Archives for June 2015

How to Transform Hostility into Compassion

June 1, 2015 By Jacob Gotwals

When we view others with hostility, we’re more likely to try to get our needs met at their expense. Transforming our hostility into compassion can shift our approach to conflict, allowing us to respond in ways that are more beneficial for everyone involved. (By hostility, I mean those strategies, impulses and habits that tend to arise within us when we view others as bad, wrong, or deserving of punishment.)

Notice Your Hostility

The first step is to notice our own hostile feelings, impulses, and habits. What does hostility look like? It could include feelings such as distaste, irritation, anger, resentment, or fear, with thoughts about the wrongness or badness of someone else. We see the other person as a destructive force to be controlled. We see them as separate from ourselves—a separate, external, threatening force. Often we are focused on a limited resource, and we perceive the other person as competing with us to obtain that resource. We may find ourselves secretly or openly rejoicing at news of the other person’s misfortune.

When we see others as forces to be controlled (rather than as human beings), we are more likely to try to meet our needs at their expense. We may feel justified in this by our thoughts of the other as wrong, bad, and deserving of punishment. To the extent that we consider ourselves victims of the other’s actions, we are likely to react with righteousness. When we have this kind of thinking, our reactions may range from subtle acting out (for instance, passive-aggressively avoiding eye contact), to all-out war with other people, groups, or nations.

Cultivate Empathy and Self-Connection

Noticing we are in an hostile state of mind is the first step, but the actual transformative process involves empathy and self-connection. Our empathy does not have to involve the other’s participation. It’s all about our openness to putting ourselves in their shoes and sensing their experience—including what they are feeling and the needs that are stimulating those feelings. What’s actually going on for them? Can we appreciate the needs behind their behavior (even when we don’t like the behavior itself)?

Self-connection is also important—for centering ourselves and for preparing to seek a beneficial response. We may have been competing with the other person for certain resources; if so, our self-connection process may involve looking at any limiting beliefs we may be holding about the scarcity of those resources. We might also look at our own attachment to getting our needs met through strategies that put us in competition with the other person. What needs are we trying to meet? Can we find other ways of getting those needs met?

Letting go of our view of the other person as bad and wrong may raise a possibility that may feel scary and difficult to face: in our righteousness, we may have acted in ways that we regret. Can we forgive ourselves for these things, and can we forgive the other person for actions and reactions that may not have been skillful?

Respond to the Situation

Releasing our hostility opens the possibility of responding to the situation in a more beneficial way. Any response is possible—we may choose to increase or decrease our involvement with the other. If we choose to increase our involvement, we might initiate an honest conversation with the other person. Or, we may choose to reduce our involvement, choosing other strategies for meeting our needs. We may choose to take steps to protect ourselves—not out of hostility or a desire to punish, but with compassion for both ourselves and the other person. (Compassion is not incompatible with discernment and clarity about our own boundaries.)

Sometimes I may choose a strategy of reducing or ending my involvement with another, when I don’t see that involvement as beneficial. But I still want to remain connected with them, in the sense of having a compassionate openness to their humanity. I want to continue to value their needs, whether or not I am involved with them or actively communicating with them.

This article originally appeared in https://www.swc.edu.

Seven Compassion Practices

June 1, 2015 By Leo Babauta

Morning ritual. Greet each morning with a ritual. Try this one, suggest by the Dalai Lama: “Today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others, I am going to benefit others as much as I can.” Then, when you’ve done this, try one of the practices below.

Empathy Practice. The first step in cultivating compassion is to develop empathy for your fellow human beings. Many of us believe that we have empathy, and on some level nearly all of us do. But many times we are centered on ourselves (I’m no exception) and we let our sense of empathy get rusty. Try this practice: Imagine that a loved one is suffering. Something terrible has happened to him or her. Now try to imagine the pain they are going through. Imagine the suffering in as much detail as possible. After doing this practice for a couple of weeks, you should try moving on to imagining the suffering of others you know, not just those who are close to you.

Commonalities practice. Instead of recognizing the differences between yourself and others, try to recognize what you have in common. At the root of it all, we are all human beings. We need food, and shelter, and love. We crave attention, and recognition, and affection, and above all, happiness. Reflect on these commonalities you have with every other human being, and ignore the differences. One of my favorite exercises comes from a great article from Ode Magazine — it’s a five-step exercise to try when you meet friends and strangers. Do it discreetly and try to do all the steps with the same person. With your attention geared to the other person, tell yourself:

Step 1: “Just like me, this person is seeking happiness in his/her life.”

Step 2: “Just like me, this person is trying to avoid suffering in his/her life.”
Step 3: “Just like me, this person has known sadness, loneliness and despair.”
Step 4: “Just like me, this person is seeking to fill his/her needs.”
Step 5: “Just like me, this person is learning about life.”

Relief of suffering practice. Once you can empathize with another person, and understand his humanity and suffering, the next step is to want that person to be free from suffering. This is the heart of compassion — actually the definition of it. Try this exercise: Imagine the suffering of a human being you’ve met recently. Now imagine that you are the one going through that suffering. Reflect on how much you would like that suffering to end. Reflect on how happy you would be if another human being desired your suffering to end, and acted upon it. Open your heart to that human being and if you feel even a little that you’d want their suffering to end, reflect on that feeling. That’s the feeling that you want to develop. With constant practice, that feeling can be grown and nurtured.

Act of kindness practice. Now that you’ve gotten good at the 4th practice, take the exercise a step further. Imagine again the suffering of someone you know or met recently. Imagine again that you are that person, and are going through that suffering. Now imagine that another human being would like your suffering to end — perhaps your mother or another loved one. What would you like for that person to do to end your suffering? Now reverse roles: you are the person who desires for the other person’s suffering to end. Imagine that you do something to help ease the suffering, or end it completely. Once you get good at this stage, practice doing something small each day to help end the suffering of others, even in a tiny way. Even a smile, or a kind word, or doing an errand or chore, or just talking about a problem with another person. Practice doing something kind to help ease the suffering of others. When you are good at this, find a way to make it a daily practice, and eventually a throughout-the-day practice.

Those who mistreat us practice. The final stage in these compassion practices is to not only want to ease the suffering of those we love and meet, but even those who mistreat us. When we encounter someone who mistreats us, instead of acting in anger, withdraw. Later, when you are calm and more detached, reflect on that person who mistreated you. Try to imagine the background of that person. Try to imagine what that person was taught as a child. Try to imagine the day or week that person was going through, and what kind of bad things had happened to that person. Try to imagine the mood and state of mind that person was in — the suffering that person must have been going through to mistreat you that way. And understand that their action was not about you, but about what they were going through. Now think some more about the suffering of that poor person, and see if you can imagine trying to stop the suffering of that person. And then reflect that if you mistreated someone, and they acted with kindness and compassion toward you, whether that would make you less likely to mistreat that person the next time, and more likely to be kind to that person. Once you have mastered this practice of reflection, try acting with compassion and understanding the next time a person treats you. Do it in little doses, until you are good at it. Practice makes perfect.

Evening routine. I highly recommend that you take a few minutes before you go to bed to reflect upon your day. Think about the people you met and talked to, and how you treated each other. Think about your goal that you stated this morning, to act with compassion towards others. How well did you do? What could you do better? What did you learn from your experiences today? And if you have time, try one of the above practices and exercises.

This article was originally published by http://downtheforestpath.com/.

Training Compassion

June 1, 2015 By John Hoffmire

Compassion, often reckoned to be the “highest personal virtue,” is held to embody the very essence of humanity. It is widely attributed to play a fundamental role in pro-social behavior, cooperation and human morality. But there is compelling evidence that the “compassionate instinct” to care and cooperate is not the sole preserve of humans. Across species — from elaborate elephant funeral rituals to kindness of dolphins in rescuing swimmers from sharks and guiding stranded whales back to sea — compassion is vividly manifested in a range of settings. As Darwin surmised long ago — sympathy is our strongest instinct.

A revealing experiment by Elizabeth Dunn, published in Science, showed that participants who had spent money on others felt significantly happier than those who had spent the money on themselves. Brain imaging studies reveal that compassion activates the “pleasure centers” of the brain associated with reward. Steve Cole has found that social connection strengthens our immune system as the genes impacted by social connection are the same ones responsible for immune function. We are designed to care and to connect. By helping others we help ourselves, improving our health and even our longevity. “Survival of the kindest” is more apt for the collective flourishing of our species than “survival of the fittest.”

And yet, in innumerable contexts, self-serving interests can override compassion as we are overwhelmed by the stresses, pressures and experiences of everyday life. Loneliness, isolation and depression can, in part, be explained by a decline in social connectedness — 25 percent of Americans say that they have no one in whom to confide. The consequent stress exacts significant costs. There is a 46 percent increase in health care costs associated with workplace stress. By one estimate, stress in the workplace costs corporations approximately $7,500 per employee per year.

However, the good news is that although compassion is a naturally evolved and adaptive trait, it can be deepened by training and elicited quite rapidly. Developments in neuroscience have shown that the brain is plastic and malleable, offering the promise of change, growth and understanding. Interventions such as the Stanford Compassion Cultivation Training Program, a completely secular synthesis of Eastern contemplative practices and Western psychology, can help change how we respond to adversity. The training emphasizes compassion, both to oneself and others, and thereby activates perspective and resilience indispensable to effective decision-making and moral sensibilities.

Research by Northeastern University professor David DeSteno suggests that a sense of connection with others is more likely to make us compassionate.

Compassion training extends beyond merely invoking empathy and concern for others but seeks to infuse the strength to be present with suffering, the courage to take compassionate action, and the flexibility to prevent compassion fatigue. These qualities, in turn, support a broad array of goals such as improving personal and professional relationships and making a positive difference in the world.

Compassion is not limited to the personal level of our individual relationships but can also permeate the interaction of societies and cultures with one another. In substantive ways, the vicious cycles of poverty, ecological catastrophe and wars also arise from the lack of compassion. Of course compassion, on its own, will not totally overcome all that afflicts people, individually and collectively. However, it will certainly dictate the fate of our world in significant ways. As social psychologist and sociologist Rob Willer says, “Given how much is to be gained through generosity, social scientists increasingly wonder less why people are ever generous and more why they are ever selfish.”

John Hoffmire is director of the Impact Bond Fund at Saïd Business School at Oxford University and directs the Center on Business and Poverty at the Wisconsin School of Business at UW-Madison. He runs Progress Through Business, a nonprofit group promoting economic development. Pankaj Upadhyay, Hoffmire’s colleague at Progress Through Business, did the research for this article.
This article was originally published at national.deseretnews.com.

Golden Rule and Development

June 1, 2015 By Andrea Gunn

A go-to tactic for many parents when trying to get their children to examine their own behaviour is to ask them to put themselves in the shoes of others.

The results of a recent psychological study show that approach is pretty effective.

A joint study between Dalhousie University Dean of science Chris Moore and Markus Paulus of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich, published in the journal Social Development, shows that children as young as three can anticipate negative feelings in others and adjust their own behaviour in response.

In the study, children aged three to six were divided into three groups. One group was asked to think about how they feel when someone shares with them or not, and the second was asked about their feelings and about how someone else might feel in the same situation. The third group, the control, was not asked about emotions.

The children were then asked to perform an experimental task in which they were given the option to share stickers with a fictional child.

In the end, children who were encouraged to spend time thinking about their feelings and the feelings of others were more likely to share than the control group.

“If you think about how parents encourage pro-social behaviour with their kids, they’ll often say things like ‘How do you think Jenny felt when you did that?’ That’s actually a pretty good strategy,” Moore said.

“Perspective taking becomes very important.”

The study was an extension of social development research that has been taking place at Dalhousie under Moore, a developmental psychology expert, for the last 20 years. Using simple sharing experiments, Moore has been trying to get a larger picture of what factors influence what’s referred to as pro-social behaviour in children.

“We’re primarily interested in the development of social behaviour and social understanding, so how young children develop the ability to interact with other people in socially appropriate ways and how they understand other people,” Moore said.

Inside Dalhousie’s Life Sciences Centre, a room filled with toys, books and games sits amid corridors of offices and classrooms, bright decals in the hallways contrasting with the drab white walls. It’s the waiting area for kids that come through for testing, Moore said.

In the experiment room, there’s more of the same; a child-sized table with matching chairs sits in the middle.

Though the experiments differ depending on what Moore and his colleagues are studying, the basic task stays consistent.

A child is given a laminated piece of construction paper divided into two columns, each topped with a stick figure, one side representing them and the other a sharing partner. The child is then asked to distribute the resources — always stickers — with the partner however they choose.

In one experiment, the child is asked to think of their best friend and someone they know but aren’t friends with. They are then given the option to share their stickers with both. More often than not, Moore said, the child will share with a friend more than someone they don’t like or a stranger.

“What’s interesting is it’s unlikely they would have acquired that pattern of preferential behaviour from parenting because parents don’t tell children to treat people differently, and yet they still do it,” Moore said.

In another study, a child is shown a video of a little girl who is distraught because she recently lost her dog and another video of a child who is not sad, then asked to share with each. That experiment showed children are more likely to share with the sad child, suggesting that feeling empathy for someone has an effect on pro-social behaviour.

Other experiments show children can be more likely to share with a partner who has similar interests, and envy also plays a role.

The German study showed that thinking about emotions, not just feeling them, also influences sharing behaviour.

“The general point is you can affect children’s pro-social behaviour, how generous they are, by manipulating a number of things,” Moore said.

Moore said plenty of research has been completed, but there hasn’t been a lot looking at factors that influence responses.

He said getting a more complete picture of how these complex thought processes work could be helpful in determining how to encourage pro-social behaviour.

“If we can understand these kinds of things then potentially we can support that in terms of how we parent and how we educate kids.”

This article first appeared in http://thechronicleherald.ca/.