(Part One) How I became involved in developing, studying, and teaching people about compassion

Without Compassion We Cannot Survive

I grew up at the feet of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, whose teachings have always inspired me. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in the Tibetan Buddhist world, is seen as the embodiment of the Buddha of Compassion and his teachings are focused so much on the need for compassion. The Dalai Lama says compassion is a necessity, not a luxury. Without compassion we cannot survive, humanity cannot survive. The Buddha himself actually said that if you had one virtue, one quality in your hand, all the other qualities would be present. What is that quality, what is that virtue? He said that it is compassion.

A pandemic like we are going through right now just highlights the importance of compassion. It’s how we will survive, how we will come through this real kind of crisis and what keeps societies together, what keeps groups together. Cooperation and trust. It’s that sense of connection that is so crucial for us to flourish.

Web Of “Interconnectedness”

The pandemic and its alleged origins in the animal kingdom highlight our interconnection and interdependence. If you think about all life, we are completely interconnected with other lifeforms and whole systems around us. Our individual actions impact others and others’ actions impact us. This goes on not just between humans, our actions impact other life forms and other life forms impact us. So, in this kind of web of “interconnectedness,” how we treat each other has certain real consequences for ourselves and for the larger society.

This pandemic is teaching us a lot. We are very vulnerable, we are not superhumans completely immune to illness and the impact of others. The pandemic is not any one individual’s fault. I think that we as individuals have needs. We need to eat and then in some areas of the world people eat what is available. Certain circumstances drew them to depend on a certain kind of diet, a certain kind of food. This is not an individual choosing because of who he or she is. Anyone of us, in a certain kind of environment and at a certain place and time, could have started this. So, it’s no one’s fault.

I think that it shows how we as individuals are vulnerable. We have needs and we depend on certain resources and so forth. Our bodies are not made or built to only take in that which will make us flourish and repel or push away that which won’t. Our immune system is a wonderful system to protect us but it’s not unlimited.

We often fail to recognize our vulnerabilities and the changes that will take place from childhood to adulthood to old age. But we will have to leave this beautiful planet at some point. I think that this can give us a sense of how precious the life is that we have now. It also gives us a sense that other people, other individuals are not going to be here forever either, our loved ones and others. It’s wonderful that we have them in our lives, we can begin to cherish them. By cherishing them we will also begin to see their needs here and what is important for them. They will become more important to us. There is also something interesting about the suffering inherent in life, that as we encounter it, if we accept it as part of our normal reality, then we also see that it is through our own suffering that we are able to empathize with others and have compassion for them as well.

Recognizing Our Vulnerabilities

Suffering is often a catalyst for compassion. In the case of CBCT® (Cognitively-Based Compassion Training), it grew out of the suffering that the Emory University was going through back in 2003. I was teaching a course in Buddhist psychology, and we reviewed various meditation models. One of the students, Molly Harrington, was very committed to raising mental health awareness on campus, to removing the stigma surrounding mental health, because there were students who unfortunately had committed suicide. Molly had a deep kind of concern for the well-being of the students and the Emory community at large. She felt that some of these meditations that we were reviewing would be really helpful for the community. She encouraged me to create something around these issues. I was friends with Emory psychiatrist Dr. Charles Raison and we had been discussing meditation research and so that’s what led to the creation of CBCT® (Cognitively-Based Compassion Training).

His Holiness the Dalai Lama often talks about how important it is for him to practice analytical meditation. Analytical, not in the sense of just thinking wildly, but just making sense of things, making them visible. There are a lot of things that are not clear to us, not visible to us. For instance, the moons around Jupiter were not visible to our naked eyes before the telescope was invented. Microorganisms were not visible to us before the microscope. Then to see things like this for the first time, these two revolutionary discoveries!

So, when it comes to the compassion part, I think that making visible our human condition is what is at the heart of compassion, that we are human beings. Not superhumans or some kind of machine, but human beings with real needs and feelings and emotions. So, making visible our human condition helps us then to see others also as humans, to see if we can recognize the human condition in others. In compassion training, the first step is to recall some kind of personal experience when we received compassion or extended compassion and what it felt like and from there to see how crucial it is for our well-being. There is something innate that also kind of primes us for security as we attune to something that is associated with a sense of caring, comfort, safety, and security. This safety can even be artificially induced by subliminally exposing people to words like “love” and “care” so that people feel safer and more open and more outgoing and more pro-social and more compassionate.

But at the real heart of the compassion training is really understanding our emotions, what His Holiness the Dalai Lama calls needing to develop “emotional hygiene,” another beautiful metaphor for today. We mentioned maintaining personal hygiene and social distancing to protect ourselves and others during the Covid-19 pandemic. But emotional hygiene, along with external hygiene, is so important for the emotions.

The Heart Of Compassion

That comes with emotional intelligence, which is being aware of our own emotions, how they feel when we experience them, finding ways to regulate and manage them. Being aware what it feels like when we are stressed, when we are struggling with really uncomfortable feelings of anger, hatred, fear and anxiety. There are many ways to approach afflictive emotions, but at least we can develop this kind of choice about how to disengage from them. We can bring our attention to something that is comforting, something meaningful or neutral even, to let our brain and our nervous system calm down, to calm the body. Then we begin to see that this sense of connection develops, that the people we know, our neighbors, our coworkers, and people in our community, they don’t remain just faceless “somebody else’s” or “The Other” but rather one of us.