Spirituality

 

" The Science and Practice of Compassion"

The following material was presented at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California on March 17, 2013.

Introduction by Robert Cusick:

It’s a great pleasure to introduce our teacher today, Kelly McGonigal. I’m just going to read you the bio because I don’t want to forget anything here. Kelly is a PHD, senior teacher, and research collaborator at the Stanford Center for Altruism Research and Education, as well as being a psychology lecturer at Stanford University. She is a long-time meditator in the American Zen tradition and integrates modern science with contemplative practices. She’s also a yoga teacher. I understand quite a spectacular one at that from what I hear. She’s an author. Her books include The Willpower Instinct, The Neuroscience of Change, and Yoga for Pain Relief.

Kelly is one of the senior teachers in the CCARE Program and teaches the Compassion Cultivation Training Program at Stanford that I have the honor to be part of and there’s some other folks here from that program. It’s an absolutely incredible program and you’re going to get a little bit of a taste of it this afternoon. I welcome you all, Kelly, thank you and welcome.

Kelly McGonigal:

Thank you, we’re going to begin our first practice in just a few minutes, but I want to orient you first to what’s going to happen today so there’s still time to run out the emergency exit if you think you’re here for the St. Patrick’s Day festivities (laughter).

 I want to actually tease Robert here for just a minute. Robert asked me: “we want you to teach something on compassion so can you send us a description?”

 I sent him this description which you may have read: this experiential workshop explores through discussion, self-reflection and meditation, insight into the process of cultivating compassion based on the latest research on compassion. Topics include self-compassion, obstacles to broadening compassion, and how compassion meditation changes the brain. Practices will include guided compassion meditations, gentle mindful movement and simple breathing exercises.

So, I sent it and there was a little bit of silence, then I get back this very sweet email from Robert saying “we’ve talked about it and we’re wondering if you’re actually going to be able to do all that in three hours. Should we maybe take some of that stuff out? Do you remember that Robert?

Here’s my thought about this: That’s the overall trajectory that we’re headed on and then we’re going to respond and see what actually happens as we practice.

This this will be a mix of science, practice and conversation. You’ll be talking with me, you’ll be talking with yourself, you’ll be talking with each other. There will be opportunities to take notes if you’re a notetaker and there will be lots of opportunities to meditate. Even though we’re at a meditation center it is a secular workshop, so it won’t be quite as formal as maybe some of the meditation retreats and workshops that you’ve been to.

 We do have some basic guidelines, and I just wanted to set them up since many of you have never taken a workshop with me before and there are few basic principles I like to follow to make this a safe and supportive environment for everyone who’s here whether you are a lifelong meditator or brand-new to this practice.

The first guideline is that you are free to participate or observe in anything that we do today and that includes big group conversations, it includes the meditations, you may find that, you know you’re like wow I’m just going to listen to this meditation first and maybe I’ll explore it again later on my own. Or feel free to dive in and actually do the practices as I lead them.

It’s also going to be true that we will occasionally break up into small groups or partners for a couple of short exercises. If you’re the kind of person who feels like you want to keep this a little bit contained to your own experience today you are welcome to practice with yourself rather than with a partner although I encourage you to work with a partner for a few of these exercises.

Now when it comes to group conversations and partner exercises I’m going to ask you to be impeccable with a few basic rules for how this happens. One is that when we talk as a group, I am the facilitator, so you are always talking to me. If someone on this side of the room says something absolutely amazing and fascinating and you want to respond directly to that person I’m going to ask you instead to speak from your own experience and speak to me. In this way it makes it a little bit easier for folks to share their experience without worrying about whether someone is going to come in and evaluate or misunderstand or interrogate. So, you’re going to be more like a witness in conversations both as a full group and also when we do partner exercises.

There will be very specific guidelines for just witnessing and listening to what someone shares to make this as really as impeccable and clean a process as possible.

Another thing I want to mention is that we will be taking a break about halfway through, but you should also practice self-care so if you need to take a moment to yourself step out to use the restroom or anything else like that. I realize that in a room this tight it’s going to be hard to do that without feeling a little bit awkward, but you should do it anyway. People will understand if you have a need that you need to take care of. So those are our basic guidelines, and can we have kind of a consensus around that? And I’ll remind you of that as we go along. Yes.

 Should we take a vote are we cold? The room has microclimates. That’s what I’m being told from people who know this room better than I do. Oh, this reminds me of a great story about rooms being too cold and too warm. (A facilitator adjusts the thermostat). That’s great, ask and ye shall receive. We probably will not be able to create the perfect climate for each one of you, but if we as a group get increasingly uncomfortable and there’s a skillful way to deal with it we will. Otherwise we also make room for the fact that things will be imperfect and that’s okay too.

The other thing I wanted to mention before we go into our first practice is the definition of compassion that I’m working with and the scope for the material that I will be presenting to you today. The definition of compassion that I use is one that comes from the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism and this is one that really integrates what you might call wisdom traditions with science. This is the idea that compassion is a response that unfolds in the awareness of suffering. So, it begins with awareness of some kind of pain or suffering in yourself or in others or in the world and that awareness gives rise to a mixed emotional state of a little bit of distress but also a sense of care and love or connection that then motivates a desire to relieve that suffering and, whenever possible, the willingness to act skillfully to relieve that suffering.

When I say compassion that’s really what we’re going to talk about today; awareness of suffering, how suffering makes us feel when we’re aware of it and how we can try to transform whatever we’re feeling into a desire to relieve suffering and skillful means for relieving that suffering.

This is going to be a mash today of two classes that I teach.

One is a straight up meditation training that’s the eight-week compassion cultivation training class that Robert mentioned. So, we’re going to be doing a lot of meditation and the other class is a class I teach called the Science of Compassion which is a straight up science lecture on compassion. So we’re going to go back and forth between the two. You’ll get a taste. Both of them are eight-week classes. You’re going to get small doses, thin slices of that material today.

Okay now I think that probably as many of us that are going to be here are here so we’re going to start with a stabilizing the mind and settling practice. I’m actually going to invite you to, now that you’ve all gotten super comfortable, I’m going to invite you to stand up. Now standing is not possible for everybody at every moment so standing is your version of standing. If that means just sitting up a little bit more, if that means bringing awareness to the crown of your head, standing is relative.

This is an exercise that I call "Mountain, Sun, Sky" and it allows us to touch into what we might think of as the embodiment of certain qualities of compassion and the first quality is groundedness and steadiness and you’re almost already there.

The only thing you need to add to this is bring some attention to your own foundation whether you’re sitting or standing whatever the posture is right now. See if you can make a more conscious choice about the placement of your feet, your legs or your hips. If there’s a lot of tension holding you together you might give yourself a little bit more space at your base. Whether that’s spreading your hips or spreading your feet.

 Let your shoulders come all the way up to your ears on an inhale and as you exhale drop the shoulders down. Let’s do that two more times. Inhale, shoulders to your ears. Exhale and one more time.

 Now take a moment and either close your eyes or just focus your gaze at one spot so there’s a sense of your attention stabilizing and turn your attention to what you sense in your own body.  Although there may be a lot going on I invite you to turn your attention to any sensations of stability or groundedness. Now I invite you to take one hand to your own heart or chest area and again, you can have your eyes open or closed, whatever feels more appropriate but keeping your attention inward towards sensation.

I’d like you to make contact with the second quality of compassion which is your own natural warmth. You might sense that around the heart. Sensing the three dimensionalities of your breath like a radiant sun, there’s a sense of expansion as you inhale and a gentle release as you exhale.

Go ahead and bring your other hand to your belly and bring in the quality of the sky. This is the quality of acceptance and spaciousness. If we were to think of an expansive blue sky that has room for everything, all the clouds that pass by and sense in your own body the breath moving in and out. Sensing the body as a spacious container for the breath.

I’m going to see if we can take these qualities into a brief silent, seated meditation. I know some of you are new to the practice of meditation, so I will give you a little bit more instruction than that, but the first instruction is to take your meditation posture or seat.

So now mindfully come back to whatever your seat is. So, you’re going to find that quality of steadiness in your seat, the mountain, you want to feel connected to whatever is the support underneath you. Maybe it’s feet flat on the earth, hips spread on your chair, or sit bones rooted into the floor. You’re going to make a conscious choice about the placement of your hands. Whether that’s hands in the lap, on the knees, or in contact with the breath. Keeping with that quality of stability, once you’ve made a choice about your position I will encourage you to stay with it to allow the body to enter stillness to the best of your ability.

Now we’ll make contact with that quality of the heart by setting an intention.  I’d like to ask you to bring in mind your intention for being here today. There’s some reason you decided to show up. Take a moment and bring that intention to mind.  It’s that same quality of the heart that can also hold space for the intentions of everyone else who’s in this room right now. Although you do not know the content of their intentions, see if your heart can, just for a moment, hold that awareness that there are other human beings in this room who are also here for a reason. See if you can make some extra space for all those intentions as part of our shared experience today.

And finally, we are going to bring in the quality of the sky with both our attention and with our breath. So, the focus of this practice will be the breath. If there’s a particular way that you practice breath focus or breath awareness meditation go ahead and use that technique. If this is a new technique for you my favorite way to do that is just focus on how it feels to breathe. Whether that’s a sense of breath in and out of your nose and mouth, or maybe it’s the feeling of expansion and release in the belly and the core of the body.

As we sit in silence for a few minutes I invite you to notice when your mind wanders away from the breath and then gently bring it back to the breath.

 (After about five minutes of silence Kelly continues). Taking one more moment in stillness and beginning to really open your awareness back to the space around you. If your eyes have been closed that means opening the eyes and just take a moment and now re-see the space around you. Take a moment. Take it in. That might include seeing the folks around you. You might be sitting next to someone you haven’t actually made eye contact with yet. Now could be a chance for that. It’s good. I already see the balance of participants and nonparticipants. It’s good we are exercising autonomy. That was a good test.

Here’s another opportunity for participation we’ll call this “confessions of a meditator.”  I’m just going to ask you a really simple question. Just raise your hand if this describes either your experience of the last few minutes, or in general your experience of doing a practice like this. So, raise your hand if you’ve had the experience that you set the intention to be physically still and yet you noticed how difficult it is to sit still and how much the body likes to move and fidget. Raise your hand if that, I did have my eyes open, so also, I’m aware of that. Okay good, many people have that experience. We set our intention toward stillness and yet we found some sort of fundamental nature of fidgetiness. I know we set the intention to focus the mind on the breath, did anyone have the experience that the mind also wandered? That there were distractions? Oh good. Full participation of the mind. Excellent. So, we’ve been holding both of those as being true, did anyone who experienced either one or both of those also find that you experienced something you might call a settling of the mind or a flash of stillness or sense of peace or acceptance, something that could hold that experience? Great. Good. That’s most people.

 So, this is actually the approach that we are going to take all day today and I’m just going to grab my little technology here. So one of the things that I’ve noticed about teaching compassion as well as teaching meditation is that we often come in with a lot of enthusiasm about what we’re going to cultivate; my compassion, my empathy, my forgiveness, my love and as soon as we turn our attention to that natural ability that we have the first thing we see is our own impatience or our own pettiness or the limits of our compassion, of forgiveness, of love.  I actually think that’s a really good method for exploring this stuff.

I put this image up because it’s sort of like if you were to go out on any given day and look up for the sun, the sun would be there. Yes? It’s there. If you are going out during the day the sun is there. Sometimes, depending on the day, depending on the weather, you look up for sun and you see clouds. Sometimes they’re storm clouds, sometimes they’re pretty clouds, but sometimes you look for the sun and you see something else instead. I feel like that’s often the experience we have in meditation particularly when it comes to cultivating compassion. We look for stillness and focus and what we see is actually the inherent tendency to move, to distract ourselves or to be distracted. At the same time, it’s that process of being willing to go through that which also gives us a taste of the stillness of the mind and the spaciousness of the mind. The same is going to be true for all the compassion meditations that we do today. I’m going to be inviting you to look at the sun and you may see the clouds and actually it’s that process of compassionately exploring the barriers to our own compassion that is my method for cultivating compassion that we are going to explore today. Specifically, we’re going to look at the following common barriers to compassion. My goal is to get through four, in other classes that I teach we would get through all five but I’m setting a personal agenda here to try to get through four and call that a day.

The way we’re going to do this is through both science and practice because one of the great things about the last decade or so of research is that now there’s a lot of science interested in exploring why it is that compassion is a natural capacity of human beings.

We all have something like a compassionate instinct, a natural ability to see suffering and to respond to it and want to relieve it. At the same time, it’s really hard. Right? There are limits to that natural instinct and science has gotten very interested in exploring why that is as well as how those limits can be overcome if we desire that.

So we’re going to go back and forth. I am going to tell you some scientific stories and ideas and we’re going to talk about it and we’re going to do a more in-depth meditation practice that gives you an opportunity to look for the sun and see whatever else shows up as well.

We’re going to start with the fear of compassion, this thing that you came here for. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that even though you came here for compassion that you’re going to resonate with some of the fears of compassion that I show you, that both will be true.

 Then we’re going to look at why it is that sometimes when we are aware of suffering our natural response is not this amazing heart opening courageousness- “now let me relieve that suffering and replace it with strength and acceptance.” Sometimes we feel other stuff instead when we’re close to suffering. So we’re going to talk about that and actually make it more likely that our mind and our body and our hearts will respond with compassion rather than with distress and overwhelm.

We’re going to talk about why compassion and empathy are harder for some folks than others in will have a break around here so if you’re not interested in cultivating compassion for people you don’t like that is the time to leave and not come back (laughter).

Finally, we’ll look at the barriers to self-compassion. For many people, it is more difficult to feel compassion for their own suffering than for the suffering of others, even people they don’t like. So, we’ll look at why that is and how to sort of bring everything together that we’ve talked about so that you might cultivate more compassion for yourself. That’s our agenda.

Every practice we do we’re going to basically come back to this little exercise we started with and before we enter practice we’re going to find our own stability physically we’re going to connect to the warmth of our own intention and then use the breath, really use the breath, as an opportunity to feel spaciousness around whatever arises. We’ll do this over and over again. Stability, warmth, space, okay.

Now I’m going to have you stand up to because I’m having a hard time making eye contact with some of you guys in the back.  This is an opportunity for self-reflection and we’re going to be doing a small group exercise with this in a couple of minutes. So, I’m going to be reading and then showing you on the screen a few statements that reflect commonly held fears of compassion, both feeling compassion for the suffering of others, feeling compassion towards ourselves, and even fears of receiving compassion from another person, to be the object of compassion. One of the things that science has been exploring lately is the fact that this is very common, that many people feel strong reservations or concerns about whether or not compassion is a safe thing. Whether compassion is a strength or weakness. Whether compassion is a virtue or something that might actually be dangerous. So, as I show you each of these I want you to be looking for the one that resonates with you. When I see some of these I feel like I am not sure I fully understand what that’s about. And then others, I’m like, I understand that. I get that. I want you to be looking for one where you feel that, okay, I know what that point of view is.

 The first two:

1) Being compassionate towards people who’ve done bad things is letting them off the hook.

 2) There are some people in life who don’t deserve compassion. This is really about compassion for others. Some people just don’t deserve it. Necessary limits on compassion.

Here are a couple of others:

1) people will take advantage of me if they see that I’m too compassionate. People take advantage of me. They’ll exploit me.

2) I worry that if I am compassionate, vulnerable people will drain my emotional resources. There’s too much suffering. I worry that if I am compassionate other people will drain my resources. Feel free to take notes if you like to jot down the essence of any of these.

Here’s the next set:

1) I often wonder whether displays of warmth and kindness from others are genuine. When someone is showing me compassion I wonder what’s that about. I wonder if that is genuine.

 2) When people are kind and compassionate towards me I feel anxious and embarrassed.

 Next:

 I’m fearful about becoming dependent on the care of others because they might not be available or willing to give it. I fear getting dependent on the compassion of others. You can see if there’s anything here that kind of feels that it resonates.

 And then finally, fears of self-compassion:

I fear that if I become less self-critical my standards will drop. I fear that if I am more self-compassionate I will become a weak person. I fear that if I start to feel compassion or warmth for myself I will become overwhelmed by sadness or grief by my own suffering. I fear that if I start to feel compassionate for myself I will be overwhelmed by the suffering.

 So, you’ve now seen a bunch of statements that reflect kind of common reservations about this practice we’re embarking on today of broadening compassion and cultivating compassion for self and others.

 I would like you to take a moment, so for those of you who have something to write on or with feel free to do it on paper or feel free to do it with just the technology of your own mind. We’re going to take a minute of silence to just, I want you to see if you can re-express in your own words the statement that resonated most with you. So, I’m not going to show them to you again. Specifically, so that it ends up translated into your particular flavor. If you had to express in your own words, take one of those statements and put it into words in your mind or on paper. Then again, as I said, this is, every exercise we do is optional and if you’re choosing not to fully participate I ask that you hold the space for others who are. So, you can be that part of that spacious container who’s breathing with and being with, staying present with but maybe not directly participating and that’s just fine. Okay so one minute.

Okay now I’m going to throw you off the deep end. I don’t know how you usually do things at the Insight Meditation Center, but in my training, we talk a lot. So, I’m going to ask you to find small groups, ideally four. Now again you do not have to leave the room if you’re choosing not to do this. But here’s what you will be doing so you can make a full choice. I’m going to ask you to get into groups of four and then we are going to practice compassion at witnessing as each person has about 30 seconds to express the statement that’s kind of resonating with them. If they don’t use up the full 30 seconds you all just sit and breathe until that 30 seconds is over. If they’re still talking at the 30 second point, they’re done anyway, we got the gist of it (laughter). After each person has shared and the others have witnessed, we take a brief moment, we breathe and then I will tell you when it’s time to go to the next person.

So, it’s not really a conversation. It’s about expressing from the generosity of your own spirit to let other folks know what’s going on and the generosity of receiving, of learning how to witness this stuff without reacting, without evaluating, without projecting, without comment. Does that make sense? It’s a brief statement then just listening and the whole thing will be over in a couple of minutes if you’re choosing not to participate. So if you are participating find a group, four is ideal. Just turn your chairs a little bit, we’ll get a little messy, it’s okay, but you want to be able to actually orient towards your group, so a line does not work.

End of part one
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