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The Science and Practice of Compassion

Part Three

 

 

Probably across the spectrum of all human possibilities there’s some capacity for compassion. Does that mean that everyone should give their time, attention and energy towards compassion beyond the compassion they feel for their own children, for their own community? I think the answer is no. I think that this process we’re talking about now, of broadening compassion, is for people who feel called to it. The last thing you would ever want to do is inflict compassion cultivation on people. There can be very unintended consequences telling people that they need to be more compassionate. This is something one chooses. Going beyond the natural limits of compassion and really challenging your own limits is a very courageous thing. It’s for people who want that experience and want to contribute it to the world. It always has to come from a place of willingness. I’m not really a compassion evangelist. I’m glad you guys are here but you are also free to leave, we did not lock the doors.

We’re going to do a meditation to allow this process to unfold. Other things might arise like distress, guilt, or anxiety. We did the process of trying to hold opposites and we’ve done the practice of trying to find the qualities of warmth and spaciousness in your own bodies and attention. So, you’re going to bring those ideas into this practice. If you find that when you think of a loved one suffering you start to feel a little panicky, or you’re feeling a lot of things come up, it’s a really good time to come back to those qualities of groundedness. Physically you can stop thinking about any particular story and just sense your feet. You can come back to just sensing your breath. You have flexibility over your attention so that’s something to bring into this practice and other practices. While you’re bringing that in I’ll talk to you about different aspects of this unfolding process of compassion and ask you to turn your attention to things like a feeling of care and connection, a desire to relieve suffering, and we’ll do it in a way that might allow you to actually touch this version of responding to suffering even if empathic distress comes up again.

So, we’re going to take an intentional seat for practice. Finding that quality of stability in your own body. As in many meditations, it can be helpful to choose stillness of the body but it’s not like putting on a suit of armor. You can move as needed but at the same time have the intention to be physically still.

Let’s bring in the quality of the sun by connecting to your own natural intention and warmth. Bring back to mind that intention; the why, why you’re choosing to cultivate compassion.

Bring in the quality of the sky by sensing the breath. Sensing the wind that moves in and through you. Sensing room and space.

Now I invite you to bring to mind a friend or loved one, human or otherwise. Imagine yourself in their presence. I invite you to especially notice any sensations or thoughts of care, of love, of friendship or gratitude. With any thoughts or feelings of this warmth and connection in mind I invite you to allow yourself to really connect to them through words and through actions in your own mind. If there is a gesture or a touch that you could imagine offering your friend or loved one that would express your feelings of friendship or care, or gratitude in your own mind I invite you to imagine what that would look like embodied. You can imagine yourself actually offering that touch or gesture. Now I invite you to see if there are words you would use to express your own feeling of love, of friendship, and to imagine saying those phrases, or those words, to your friend or loved one.

Now bring your attention to the area around your chest, heart and lungs. Begin to sense the movement of the breath around the heart and lungs where there’s actually movement of the breath happening right now. That expansion as you breathe in. That expansion dissolving as you breathe out. Imagine that you could inhale and exhale directly from this part of your body as if you have moved your nostrils to your chest. What would that feel like?

 Finally, I invite you to imagine your breath as an offering to your friend or loved one. Imagine that as you breathe out from the chest, from the heart and lungs, imagine that your breath could carry your thoughts and feelings, your words of love and friendship. You can imagine the breath carrying those thoughts and feelings to your loved one and bringing him or her a sense of support and happiness.

Now bring your awareness back to your breath and body. We’re at the halfway point in this meditation. If you’re feeling sleepy this might be a time to mindfully open the eyes and reset the body. If you’re feeling any discomfort in your body now might that be the time to mindfully adjust so that you feel willingness to reengage with part two.

I invite you to bring to mind now a time when your friend or loved one was suffering in some way. It could be a cold or the flu. It could be some small stress, or some bigger form of suffering. Remember or imagine a time when your friend or loved one was in some form of pain, or stress or suffering. Notice how this feels. I invite you to turn your attention to any compassionate responses that are present right now or that you would like to invite in. Notice how it feels to be aware of your friend or loved ones suffering. Is part of what you feel a concern, or love, or care? Is there a desire to relieve that suffering, if possible, or to offer encouragement and support in whatever way is possible? I invite you to imagine in your own mind if there’s a way that you would approach your friend or loved one with words and with actions. If there is a gesture or a touch you could imagine offering, what would that be like? Are there words that you might say?

 Here are some words you might try out in your own mind, imagine saying them to your friend or loved one: (said slowly with a short pause in between) May you be free of the suffering. May you know that you are loved. May you know your own strength. May you know peace.

Turn your attention to the breath again. Bring awareness to the expansion of the area around your chest and lungs. Once again imagine your breath as an offering from the heart that might reach your loved one or friend. Imagine that all of your thoughts or feelings of compassion could reach your friend or loved one in a way that provides peace or strength.

Now bring your awareness back to your own body and breath in this moment. Drop any story or visualization. Sense your body and breath in this moment. Bring a kind of compassionate awareness to whatever is present right now, whatever thoughts, feelings or sensations are present. Begin to open your awareness to the space around you, taking a moment to touch the space around you, you can move your fingers, you can let your gaze touch the space around you, turn your attention and move or stretch in any way that is needed as well. We are going to take a minute of silence to literally allow the body to come back into this space.

One of the things I haven’t mentioned yet, sort of a general policy in my classes, is this idea of conscious contribution. Now that we’ve been together a little while and some folks have shared in a big group and some folks have not, by either asking questions or making personal observations. I want you to check in with yourself and whether you’re someone who has shared already and asked a question or whether you’re someone who hasn’t. We especially invite the people who haven’t, to think about whether there’s something you want to share, you’re willing to share, or need to share.

With that in mind any observations about that meditation practice? Either as a stand-alone or compared to the first little mini exercise we did we did where you just thought about a loved one suffering without the rest of the framework. What stands out to you?

At this point in the workshop the microphones were not used. Kelly responds in a way that summarizes the question in her answers.

Kelly: Yes, it was easier. Good! Great. Thank you. Your experience was that there was real warmth there and it wasn’t as frightening. Thank you.

Kelly: You had the experience of being calm and settled even in the awareness of suffering. Thank you.

Kelly: Others, yes. Thank you. This is the observation that the person that you chose for this meditation is dealing with really serious stuff, a lot of stuff and that you’ve had this experience of not wanting to engage. This was a practice that actually allowed you to have the experience, the willingness to engage, thank you.

Kelly: Yes, thank you for expressing that. This is the observation that this one was much more difficult and the word you used first was emotional. Do you want to say anything else about that? There’s a lot of sadness. Is that okay? So, this is something that often happens when we start to open our hearts in this way, that the more space we create, the more compassionate space that we create, the more stuff shows up and then sometimes we have to find our own comfort with how much room we want to make and to keep ourselves as part of that compassionate response, right? When were in this process of broadening compassion we will come to places where we need to shift into self-compassion as well and really have a sense of how difficult this is and how much were opening ourselves to. Thank you.

Kelly: Yes. This is the observation that you started to cough even though you don’t have a cough or cold, you had this physical response and maybe that’s connected to what you’re feeling and what you’re bringing attention to. The great thing about all this information from the body is that we don’t really need to think about it. We just invite this into our awareness. This is interesting that the body is having this response and to not fight it or feel like it’s something we need to then block out of our experience.

Kelly: Let me repeat that for everyone. She had a difficult time staying with one person. You wanted to bring in all sorts of people, children and adults, right? Oh, isn’t that interesting. Okay, the mind wanted to include lots of people and there was a sense of helplessness. I’m going to repeat again the whole container because I actually think they’re very interestingly linked. So, there was this desire for the mind to include a whole lot of people and a whole lot of suffering and often what comes up, particularly with adults, is the sense that I want to help but there’s nothing that I can do to help. Psychologists call that compassion collapse. Where there’s a sense of awareness of suffering and because we don’t know what we can actually do to fix the problem, maybe we can’t fix it, maybe there’s nothing to do, that we start to shut down or feel overwhelmed. There’s kind of a collapse of this version of compassion because the brain thinks that we need to be able to fix or solve and in the absence of knowing what to do it feels like there’s nothing to do. What’s required is the ability to sustain just the compassionate awareness and presence. My encouragement would be to really hone the quality of attention that allows you to stay with one person, one suffering, even if whoever it was that came to mind when you bring them into the meditation, if you’re like well there’s nothing that I can do, or that suffering is huge, or I don’t know how to handle that. I think there’s something very helpful about training the quality of attention that can go narrow that also supports our ability to go quite broad.

Being mindful of our time I want to tell you about a particular study that may encourage for those of you who don’t have a compassion meditation practice. It may encourage you to stay with the practice that we just did which, of course, is not something that you need to hear someone else talk you through. These practices actually work better, in my opinion, when you do them yourself. Once you kind of know what you’re doing you just bring in the suffering and bring it on.

So, this is a study that was recently published. These are researches at the Max Planck Institute in Germany who decided to look at what compassion looks like in the brain among people who are experts at compassion meditation. I don’t know if they are actual experts in compassion, but they sure are used to practicing it. See what happens in the brain when these expert meditators feel like they are really confident that what they’ve experienced, what they’ve touched is compassion. See what happens in the brain and then take, in this case it was women, I don’t think this is because it doesn’t work for men. It just happened that in this case we’re looking at women who have never meditated before, young adults age 18 to 35. Some of them were randomly assigned to do a compassion training that I’ll tell you about in a second, a compassion meditation training. Others were randomly assigned to a different training where they were focusing on memory, working memory and focus. A different kind of cognitive training. They decided to look to see if you could see changes in the new meditators brains that reflect what they observed in experienced meditators, the compassion experts.

So, here’s what the training was: I feel like this should be very inspirational. Sci-inspirational. It was a one-day workshop and then and average of 5.7 hours of home practice over a follow-up; people taking the meditation that they learned and doing it at home. Not a huge commitment. Here’s what people were doing while their brains were being observed. This is a timescale. If you can see these slides. I’ll explain it if you can see it. These are screens, if you were a participant in the study this screen would be in front of your face while you are lying down in a brain scanner. The scientists were able to see changes in activity in your brain while you see things that show up on the slide screen in front of you. You’re going to be given instructions and then you’re given things to rate. So, we’ll see a slide that says observe so you’re going to be observing somebody talking about something and then a video comes up and it’s somebody talking about either something that’s kind of no big deal, like having to move your car because the cops were going to tow it. It was like annoying but it’s not a big deal. Whose car was that? You’re still here, right? You’re over that, right? Then other people talking about really emotional things more like what we could think of as being deep suffering. There’s going to be a range from the non-emotional to the pretty emotional stuff and then the participant rates how much empathy they felt for that person. As in you feel like you understood what they’re going through.

Negative affect, that’s the distress, how much did it make you feel anxious? You feel angry? You feel sad? The positive effect is how much happiness was present, connection, good feelings while you’re listening to someone talk about their suffering. Then the whole thing starts over again.

These are the results. We’re looking at people who are in the control group. These are folks who learned how to strengthen their focus and their memory and I’m just going to get rid of them right away because they are not interesting.

You’ll notice that every blue line is flat, no changes. We don’t care anymore about them and this had nothing to do with their experience of compassion.

The redlines are the people who did the compassion training, the one- day workshop, so those are lines that I’m interested in and over here we are looking at positive emotions, negative emotions and empathy and we have two different red lines. This is the line showing how much positive emotion people felt when someone was telling the story of real suffering. It’s like the actual emotional stuff. And then this was positive emotion when it was not big deal stuff like moving your car. You’ll notice that there was a significant increase in positive emotion in both of those circumstances from before to after. So, you do this one-day workshop in lovingkindness compassion meditation and now you hear people talk about their day or their suffering and you actually are feeling more positive emotion as part of your experience of being aware of their experiences and their suffering. Now these red lines look a lot like the blue lines. So, this is negative emotion. No change. Not as much negative emotion when people are talking about not highly emotional things in a fair amount of negative emotion when people when people are talking about serious stuff. No change from the compassion meditation.

 I think is really important because this is my experience teaching compassion meditation. We don’t make the distress go away. We make space for that sense of care and connection and the desire to help that you could frame as positive emotion. We make room for it and that increases and gives us a more complex response to suffering that actually allows us to be willing to stay with that suffering.

Empathy, there was no real change for empathy for serious problems but very interesting. The biggest change of all was an increase in empathy for not really big deal stuff. I also think that’s really important. Because sometimes I think we’re in a little bit of denial about other people’s stress and suffering or not that interested. The idea that people could be talking about almost anything going on in their lives and you would feel a sense of empathy for them, that’s also a side benefit to working with suffering. Not only do we strengthen our container for dealing with suffering, but other people become more intrinsically interesting and it’s easier to see common humanity even when suffering is not the context. It doesn’t have to be big suffering. There’s something about this process that brought in positive emotion to awareness of suffering and increased empathy, particularly for the low stakes issues. So, I guess now after having told you guys about that, basically that’s the meditation that they were doing.

So, we did the meditation that they were doing. We did the same meditation that they were doing in the study and you had a taste of what that might be like to bring in the positive without having to push away things like fear or sadness and that really is the process of this practice.

And then the brain images which we don’t have a lot of time for. Basically, the key difference between distress and compassion was the approach motivation system. I’m not going to break down where this actually is in the brain but it’s in every single area that you see circled here. That’s part of the approach motivation system.

 That is the area of the brain that really changed in response to meditation training not whether the brain activated the stress regions is still happening, it’s the reward system, the desire to approach that was the thing that changed.

Again, this is my encouragement to you if you want to take a practice home with you today this is a good practice to take home.

The idea of bringing to mind a loved one, establishing that sense of connection and care, bringing in awareness of suffering, and choosing to focus on the different aspects of compassion, the care, the willingness to be with the sense of connection and a desire to relieve that suffering and the out breath is the way to do that.

Okay Robert, I think you were right about whether we were going to get through all this stuff. I think having heard what you guys are here for I think we’re going to skip the vegetables. Do you want to hear about vegetables? We may be able to come back to this. I know a lot of you are here for self-compassion. So, let’s explore that first and then if we have time we might come back to the question of vegetables and common humanity.

I want to actually do a show of hands. Raise your hand if for you it is sometimes or often more difficult to feel compassion for your own stress, or difficulties, or failures or pain than it is for others. Keep your hands up. This is a very important exercise because this does not happen by accident. Right? This is not a coincidence. Turn around and look. Even the folks in the back who you guys can’t see, they’ve all put their hands up, so put your hands down. This seems to be way more common than often people believe if we don’t have a conversation about it. This is true across the entire age span. This seems to be true. It shows up pretty early, the self-criticism or having greater ease responding to other people’s pain and suffering than our own, all the way through the life span as people experience caregiving situations. And often I think people think that they’re alone in it because there’s a voice in the back of head that says well but my suffering isn’t as bad as or I really do need to fix what’s wrong with me before I can then accept everything about me. There’s such a stickiness to the sense that our own stress and suffering is somehow different than the stress or suffering of others.

So, I wanted to go back to our definition of compassion and really think about this. Why self-compassion can be so challenging.

First of all, there’s the recognition of suffering that should lead to a feeling of concern for and connection to the one who suffers.

What are some of the things that get in the way of recognizing our own suffering? You can just call out a word or phrase.

Denial. Why might we be in denial about our own stress or suffering? You feel it diminishes it that if you don’t pay attention to it. That it will be as big or as real. That there’s a sense that you may have that if we choose not to pay attention to it that we can escape it in some way.

Shame. Yes, were going to talk more about that.

Vulnerability. When we start to bring attention to our own pain and stress there often is a feeling of vulnerability that comes up and that itself may be a new form of what feels like suffering that we want to escape so that can lead us to downplay that we even are experiencing pain or stress.

Kelly: was there anyone else? Maybe other people don’t want to hear about it or it would in some way suggest that I am more important than other people if I’m focusing, and you understand that.

Kelly: that you deserve to suffer. Good, I’m glad we made room for that. There could be a deep-seated belief that you deserve to suffer and therefore you don’t see it in the same way that you see the suffering of others. It doesn’t have that purity of just pain that you’re dealing with something difficult. It becomes clouded and then we experience something like shame.

The second challenge is a feeling of connection and concern for the one who suffers. I mentioned that from a scientific perspective, not necessarily a Buddhist perspective or philosophical perspective, from the science perspective it seems pretty clear that compassion unfolds when you have a sense of seeing yourself in the one who suffers but it is not the self who is suffering. There is something about a boundary. That you are in relationship to the one who is suffering that makes it much easier for compassion to unfold. If you flip that and suddenly you are the one suffering, that quality of relationship gets taken out. It’s something about the quality of relationship, that I see you and I see your suffering, that quality of witnessing and being in relationship to, that makes it easier for compassion to transpire instead of something like shame, or anger, or self-pity or grief.

So, we’re going to do a practice specifically for this. To help us find the relationship to the one who suffers when it’s us who’s suffering and then the desire to relieve suffering in the ability to act skillfully. So, these often go together. What are some of the things that might get in the way of these?

We’ve heard the belief that we deserve the suffering and that can get in the way of the desire to relieve it or to act skillfully but what else in in your own experience maybe gets in the way of this?

Kelly: I think many of us have this belief that we are holding ourselves together and keeping ourselves and maybe others safe by being vigilant in a way that also increases our suffering a little bit. Like it’s a trade-off were willing to make.

Kelly: Yes. A fear of getting swallowed up by it so even if I’m aware of it I might not want to engage in it this way because I’m afraid of what will happen if I take that approach to the suffering.

Kelly: Not wanting to give up the thing that’s causing the suffering. This is attachment, addiction, personal narrative, the narrative self. How we construct a sense of meaning often from our suffering and what would it mean if that’s no longer true? If our pain is no longer there? If we relieve that or change that sometimes we don’t even know who we are. Certainly, we may have to change things about our lives.

All of these things can make compassion difficult and I want to particularly highlight stress and shame and self-criticism as very common responses to our own pain or stress or suffering that are the counterpart to sympathetic or empathic distress.

 I mentioned that we all have this instinct to be overwhelmed when we see a loved one suffering and that we ourselves freak out and fall apart. It’s a natural instinct related to caregiving but often gets in the way of acting skillfully. It seems like when it comes to our own stress and suffering we have these two other instincts that are also related to just basic survival needs and one is the stress response that we have this incredibly hard-wired instinct when we are at risk to defend ourselves through something that is different than compassion. It’s the sense of emergency. It’s a sense of overwhelm. It’s the sense of acting without thinking and it’s that heart pounding sense of being trapped. In theory this is going to motivate us to take action to protect ourselves, but the action that stress motivates is often very, very different than the action that could be motivated from the slightly calmer, more spacious approach to one’s own suffering.

Shame and self-criticism seem to be related to the instinct to connect with others. It’s kind of a paradox. The more the we actually care about being a good member of our tribe, the more we care about our relationships with others, the more we want to contribute, then often the more likely we are to criticize ourselves when we let ourselves or others down. To feel like we aren’t doing enough or giving enough, and we take that desire to be connected to others and support and contribute and be part and be appreciated and that motivation often gets translated into being hard on ourselves as if being hard on ourselves will help us be a better member of our community, will help us fix ourselves so that we are appreciated, and we don’t get into trouble. I think it’s really worth appreciating that if you add other instincts besides self-compassion to your own pain and suffering to recognize how really human this is and often they come from a place that allows us to connect to others, which is why it can be easy to feel for others and not easy to feel for ourselves.

Before we do the practice. I want to talk a little bit about the self in self-compassion. In cultivating self-compassion is finding a version of you who feels like you because you are embodying a kind of attention and present moment awareness that you are aware of but it’s different than the part of you who is actually suffering or stressed out. I often think of this in terms of size. There’s a part of you when you’re suffering. You’ve had a failure. You’re in pain. That kind of contracts. Does this make sense? You have to find the version of you who’s connected to something bigger than that particular moment of pain, or that particular story, or that particular relationship. It’s really a quality of attention that comes in who can hold the one who’s suffering. And it’s that quality of attention who can be in relationship to the one who is suffering.

Often the way to get at this quality of attention is to cultivate it first in your body and breath, that quality of spaciousness and then turn your compassion to others who are suffering and then we’re going to like jujitsu it back onto ourselves. We’re going to use that energy of compassion and sneak up on ourselves.

So that’s the practice we’re going to do. It’s the idea that were going to find that self who often offers compassion and then were going to find a way to invite in the little self-who’s suffering to be the recipient of that.

So, this may be our last meditation practice. So, let’s go through that process again, the mountain, the sun, the sky. I invite you to take again a conscious position for your body and like every other meditation practice, you could listen, or you can fully participate. But either way you’re holding the space for those who are participating.

So, you’ve taken your conscious seat and making a conscious choice about the placement of your hands, your head and your neck. If you were to actually bring to mind the image of a mountain. Mountains do change with time. They get affected by wind and water and other things like that. Grass grows, but it’s kind of a slow process. So, when you think about bringing a quality of stillness to your body. I want you to think of having the quality of stillness in your body that’s not rigid. There may be some movement and some adjustment as we practice but it’s going to be slow, not on impulse and feel free to take care of your body if you need to.

Let’s bring awareness to the quality of the sun, the natural warmth, by bringing to mind your intention for this practice which is to extend your own compassion to you, yourself.

Find that quality of the sky in your attention by bringing attention to your breath. We’re going to stay with the breath a little while longer because I want you to have this as a resource to come back to as needed.

So, let’s reengage and sustain that attention to the breath. I invite you to come back to the breath and feel the breath at any point in this practice. When we turn our attention to both our own suffering and the suffering of others a lot of stuff might come up; sensations, thoughts and feelings. Although I trust that you have the space to be with them you also have the capacity to turn your attention back to the breath as an act of self-compassion if you choose to.

I invite you to bring to mind something in your own life that is currently causing some kind of stress, uncertainty, anxiety, pain, anything that you are aware of right now that is causing some suffering. It may even be something that you did that you are feeling regret or disappointment about.

We’re going to take a minute to see if you can be with whatever comes up when you bring this to mind, just be with yourself.

 Notice where your mind is and see if you could choose to bring it back to this thing that is creating some suffering. Sense the breath at the same time. I invite you to imagine that someone you care about is going through something very similar right now. Pick someone specific you care about and imagine that they are going through the same thing that you are experiencing. Notice how this feels when you have a friend or loved one in this situation. Do you feel a sense of care or connection? A desire to support or encourage? See if you can breathe with this. In your own mind you might come back to those phrases of support and compassion. Imagine saying to your friend or loved one may you be free of this. May you be free from suffering. May you know your own strength. May you know that you are loved. May you know peace.

I invite you to sense your breath and as I repeat those phrases, just allow yourself to receive those phrases. May you be free from the suffering. May you know your own strength. May you know that you are loved. May you know peace. Breathe with whatever is present.

Finally, I invite you to bring to mind the possibility that whatever you yourself are going through right now, that it does not isolate you from others, but is part of common humanity and that whatever you’re going through right now there are countless others human beings who also know what this feels like. Whether it is pain or illness, anger or fear, grief or loss, confusion and doubt. Whatever it is there are countless other human beings who also know what this is like right now. See if there is a sense of compassion for all others who are suffering in this way. You might repeat the following phrases in your own mind: may we all be free of the suffering. May we know our own strength. May we know that we are loved. May we know peace. Again, breathing with whatever is arising.

As we conclude this practice I invite you to consider one last idea; that your own willingness to be with your own suffering actually helps relieve the suffering of others. You might dedicate this practice to that idea.

 May my willingness to be with this pain and suffering, to find compassionate awareness in space, may it in some way contribute to the happiness and freedom from suffering of others.

 As you begin to open awareness back to the space around you I invite you to do a little re-grounding exercise. If you want to stay seated, you might just literally sense your feet on the ground. If you want to and have room to stand you might want to stand up again for a second and sense that rootedness and this is still part of the exercise whether you’re sitting or standing.

I want you to just bring awareness to the skin of your whole body as if you have kind of 360° awareness right now. I want you really sense the space around you and the others around you and begin to do that visually as well. Look at the space around you, the sense of turning attention back outward when we’ve gone in like this. Really seeing the space around you and conclude again by making this generous offer of eye contact with others around you.

When you’re ready, have a seat and I want to say something about this practice we just did before you say something about this practice that we just did. This is one of my favorite practices. It’s a version of a practice that we do in the Compassion Cultivation Training that brings together the practice of common humanity with self-compassion. This is a visual depiction of how I think about this practice. It is a process of turning inward and then a process of broadening our awareness to understand the suffering of humanity to understand that our individual story is not as unique as we often feel when we’re in the midst of the suffering. We go right into it and we allow ourselves to sense and feel it and be aware of it and then the quality of that awareness we bring to it is one that is connected to something much bigger than our own experience.

This is an image if you are not familiar with this image it’s considered to be in Buddhism the embodiment of compassion. One version of the embodiment of compassion. In this particular embodiment of compassion there are 1000 hands in this picture if you can’t see it. It looks like a human being with a lot of different heads and 1000 hands. The heads are rotating and turning around in lots of different directions and each hand has an eye in it. The idea is that the embodiment of compassion is one who can hear and see all suffering everywhere.

 I feel like this is in many ways the self that we need to bring into the self-compassion that when we are aware of our own suffering and the response is not compassion it’s usually because our attention has become so constricted that all we can see is our own weakness, our own failure, our own pain and so that compassion itself is the one who can hold that and have it as part of the many to actually see that this suffering is part of what it means to be human. So that’s what the practice was about from my point of view. Does anyone want to share what it was about from your point of view?

Kelly: Yes. Let me get out of this. Did anyone else have that experience? The other meditations were great but this one was like when will this be over? I do not think it’s because this is the last one. I think it’s a fairly common response and I think it actually relates that often the lack of desire we have to move towards our own suffering in this way for many different reasons. It’s not a problem to be fixed but I really appreciate you naming it. There is something that’s very unusual about this process and often our first instinct is like is not comfortable, it’s physically not comfortable, and I’m going to look for the exit strategy. Which often includes not doing it by the way. When we get to the weekly practice there’s a lot of not practicing that happens.

Kelly: other folks that haven’t said anything yet. Yes, you had a similar experience and probably not just exhausted from all this meditation. This is a skill set, an intentional quality, this is actually difficult.

Kelly: you’ve sensed the physical quality of warmth and one that allows you to touch an emotional quality that brought tears to your eyes. Thank you

Kelly: Let me repeat this for others. This is the observation that okay I know what compassion for others feels like in my body. You asked me about that. I know what it feels like I can feel it. But when it’s time to turn it to myself it’s gone, and I don’t know what it feels like and that feeling doesn’t stay. So, this is the skill. This is the reality of it that for most people that thing that is often instinctive toward others feels like a vacuum, it feels like it’s just not the response to our own suffering. The way that I think about this is that it’s a practice. In the same sense that from the very first practice that we did today, some of you are very experienced meditators, you remember what it was like that first time someone told you that you weren’t allowed to move in sitting meditation. It seems impossible or the idea that bringing your attention back to the breath again and again. That’s really what this is a practice of that. There’s part of you that can touch the compassion and then there’s another part of you that’s going to immediately want to abandon it or not know how to find it again. And you just keep touching into that part of you that knows what it feels like.

Kelly: I think this is a very interesting observation that sometimes one of the reasons we can give compassion to others but not ourselves is that we are using that lack of self-compassion to maintain a sense of being special. That somehow our suffering is different or that somehow, we could escape suffering like that would be possible. So, we need to be hard on ourselves, or we need to relate in this different way. There’s so many different ways that we relate to our suffering that’s not compassion can be about trying to feel separate from others. This practice definitely challenges that in my experience teaching these programs common humanity is the key to self-compassion. I haven’t seen anything else unlock it in the same way. It’s only when you are able to see your suffering in others that self-compassion becomes natural and it could be through this meditation or it could honestly be by paying attention to other people. One of the problem problems of self-criticism or shame or denial of our own suffering is that it’s like putting blinders on.

 It’s so much harder to see what’s actually going on for other people as well. So sometimes just choosing to turn our attention there and not have it be that this is fundamentally different from my own experience it really unlocks self-compassion.

We have just a few minutes left. Are there maybe one or two more reports?

Kelly: yes, this is the observation that the idea that being with your own suffering is actually a way to support others. By the way it is. When you’re with the own suffering in this way there are lots of ways to relate your own suffering that get in the way of supporting others but there’s really no difference between the capacity to be with yourself when your suffering with presence, with mindfulness, with acceptance and also a willingness to act and relieve suffering. That’s not at all different than what’s required to be with someone else when they are suffering rather than shutting down or escaping or trying to fix it, so you don’t have to deal with it because you’re so uncomfortable or all the other things we sometimes do. So, it truly is. I’m glad that is motivational and also inspirational.

Maybe one more from anyone who hasn’t shared.

Kelly: yes, thank you this idea of using phrases in your meditation: may you be free from suffering. May you know peace or other phrases. This is a very important part of loving kindness compassion practices in many traditions. This idea of connecting to a basic aspiration. You don’t have to know how it’s going to happen. It doesn’t rely only on you. It’s kind of connecting to compassion itself and sometimes when we are feeling frustrated or we’re feeling nothing or feeling overwhelmed sometimes that’s a way to connect to compassion itself. I think it’s why these phrases are part of so many different meditations. We are going to end on time we have a couple minutes left so we are going to do a formal close and then I will not immediately run off so that if you guys want to stay and chat I’ll be available.

Kelly: yes, this must be very urgent. So, I think I can talk as a scientist and as a practitioner. The science answer is actually easy. There’s now a lot of growing evidence that these types of practices that we did today and the process behind them helps relieve suffering and anxiety. As somebody who has experienced both I can say that this approach of making space for suffering and not having to shut down and sometimes being unable to fix, that’s actually the only thing that’s ever supported me. So, I feel like there is the science side and, yes, this stuff changes the brain and in our own study we show that it reduces stress, anxiety and depression. I feel like this approach actually is what often allows us to engage with other therapies. That we can be with our own difficult thoughts and emotions may make it possible to talk with someone about it. To challenge the way we think about things, to try out new experiments, new behavioral experiments, this process supports all of that and I wouldn’t want to be doing any sort of intervention or therapy without that at this point.

So, let’s come back to your seats. Take a moment. Turn your attention inward whether that means closing your eyes or dropping your gaze. Take a moment to acknowledge your own presence and participation here today. Remembering your intention for being here and acknowledging your own presence and participation in support of that. And then open your eyes and just share your gaze again with the folks around you in the space around you and take a moment to appreciate the presence and appreciation of everyone here. Those who sat next to you and those who sat in the back. Those who set up our technology. Those who set up the event. Those who built this building. We could go quite large, right? A sense of everyone who helped participate in this process today and may our own presence and participation in some way support the happiness and freedom from suffering of everyone who has supported our ability to be here today.

Thank you very much. Have a wonderful rest of your day, St. Patrick’s Day and for those of you who are interested in staying connected because this, as I said, this is a mashup of two classes. If you are interested in the science side, there’s an eight-week class that starts April 1st at Stanford and you don’t have to do any of the touchy-feely stuff, it’s just science. Then the eight-week meditation class which is very little science, a lot of meditation, a lot of talking in small groups. That little bit we did today. That’s through CCARE. I’m not teaching that this quarter but there are other wonderful teachers this quarter that are teaching it locally at Stanford and there will also be classes in Berkeley and other places in the East Bay coming up. So, if you’re interested in taking an immersive compassion meditation training you can find us through CCARE. And that’s it. Unless there are other announcements I should hand it over to you.

Robert Cusick: I just want to think everyone for coming out on a Sunday afternoon. I want to thank our guest speaker our teacher, Kelly McGonigal, who really did a fantastic presentation. Applause.

Kelly: Especially the people in the back, I’m just so glad you stayed.

Recorded on Sunday, March 17, 2013 at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Copyright release given through Creative Commons. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License