more palatable, and less threatening, or whatever. It's pretty impressive actually, the ego's cleverness. I don't even know if I'm using "ego" in the correct "Ego" way but I think that's what I'm driving at, etc. Anyway I'll have to spend a little mental energy on purifying this technique again for myself and not conflating it with pity and dislike and superiority.
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