Archives for July 2014

LIFESTYLE: The Best Kept Secret to Peace of Mind

July 1, 2014 By Emma Seppala

We’ve all been in situations where we are upset – angry, anxious, jealous, you name it – and there’s nothing we can do! We’re steaming, shaking, a general basketcase. Those are the moments we say or do things we later regret. The problem is, we’ve never learned tools to regain our cool in these times. The irony is that our greatest tool is always with us. That’s right, our breath. Of course, we’ve heard the expression “take a deep breath” but we’ve never taken it seriously. Science is showing that it’s something we should immediately take seriously. It may just be the best kept secret to peace of mind.

The Breath Is a Powerful Tool to Calm the Mind

Because breathing happens automatically, many of us don’t give the breath as much attention as it deserves nor have we learned to harness its full potential to calm our minds.

One of the reasons why breathing can change how we feel is that emotions and breathing are closely connected. A revealing research study by Pierre Phillipot showed that different emotional states are associated with distinct respiration patterns. In Phillipot’s study, participants came in and were instructed to generate emotions like sadness, fear, anger and happiness to the best of their ability. While they were experiencing the emotions, Phillipot’s team requested participants to closely observe and report on their own respiration patterns. The research team found that each emotion was associated with a distinct pattern of breath. For example, when the participants felt anxious or afraid, they breathed more quickly and shallowly and when they felt happy, they breathed slowly and fully. Even more interesting was the follow-up study in which the researchers invited in a different group of participants into their lab and instructed them to breathe in the patterns they had observed corresponded to emotions. The researchers literally told the participants how to breathe and then asked them how they felt. Lo and behold, the participants started to feel the emotions that corresponded to the breathing patterns!

Pay attention. This finding is literally revolutionary, folks: We can change how we feel using our breath! Given the fact that it is so difficult to change our emotions using thoughts alone (go ahead, try talking yourself out of intense anger or anxiety), learning to use the breath becomes a very powerful tool. You may not be able to talk your way out of our feelings, but you can learn to “breathe” your way through them. Believe me, I’ve seen it in action with one of the most traumatized populations. After participating in a 6-day workshop, young veterans of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan with severe trauma who said they had felt “dead” since returning from war now said they felt alive again. Though stricken with a severe anxiety disorder, they are all of a sudden able to sleep again, to feel comfortable in crowds, and to stop starting at every loud sound. If it can impact them so profoundly, just think what it can do for you.

More Benefits of Learning Breathing Practices

How does this happen? Several studies suggest that controlled yogic breathing has immediate and positive effects on psychological well-being, as well as on physiological markers of well-being, such as blood pressure and heart rate. Within minutes you will feel better and place your body in a significantly healthier state. The long-term effects of a daily breathing practice are even more pronounced. By activating the part of our nervous system associated with “resting and digesting” (the parasympathetic nervous system), breathing practices may “train” the body to be calmer. For example, preliminary studies have found that regularly practicing breathing exercises lowers one’s level of cortisol — the “stress hormone.” Having lower levels of this hormone may be indicative of an overall calmer state of being, which may translate into less reactivity in the face of inevitable life stressors and less risk of heart disease. Although substantial studies of yogic breathing and the brain have yet to emerge, preliminary brain studies of meditation and the breath suggest that they activate brain areas involved in the control of the autonomic system, such as the insula. Control of the breath appears to activate brain regions that guide the parasympathetic, or “rest and digest,” processes of the body, perhaps thereby inducing its calming effects. Deep breathing has even been found to reduce pain.

A Breathing Practice to Try at Home: Alternate Nostril Breathing

This gentle pranayama is said to cool the mind and emotions. You may notice that, at any given time, one nostril is dominant (that is, air flows more smoothly through one nostril and only partially through the other). The dominant nostril alternates throughout the day. Preliminary research suggests that breathing through the right nostril oxygenates the left side of the brain, while breathing through the left nostril oxygenates the right side of the brain. One of the reasons alternate nostril breathing may induce its calming and balancing effects on the mind is that it gently allows for airflow through both nostrils.

To practice, place the index and middle finger of the right hand on the center of the eyebrow, and place the thumb on the right nostril, and the ring finger and pinky on the left nostril. The left hand rests on the lap, palm facing up. Take a deep breath in and, closing the right nostril with your thumb, breathe out through the left nostril. Then take a deep breath in through the left nostril, close the left nostril with your ring finger and pinky at the end of the inhale, and exhale through the right nostril. Take a deep breath in through the right nostril and, closing the right nostril with the thumb, exhale on the left side, and start over. Do this with your eyes closed for about five minutes. Notice the effects on your body and mind.

Want to Learn to Breathe Again?

The veterans I worked with learned the practices taught in the Project Welcome Home Troops workshop, which teaches Sudarshan Kriya Yoga. The International Association for Human Values offers this program programs for veterans, in schools, and in prisons. This practice is also taught for the general population by the Art of Living Foundation (see artofliving.org). Elementary yogic breathing practices can also be learned in general yoga classes. Kundalini yoga classes, for example, place a particular emphasis on breathing practices.

Emma Seppala, Ph.D. is the Associate Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. Emma completed her undergraduate degree at Yale University and Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University. Her doctoral research focused on interventions to increase compassionate behavior and social connectedness. She completed her post-doctoral research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Dr. Richard Davidson where she evaluated the effects of yoga- and meditation-based interventions for combat veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. Her research fields of expertise include compassion, emotion regulation, happiness, and mind-body interventions for well-being. You can learn more on her website at emmaseppala.com.

Republished with permission from emmaseppala.com.

BOOKS: Maya Angelou on Love, Compassion, and Self-Compassion

July 1, 2014 By Elizabeth Pyjov

One of the most renowned and influential voices of our time passed away on May 28, 2014. Maya Angelou was a poet, dancer, actress, singer, and writer most famous for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Her profound ideas live on—here are Maya Angelou’s inspiring words on love, compassion, and self-compassion.

Maya Angelou on Love and Compassion

“Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.”

“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in this world, but it has not solved one yet.”

“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”

“The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.”

“To those who have given up on love, I say, ‘Trust life a little bit.'”

“If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don’t be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning ‘Good morning’ at total strangers.”

“I’ve learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights. I’ve learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you’ll miss them when they’re gone from your life. I’ve learned that making a “living” is not the same thing as making a “life.” I’ve learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance. I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back. I’ve learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision. I’ve learned that even when I have pains, I don’t have to be one. I’ve learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. I’ve learned that I still have a lot to learn. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou on Self-compassion

“If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?”

“You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.”

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”

“The question is not how to survive, but how to thrive with passion, compassion, humor and style.”

“I don’t know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, ‘Well, if I’d known better I’d have done better,’ that’s all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, ‘I’m sorry,’ and then you say to yourself, ‘I’m sorry.’ If we all hold on to the mistake, we can’t see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can’t see what we’re capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one’s own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that’s rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don’t have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.”

Elizabeth Pyjov is the Editor-in-chief of Compassion Journal. She currently teaches Compassion Cultivation Training at Columbia University to graduate students and faculty, as well as to the general public at the renowned Tibet House in New York City. She has taught workshops about compassion at Columbia, NYU, Tibet House, and the Harvard Club of New York, where she leads a special-interest group about compassion.

PRACTICE: James Doty’s Helper’s High: A Case Study in Altruism

July 1, 2014 By Bonnie Tsu

James Doty is not a subject under study at the altruism research center that he founded at Stanford in 2008, but he could be. In 2000, after building a fortune as a neurosurgeon and biotech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, he lost it all in the dotcom crash: $75 million gone in six weeks. Goodbye villa in Tuscany, private island in New Zealand, penthouse in San Francisco. His final asset was stock in a medical-device company he’d once run called Accuray. But it was stock he’d committed to a trust that would benefit the universities he’d attended and programs for AIDS, family, and global health. Doty was $3 million in the hole. Everyone told him to keep the stock for himself. He gave it away—all $30 million of it. “Giving it away has had to be the most personally fulfilling experience I’ve had in my life,” Doty, 58, said on a recent sunny afternoon at Stanford. In 2007, Accuray went public at a valuation of $1.3 billion. That generated hundreds of millions for Doty’s donees and zero for him. “I have no regrets,” he said.

So what exactly is wrong with Doty? Is it normal for a human being to commit a generous act that helps others and not himself? Or is his selfless act merely an act of veiled self-interest? Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have been wrestling with these questions for decades. Recent research suggests it’s more complicated than that—that evolution has pushed us toward a trait that binds communities and helps them prosper, and that altruistic acts promote individual well-being in biologically measurable ways. These are precisely the kinds of issues and questions that motivated Doty to form—with a seed donation of $150,000 from the Dalai Lama, whom Doty had met in a chance encounter—the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, or CCARE, part of Stanford’s School of Medicine.

In the past six years, CCARE has distinguished itself from other research centers because it’s determinedly multidisciplinary. Its affiliated scientists have conducted studies in areas from neuroscience and psychology to economics and “contemplative traditions” like Buddhism. But CCARE is distinguished in another way: Many of its core findings mirror Doty’s own life. Emiliana Simon-Thomas, a neuroscientist, the science director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and former associate director of CCARE, sees Doty as a remarkable embodiment of what researchers are learning about altruism. “He rose to absurd riches and found that having every possible need met isn’t better,” she said. “That kind of question motivates him. He’s gone to the extremes of the pendulum, and he’s trying to find the place in between that will bring him the most rich and authentic sense of purpose.”Doty, an atheist, believes life, especially his own, revolves around the kindness of others. A tall, bearish man with a head of full gray hair, who is by turns pensive and cheerful, Doty acknowledged that he founded the center out of his own self-interest. “Every scientist is inherently biased, but the data is the data,” he said. “I am just as interested in the question of what blocks or prevents compassionate behavior, and what are the documented physiologic benefits, or not.” He added, “All of us have a backstory, and how we function or behave today is a manifestation of what has happened to us in the past.”

Tsui_BREAKER-02 — **FROM WELFARE TO THE PENTHOUSE:** “You have to show everyone that you’re not inferior, that you’re as good as they are,” James Doty said of his drive to the high life.Courtesy of James Doty

Doty grew up in southern California, where his childhood was torn by poverty. His father was an alcoholic and often in jail, and his mother was ill. They lived on public assistance and bounced around from Torrance to Palmdale, fearing eviction at every turn. By age 13 he was doing drugs. “I wasn’t physically abused,” he said of his childhood. “But it just sort of sucked—you wouldn’t sign up for it.” One day Doty wandered into a local magic shop in a strip mall and met the owner’s mother. Though Doty didn’t think of himself as sullen or angry, he was at a critical juncture, and the woman in the shop saw that. She invited him to come back every day after school for six weeks, and taught him how to meditate. He practiced picturing things that he wanted to happen; it allowed him to see his way out of hopelessness.

“Take two people—both of them walk outside into the rain,” Doty explained. “One person says, ‘It’s been so hot lately, there’s been a drought, this rain is wonderful, all this growth is happening.’ Another person walks out, says, ‘My whole day has been bad, this is just another crappy part of it, traffic will be horrible.’ And yet they’re both swimming in the same pond.” What he learned from the woman in the magic shop changed not the reality of his external circumstance—he was still poor, and he was still the one who had to take care of his parents—but his internal perception of it. “We are the ones who create our world view—not some outside event or environment.”

The generosity of the woman in the magic shop unleashed a boldness in Doty. A high school friend was applying to the University of California, Irvine, and Doty decided on the spot that he would, too. She showed him how to fill out the form. He studied biological sciences at Irvine and decided to apply to medical school at Tulane. When the scheduler for the college pre-med committee told him he was wasting his time because of his dismal 2.5 GPA, he demanded a hearing so he could argue his worthiness; at the end, he had the committee in tears, and won the recommendation he needed for his application. At Tulane, despite a passed deadline, a woman in the program office showed him a small kindness by allowing him entry into a med-school program for disadvantaged and minority youth.

In medical school, Doty’s ambition exploded. He aimed for the top of the physician totem pole and became a neurosurgeon. After earning his medical license he established a lucrative neurosurgery practice in upscale Newport Beach, California, and later at Stanford. But he didn’t stop there. Along with practicing medicine in the 1990s, he cast an envious eye on entrepreneurs riding a wave of venture capital investments in the biotech industry. Doty focused on Accuray—makers of a medical device called the CyberKnife, a device that could deliver targeted radiation therapy—which was going bankrupt. Like a skilled arbitrageur, he raised $18 million in investments, and personally guaranteed part of the credit lines himself. Doty became president and CEO of Accuray and sales of CyberKnife took off. He invested in other medical-device companies and his high life was in full swing. He drove a Ferrari and put a down payment on a 6,500-acre island in New Zealand.

Doty said his ambition was powered by the “monkey” on his back: the specter of his childhood poverty. “You have to show everyone that you’re not inferior, that you’re as good as they are,” he said. As someone who grew up in deprivation, he chased the money and the goods, hoping that it would translate into something. “Happiness, maybe,” he said. “Or control. You keep waiting for the magical event that will make you feel that you’re OK.” When he lost all his money, he said, “that released me from that monkey. I voluntarily gave away the thing that I wanted the most.” He paused, emotional in the recollection. “And then I didn’t have to worry about that anymore.”

Doty’s liberating act of philanthropy (although his not-yet wife Masha didn’t see it as liberating at the time) underscored his purpose as a physician. He took a leave of absence from Stanford and went to Gulfport, Mississippi, to start a regional neurosurgery and brain injury center, and was working there when Hurricane Katrina hit. He stayed two more years. When he returned to Stanford, it was with an idea to pay as much rigorous scientific attention to positive behaviors like compassion and altruism as he had to solving pathologies of the human mind. “I was struck by how sometimes it’s obvious that someone needs help, and one person gives it, but another won’t. But why wouldn’t you? That’s the burning question. I still don’t understand it,” he said with a rueful laugh. “People get so absorbed in how important their own thing is. But I assure you, if they were in the position of need, they sure wish someone would pay attention.”

Through CCARE, Doty is starting to get glimmers of understanding. Part of the center’s role has been to start a cultural conversation about why we treat others the way we do. Doty points to the work of Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, and Michael Kraus, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; their studies have found that affluent people are worse at reading others’ emotions than people of limited means. Those who are rich also tend to be less compassionate and community-focused; the researchers suspect that the less we need to rely on others, the less we pay attention to them or care about their feelings. As global inequality rises, Doty said that the psychological understanding of how conditions of material wealth and social class may influence our behavior toward others will only grow in significance. “People who have been given certain privileges have the obligation to watch out for the weakest.”

Charles Darwin himself assumed that compassion was essential to the survival of our species; evolutionary theorists have speculated that the ability to recognize others in distress, and the desire to help, is critical to the care of vulnerable offspring, and to cooperation with non-kin. “We’ve kind of misread Darwin,” said Simon-Thomas, the Berkeley neuroscientist, who co-wrote the first evolutionary analysis and empirical review of compassion in 2010. “We’ve come up with the idea that ‘survival of the fittest’ means that the strongest man wins, when what actually wins is highly collective, communal behavior.”

When asked what researchers are discovering about the main scientific argument in altruism—are we selfish or selfless beings?—she laughed. “It’s definitely both,” she said. “We’re built to survive, and to be vigilant to threats to our individual integrity. But we’re also built to cooperate with others when we’re not under threat ourselves. You don’t try to comfort or hug someone who’s trying to attack you. But if you’re confronted with someone who is in deep, profound pain, it arouses in you a mirrored perception of pain itself, and it’s not always a service to yourself to run away from that.” The sensation of stress around both scenarios is similar, she said, but the way we relate and react to that feeling—fighting and escaping vs. approaching and helping—differs profoundly.

The two behaviors, Simon-Thomas explained, are reciprocal and dynamic. Despite the fact that up until now medical science has focused on sickness, pain, and disease, society has come to pay more attention to what comes after you’ve achieved physical health. “More and more of the science of well-being and happiness,” she said, “has to do with uncovering this second story about connecting, being kind, serving others, and functioning in a sustainable community.” Doty’s own life embodies her findings. “His personal history of struggle as a young person is instrumental to his sensitivity to suffering of others,” Simon-Thomas said. “He’s willing to talk to anyone. And willing to help in almost every case.”

What Doty may be proving with his own life is what the Dalai Lama has called “selfish altruism”—we benefit from pleasing others. When we help someone else or give something valuable away, the pleasure centers of the brain, or mesolimbic reward system, activated by stimuli such as sex, food, or money, provides emotional reinforcement. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies by the National Institutes of Health have shown that the reward centers are equally active when we watch someone give money to charity and when we receive it ourselves; in addition, giving something valuable away activates the subgenual area, a part of the brain that is key in establishing trust and social attachment in humans and other animals, as well as the anterior prefrontal cortex, which is thought to be highly involved in the complexities of altruistic decision-making. What researchers call the “helper’s high” may be aided by the release of endorphins. By virtually every measure of health we know—reducing blood pressure, anxiety, stress, inflammation, and boosting mood—compassion has been shown to help us. These are some of the ways we are encouraged to establish trust and community, which have long been necessary to human survival.

The language of giving often gestures to reciprocity and symmetry. Humans are known to mimic each other, even at a subconscious level. One study of interpersonal synchrony used a metronome and showed that people who tapped a beat together would align themselves and support each other. “It’s finding similarities that make you identify with somebody else, or feel part of something, and this gets back to community, to being a part of something that’s greater than yourself,” Doty said.

The predisposition to feel compassion toward people in our in-group, but not our out-group, may be less useful in our modern society. We no longer live in small communities near people we have known and trusted all our lives; the world is wider and more accessible, and perhaps more threatening. But scientists are finding that even what is traditionally perceived as “bad” behavior can lead to greater good: A recent CCARE-funded study shows how gossip and ostracism encourage cooperation in groups. A seemingly anti-social behavior has, in the long run, positive results on community relations, by protecting cooperators from being exploited. The existence of selfish individuals and behaviors, then, may also play a role in encouraging the rest of us to be better.

Sitting in his office, Doty said the goal for his center is to translate what has evolutionarily occurred—our tendency to feel connection to family, to tribe, to nation—to extend to a common idea of the world being our collective home. “We have to go from this viewpoint that our family is defined by our mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle”—he thumped his desk—“to saying the world is my home. And not be overwhelmed by that, to have a sense of open-heartedness about that. That’s what’s going to save our humanity.”

Not long ago, Doty struck up a casual friendship with a clerk at a San Francisco coffee shop he frequented. He learned she was a single mother with a 9-year-old child and that her dream was to be a doctor. She had dropped out of college but was working to get back. Every once in a while Doty asked how her effort was progressing, and eventually wrote her a letter of recommendation. “Here, with little effort, I was able to have an effect on a person’s life,” Doty said. “To me, that’s an immense satisfaction.” Material riches had provided Doty with a consistent thrill, he said. But they were no match for the “helper’s high.” The coffee clerk is now in med school.

Bonnie Tsui is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and the Atlantic.

Republished with revisions from Nautilus.

VIDEO: Amma Speaks at Stanford

July 1, 2014 By Jenna Shapiro

Have you ever waited over an hour in line for a hug?

Mata Amritanandamayi, better known as “Amma” (or “Mother”), has devoted her life to embracing the masses through her global charities known as “Embracing the World” and her magnetic message of love and compassion. To be more specific, Amma has physically hugged more than 33 million people.

Amma’s reputation as India’s “hugging saint” and as one of the country’s preeminent spiritual leaders explains why lines stretched outside Memorial Auditorium before her visit as people waited to embrace her.

On June 2, 60-year-old Amma shared her life experiences and insights with a packed Memorial Auditorium during her conversation with James Doty, the founder and director of Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE).

“The main issue is that we believe we’re limited,” Amma said through her translator. “If we think we’re a battery, there’s a limited amount of time to be useful.”

Instead, Amma attributes her energy source to the “higher power and universal energy” to which we’re all connected. Although Amma is a Hindu leader, she said that her religion is love.

“There are many kinds of powers in the world — military power, power of the written word, intellectual power,” she said. “We’ve tried and failed to bring peace with these kind of powers. The greatest power is the power of love.”

With this deep belief in limitlessness, Amma has powered Embracing the World, a global network of projects focused on improving food, shelter, education, healthcare and conditions for impoverished populations in addition. The network also provides aid during emergencies and addresses environmental concerns. The vast majority of these efforts are conducted by volunteers and unpaid administrators, including Amma herself, who does not accept pay.

“This community really wants to make the world a better place and start with ourselves,” said Amina Janta, one of those volunteers who was in attendance yesterday. “I bet every last one of us is thinking ‘I can change the world.’ She gives you that self-confidence.”

This determination and resonant desire to change the world has clear connections to our community at Stanford. Through lunch conversations and summers spent nose-deep in research and the start-up culture, one can see that students and professors value this ideal of making a difference.

Annie Anton ‘14, a graduating psychology major and fellow at CCARE, has her own vision for change, one that is similarly rooted in true compassion. Anton first learned about Amma while doing volunteer work in Kerala, India, but she had already developed a conviction to give love.

“I went through a really hard time in high school,” Anton said. “I dealt with anxiety and depression. I thought, ‘Who am I and what is my purpose on this earth?’ It was all about me, how people would perceive me. All of a sudden, I saw the falsity of these goals and realized if other people are feeling this, I have to help them. It expanded my heart and made me want to help other people that might be feeling the same way.”

After graduation, Anton plans on doing service in Ecuador for seven months.

“I love that she’s a hugging mother,” Anton said of Amma. “I want to embody that motherly energy as well.”

Amma’s complete dedication to others and her message of benevolence can be profoundly contagious.

Dante Sawyer, a member of Amma’s organization who has worked with her since 2000, expressed his personal experience with this inspiration.

“In Amma, I’ve seen the full capacity of a human being to give themselves,” he said. “Sometimes you can think that the extent to which she is giving is a bit extreme — her entire life dedicated to other people — but I think it’s that extreme example that inspires other people to think, while she’s giving 100 percent, maybe I can give five percent or 10 percent or a little bit more than I’ve been giving.”

In the aftermath of Doty’s conversation with Amma, a palpable sense of compassion filled the auditorium’s space. People offered wide, toothy smiles and considerately cleared the walkways for each other.

“Compassion is the first step,” Amma said. “If we take that first step without fear, all else will follow spontaneously. It’s a chain reaction. It starts to go from one person to the next to the next, and it makes a huge difference.”

Experience Amma’s talk for yourself by watching it here.

Jenna Shapiro is a student at Stanford University.

Reprinted with revisions from Stanford Daily.

OPINION: Compassionately Vegan

July 1, 2014 By Eric Walton

As conventionally defined, compassion is the awareness of the suffering of all sentient beings, accompanied by the desire to alleviate that suffering. In The Compassionate Mind scientist and compassion researcher Dr. Paul Gilbert writes: “Compassion can be defined in many ways, but its essence is a basic kindness, with a deep awareness of the suffering of oneself of other living things, coupled with the wish and effort to relieve it.” It is a fact of biology and a matter of pure common sense that both animals and humans possess the capacity to suffer. Just like us, animals strive to avoid pain. Their reactions to pain and confinement, though not expressed in spoken language as we understand it, are easily recognizable as suffering. Since the capacity of non-human animals to suffer is analogous to our own, it is hard to justify denying compassion to them. Any definition of compassion that does not encompass all sentient beings is therefore incomplete.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in the essay On The Basis of Morality (Über die Grundlage der Moral) published in 1840 “Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.” The sense in which Schopenhauer intended the word “universal” is made clear by the preceding line: “The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity.” Both modern day scientist Gilbert and eighteenth century philosopher Schopenhauer explicitly include animals in their definition of compassion. Animals possess all the traits that we relate to the right to compassion and moral consideration: sentience, intelligence, the ability to form social and familial bonds, and sensitivity to pain.

If one accepts that compassion, in order to be true compassion, must involve consideration for and a desire to alleviate the suffering of all animals, both human and non-human, then it naturally follows that one must not abuse or mistreat them. This point seems too obvious to need articulating, but if we accept it, then we must also embrace the corollary notion that abusing animals by proxy is equally incompatible with a compassionate existence. In other words, it will not do to merely refrain from direct acts of abuse or violence toward animals; we must also withdraw our support, both morally and practically, from those enterprises, that lead to the abuse and the oppression of other sentient beings. For is there an appreciable difference, either morally or practically, between committing an act of violence oneself and paying someone else to do it on one’s behalf?

Though in the latter case, one is not the direct agent of the violence, one is nonetheless equally culpable and complicit in it. No amount of distance between a person and the act of violence that he has paid or induced someone else to perform on his behalf will extricate him from the moral implications of the deed itself. Commissioning an act of violence is the moral equivalent of committing it. As the English writer and social reformer Henry Stephens Salt stated in Volume III of his Humanitarian Essays, “The ignorance, carelessness, and brutality are not only in the rough-handed slaughterman, but in the polite ladies and gentlemen whose dietetic habits render the slaughterman necessary. The real responsibility rests not on the wage slave, but on the employer. ‘I’m only doing your dirty work’, was the reply of the Whitechapel butcher to a gentleman … ‘It’s such as you makes such as us.’”

That the production of meat, eggs, and dairy involves tremendous suffering on the part of tens of billions of animals every year is both inescapable and incontestable. To take just one example, in the United States alone, eight-billion chickens are slaughtered for human consumption every year. That amounts to twenty-three-million chickens every twenty-four hours, or two-hundred and sixty-nine chickens who are slaughtered every single second of every single day. By the time you finish reading this sentence, more than a thousand chickens in the United States alone will have had their throats slit in order to satiate the gastronomic preferences of human beings.

A diet that includes meat, eggs, and dairy supports violence and cruelty on an enormous scale, and is thus incongruent with the aspirations to lead a compassionate existence. Buying animals products is supporting an industry that harms animals on a daily basis, helping that industry thrive. For how can we cultivate concern for the suffering of others and aspire to alleviate that suffering while at the same time demanding that sentient beings by the billions sacrifice every trace of their liberty and pay with their very lives for our sensory pleasure and the caprices of our palates? Eating animals is not a matter of survival for us – it is possible to lead a healthy, balanced, vegan diet – but it is a matter of life or death for them.

The cultivation of compassion requires that we be mindful of our intentions. Mindfulness of this kind requires constant effort and although lapses of attention are inevitable, mealtime should not provide three opportunities a day to disengage mindfulness and insulate oneself from the suffering of others. Quite the opposite. Whenever we sit down to eat, we are making a choice: either to alleviate suffering or to perpetuate it – either to reduce harm or to cause it. If we are motivated by compassion, or at least the desire to not do harm, the choice is clear.

Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality and those of us concerned with cultivating compassion in ourselves and in others mustn’t allow our notion of “universal” to be restricted to our own species. Extending our circles of compassion to all sentient beings means leading a vegan life-style.

Eric Walton is an activist, writer, performer, and photo-journalist. His writing has been published in American Vegan Magazine, Soho Life Magazine, and on the Lincoln Center Institute blog. His photographs have appeared on the pages of the Village Voice, Metro News, the New York Daily News, and the New York Times. He is also the founder of Vegan Future Now, a grass-roots organization dedicated to vegan advocacy, education, and culture. He took Stanford’s Compassion Cultivation Training at Tibet House in the spring of 2014.