Personal Story | Compassion Journal

Matthieu Ricard and the Altruism Revolution

August 15, 2015 By Carolyn Gregoire

Matthieu Ricard has lived many lives.

As a young student in Paris during the late 1960s, he was writing his dissertation in biochemistry at the prestigious Institute Pasteur. Five years later, guided by an inner stirring to explore a deeper side of life, he was living Darjeeling, India, where he had moved to study under a Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader.

After his initial departure to India in 1972, Ricard spent many years living in silent contemplation in the Himalayas. This period of retreat ended when he published The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Live, a book based on a series of conversations with his father, philosopher Jean-Francois Revel.

Those father-son conversations were to become the first of many dialogues between East and West that have defined Ricard’s illustrious career. The beloved monk and humanitarian continues to bridge many worlds: those of spirituality and science, East and West, ancient beliefs and modern times. He has spoken at Dharamsala and the World Economic Forum at Davos; has worked with leaders ranging from the Dalai Lama to LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner to neuroscientist Richard Davidson; and has connected with millions of people through popular TED Talks while also living a quiet life his home country of Nepal.

With his many titles — including humanitarian, best-selling author, scientist and photographer — Ricard is uniquely poised to succeed at his current project: inspiring us all to act for the benefit of others.

His latest book, Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, runs over 600 pages and has more than 1,600 scientific references. The tour de force brings together science, religion and history to explore the nature of compassion. For Ricard, exploring altruism — the selfless concern for the well-being of others — was a natural next step after last book on happiness.

“It’s a natural effect: You are open and kind to others, and without even noticing, you are happy,” Ricard told The Huffington Post over the phone from his mother’s home in France. “If you’re only preoccupied with yourself, even though you’re trying to be happy, you turn your back to happiness and you make yourself miserable. Either you get a win-win situation or a lose-lose situation.”

matthieu ricard

Ricard argues that altruism is hard-wired into the human brain, and he describes this innate capacity to care for others as the answer to the greatest challenges facing our world today.

The book suggests that cultivating altruism on both an individual and societal level is the only way to bridge the “schizophrenic dialogue” between society’s immediate needs and its long-term interests. Where we’ve gone wrong, Ricard says, is in sacrificing the well-being of future generations and the environment in order to satisfy our present desires.

Acting with altruism is the only way to address the short-term, mid-term and long-term needs of society, Ricard told HuffPost Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington during a recent conversation at the publication’s New York City headquarters. “The simple notion of having more consideration for others can reconcile those three time scales,” he said.

In a competitive, individualistic culture, it’s easy to dismiss altruism as a pie-in-the-sky utopian ideal. But, Ricard argues, the ability to care about others may be the very thing that keeps our species alive.

Altruism As An Evolutionary Advantage

Scientists and philosophers have long debated whether humans are fundamentally good, or driven solely by selfishness. Academics have often struggled to find a place for altruism within the theory of Darwinian evolution — you know, the idea that individuals ruthlessly compete against each other for scarce resources, with only the strongest going on to thrive and reproduce — largely because it often implies a cost to the individual.

But the story isn’t that simple.

“Altruists should logically be the eternal losers in the struggle for life. However, that is far from the reality,” Ricard writes, noting that in our long history of living as hunter-gatherers in small cooperative tribes, mutual aid was indeed beneficial to the survival of each individual as well as the group.

He points to a large body of evidence, including the influential work of Harvard evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, that suggests reciprocal aid is vital to the survival of a species, and that those who help others rather than fighting against them may turn out to be the evolutionary winners.

Although academics continue to argue about whether humans are naturally egoistic or altruistic, modern research has suggested that the tendency to care for others is indeed innate to human nature.

Case in point: A 2007 brain-scanning study by neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health asked volunteers to think about a scenario in which they would either give money away to a good cause or keep it for themselves. The researchers were stunned to find that imagining giving the money away activated a primal part of the brain that normally lights up in response to food or sex — suggesting that morality is not only natural to us, but deeply pleasurable.

Your Brain On Compassion

Even if altruism is in some way hard-wired in the brain, that doesn’t mean it’s always easy for us to exercise compassion in our daily lives. Scientists are showing that through a systematic training of the mind, we can boost our capacity for empathy and compassionate behavior — and by extension, our own happiness and mental well-being.

Ricard tends to laugh off the infamous title he earned several years ago in a neuroscience study: the “happiest man in the world.” It’s not completely off-base, though. When University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson hooked up EEG sensors to Ricard’s brain while the monk meditated on “unconditional loving-kindness and compassion,” he recorded levels of gamma waves (which may be associated with compassion and calm attention) “never before reported in the neuroscience literature.”

It seems like the decades Ricard has spent meditating on compassion have led to measurable, and indeed extraordinary, changes in his brain.

That fact that meditation can create significant neural changes is now well-known, and a growing body of research shedding light on the benefits of compassion meditation in particular. Known as lovingkindness (“metta”) meditation, the practice that has been touted by Buddhists for over 2,500 years involves reflecting on the suffering of all living beings and wishing to relieve that suffering.

In a 2008 study conducted by positive psychologist Barbara Frederickson, 140 healthy adults who had little to no previous experience with meditation were given training in lovingkindness meditation and asked to practice 20 minutes daily for seven weeks. Compared to a control group, the new meditators reported feeling more love, serenity and joy in their daily lives. They also showed improvements in physical health, including vagal tone, a measurement of heart rate and fight-or-flight response.

At Stanford, research being conducted at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) is showing that compassion training, which includes lovingkindess meditation, to be effective in boosting altruism as well as improving physical and emotional well-being.

“Connecting with others in a meaningful way helps us enjoy better mental and physical health and speeds up recovery from disease,” Emma Seppala, a psychologist at Stanford and scientific director of CCARE, said. “It can even lengthen our lives.”

Citing recent brain imaging studies, Seppala added, “The reason a compassionate lifestyle leads to greater psychological well-being may be explained by the fact that the act of giving appears to be as pleasurable, if not more so, as the act of receiving.”

Based on both this modern research and ancient Buddhist wisdom, Ricard sees altruism as an important antidote to unhappiness. As the eighth-century Buddhist monk Shantideva famously said, all suffering comes from the wish for ourselves to be happy, and all happiness comes from the wish for others to be happy. Indeed, psychiatry research has shown negative self-focus to be at the root of some mental illnesses.

But selfishness is also at the core of many of the most pressing social issues of our times, Ricard argues.

“Selfishness is at the heart of most of the problems we face today: the growing gap between rich and poor, the attitude of ‘everybody for himself’ which is only increasing, and indifference about generations to come,” he writes.

By cultivating compassion, we can improve our own well-being, while also mediating not only humanitarian but also environmental crises.

“If we care for others, and for future generations, we are not going to destroy the planet we’ve been given,” Ricard says.

The Altruism Revolution

While meditation is a good first step toward cultivating compassion on a personal and social level, Ricard stresses it shouldn’t be the end goal.

“Meditation gives you more inner strength and confidence, and if you don’t feel vulnerable, you can put that to the service of others,” he said. “So it’s not just about sitting and cultivating caring mindfulness. It’s building up a way of being and then using it for the service of others.”

Ricard himself doesn’t just meditate on compassion — he’s long been putting it in action. For the past 15 years, his humanitarian foundation, Karuna Shechen, has built schools and hospitals across India, Nepal and Tibet. The organization has managed over 140 humanitarian projects in the Himalayas, and most recently focused its attention on bringing relief to thousands of Nepalis displaced by the earthquake.

Though a relatively small operation, Karuna Shechen has managed to help 220,000 people in 550 villages in Nepal, providing up to 30 days’ worth of food rations for each individual, medical assistance when needed, basic weather protection, seeds so that they can grow crops again, and offering protection to women and children who may be at risk for trafficking.

Despite the grave challenges facing the world today, Ricard remains optimistic about the influence of the ongoing “altruism revolution.”

While researching for his book, Ricard says, he noticed a widespread change in attitudes.

“I saw this shift happening in basically every discipline I encountered, from psychology to economics, through evolutionary theories,” Ricard said. “You see the revolution of the [nongovernmental organizations], that has already happened. You see vibrant sectors of the economy, like crowdfunding, impact investing, socially and environmentally responsible farming, cooperative banking, micro credit, social business. And you see more and more books on empathy and compassion. The big picture is emerging in that direction.”

More and more everyday people, too, are committing to finding small ways to make a difference in their communities, Ricard says — starting with practicing kindness.

“You can always have an impact, there are so many ways to do so,” he said. “Everyone has skills that they can put to the service of some NGOs or volunteer work. It doesn’t have to be in Sudan or the Himalayas, it can be right here in your neighborhood.”

This article first appeared in http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.

The Compassionate Brain: A Personal Story

July 15, 2015 By Helen Weng

It takes strength to be gentle and kind.

In high school, I was of the only racial minorities. I was bullied for this, leaving me feeling disconnected and isolated. To cope, I became obsessed with sad music like The Smiths, who were one of my favourite bands.

One Morrissey lyric became a mantra for me: “It’s so easy to laugh. It’s so easy to hate. It takes strength to be gentle and kind.”

Through music, I found a framework in which to feel and hold my pain. I listened in a meditative way until the feelings of sadness and pain turned into connection, beauty, and ultimately joy.

I had a choice in how to respond to teasing. I could choose kindness and compassion, for myself and others. I could try to connect to the harassers in a genuine way rather than slinging words back, and I could comfort myself instead of repeating the cycle of shame and dehumanization.

One word I used to label the space I had found was transformation, another word was compassion. Reading books on Buddhist philosophy, I learned compassion could be trained, that we could become more connected to others and that this would lead to greater well-being.

Compassion is an emotional response to someone’s suffering that is caring and concerned. It leads to a desire to relieve that person’s suffering. This is not always a natural response. People can have a variety of responses to others’ suffering – avoidance, fear, discomfort, sometimes even enjoyment.

But can compassion be learned through practice?

As a graduate student I designed and conducted a study testing this exact hypothesis: that we can become more compassionate through practicing meditation, and that this will result in more kind acts towards others. I hypothesized this wouldn’t take extreme amounts of practice.

As part of the study, people from the Madison, Wisconsin community practiced just 30 minutes a day for two weeks, like a new exercise regime.

Guided by an online meditation, the participants practiced compassion for different kinds of people: a loved one, themselves, a stranger, and someone they actually had conflict with: the “difficult” person. They practiced imagining a time when each person had suffered, and noticed the emotions that arose and what it felt like in their bodies. They were instructed to “sit” with the feelings, and notice them non-judgmentally.

They then practiced wishing that the other person’s suffering was relieved, and repeated compassion-generating phrases such as, “May you be free from suffering. May you have joy and ease.”

The control group learned a technique called cognitive reappraisal, where they practiced thinking about a stressful situation in a new way to decrease negative emotional responses. They used techniques such as thinking about the situation from a friend or family member’s perspective, imagining a year had passed with everything going well, and coming up with a way to reinterpret the situation. This is one of the core skills of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is found to be effective with many types of mental health issues such as depression and anxiety.

We tested our hypothesis – that practicing compassion through meditation would result in more helping behaviour in real life – by having participants consent to a separate study where they play an economic exchange game with strangers over the Internet. In the Redistribution Game, participants witnessed an unfair economic exchange between two players, and had the opportunity to spend their own money to redistribute money from the unfair player to the player with less money.

After practicing compassion meditation for just two weeks, the participants ended up spending almost twice the amount of money compared to the control group (a statistically significant difference). Practicing compassion in their minds actually resulted in more altruistic behavior towards a stranger.

We wanted to see what emotional changes in the brain contributed to the changes in altruistic behavior. We scanned the participants’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and had them view images of others suffering (physical injury, emotional pain) before and after the two weeks of training. The compassion group was asked to generate compassion towards the people in the images, and the reappraisal group was asked to reinterpret the meaning of the pictures to decrease negative emotions. We found that in the compassion group, the more they spent in the Redistribution Game, the more their brain activity had changed in response to people’s suffering. Changing their minds internally had indeed changed the outside world.

We found changes in regions associated with empathy, emotion regulation and reward processing. One region that changed was the inferior parietal cortex, which is associated with the “mirror neuron network”, and activated in response to your own experiences as well as others’.

This suggests that through learning compassion, people became more sensitive to other people’s suffering. The purpose is to not simply feel another’s pain, but to transform your own response in order to help the other person. We also found changes in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens, which are respectively involved in emotion regulation and positive emotions. This suggests that emotional habits can be transformed into something more positive – an emotional connection and caring.

As Morrissey sang, “It takes strength to be gentle and kind.” It takes awareness, commitment, and practice to change habits of mind into something more beneficial for yourself and others. Learning any new skill requires attention, effort, and persistence, and this is often associated with activity in the prefrontal cortex. It takes strength to open yourself up to another’s suffering, to hold it and understand it, and to have the desire to relieve it through appropriate means.

Through my work as a clinical psychologist, I have witnessed first-hand the power of compassion. I learned to actively listen and respond to people’s stories in a way that allowed their authentic voices to arise. What emerged from empowering their voices was an experience of transformation that was no longer just a private moment of listening to sad music.

I transformed sadness into joy with other people, and this has changed me in turn.

This article first appeared in https://www.opendemocracy.net.

I Thanked the Fish

April 1, 2015 By Christopher Stager

I went for a run along the East River yesterday. I passed a group of fisherman. One of them must have caught a fish and left it alive, flapping around on the floor next to his tackle box. The fish was bleeding out of a belly wound. I slowed down and contemplated interfering. However, since my experience with these situations has been that I end up in a fight, I decided to mind my own business.

On my way back, still running, I decided that if the fish was still alive and flapping around I was going to stop and confront the fisherman.

Well the fish was still flopping, had lost a lot of blood by now and the fisherman was seemingly unaware of this gruesome scenario. So I stopped and said to the fisherman: “Please kill this fish now or throw it back into the water. And if you don’t, I will. You are torturing the fish. This is against the law, and I will also call the cops.”

The Asian fisherman did not understand what I was saying until one of his buddies came to translate and I used sign language. He then reluctantly picked up the fish and snapped its neck. I said thank you and bowed to the fisherman. At that point all the fishermen were standing around us and it turned into a bowing fest.

I smiled, said thank you again and resumed my run.

I led my interference with “please”, I smiled and I bowed. I attribute the outcome of this story to CCT class. It contains in itself many aspects of what compassion training has been teaching us.

I thanked the fish.

Christopher Stager is a writer and landscape architect living in New York City.

Habits of Highly Compassionate Men

March 1, 2015 By Kozo Hattori

I remember being a very compassionate child. While watching “The Little House on the Prairie,” I cried my eyes out when Laura couldn’t give Pa a Christmas gift. But 12 years of physical abuse and being forced to the confines of the “act-like-a-man box” wrung most of that compassion out of me by the time I reached adulthood.

Although I was what therapists call “high-functioning,” my lack of compassion was like a cancer that poisoned my friendships, relationships, business affairs, and life. At the age of 46, I hit rock bottom. Unemployed and on the verge of divorce, I found myself slapping my four-year-old son’s head when he wouldn’t listen to me.

As a survivor of abuse, I had promised myself that I would never lay a hand on my children, but here I was abusing my beloved son.

Dr. Ted Zeff believes that only compassionate men can save the planet.

I knew I had to change. I started withempathy, which led me to compassion. I committed to a daily meditation practice, took the CCARE Cultivating Compassionclass at Stanford University, and completed a 10-day silent meditation retreat. I read and researched everything I could find on compassion.

I found that the more compassion I felt, the happier I became.

Convinced that I had found an essential ingredient to a happy and peaceful life, I started to interview scientific and spiritual experts on compassion, trying to find out what made a compassionate man. Interviewees included Dr. Dacher Keltner, co-founder of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center; Dr. James Doty, founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University; Dr. Rick Hanson, author of Hardwiring Happiness; Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence; and Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen Buddhist monk nominated by Martin Luther King Jr. for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967.

From these interviews and research, I compiled a list of what makes a compassionate man.

1. Learn to see compassion as strength

Most events I attend that discuss compassion are predominately attended by women. When I asked Thich Nhat Hanh how we could make compassion more attractive to men, he answered, “There must be a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of compassion because compassion is very powerful … Compassion protects us more than guns, bombs, and money.”

Although many men in society see compassion and sympathy as feminine—which translates to a weakness in our patriarchal society—all of the compassionate men I interviewed view compassion as a strength.

Dr. Hanson noted how compassion makes one more courageous since compassion strengthens the heart—courage comes from the French word “coeur,” which means heart. Dacher Keltner argues that Darwin believed in “survival of the kindest,” not the fittest. Dr. Ted Zeff, author of the book Raise an Emotionally Healthy Boy, believes that only compassionate men can save the planet. Zeff argues that “the time has come to break the outdated, rigid male code that insists that all men should be aggressive, thick-skinned, and unemotional”—an excellent description of the act-like-a-man box that I tried to live in.

The compassionate men I interviewed agree with the Dalai Lama when he said, “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”

2. Have compassionate role models

All of the compassionate men seemed to have role models that supported their compassion instinct. Marc Brackett gives credit to his uncle, Marvin Maurer, who was a social studies teacher trying to instill emotional intelligence in his students before the term “emotional intelligence” was coined. Over 30 years after teaching in middle school, Maurer’s “Feeling Words Curriculum” acts as a key component of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence’s RULER program. Similarly, Marshall Rosenberg, author of the book Nonviolent Communication, constantly mentions his compassionate uncle who cared for his dying grandmother.

A role model doesn’t necessarily have to be living, or even real. Chade-Meng Tan, author of Search Inside Yourself, cites Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Gandhi as a role model for compassion. Dr. Rick Hanson posits Ender from the science-fiction novel Ender’s Gameas a compassionate role model. Certainly, Jesus and Buddha are obvious role models of compassion. The key is to treat them like role models.

Role models are not meant to be worshiped, deified, or prayed to. They are meant to be emulated. They pave the way for us to walk a similar path. Can we turn the other cheek and love our enemies like Jesus asked us? Can we transcend our ego and see all things as one, like the Buddha did?

In contrast are individuals who were not guided by positive role models. In his book From Wild Man to Wise Man, Franciscan friar Richard Rohr describes what he calls “father hunger”: “Thousands and thousands of men, young and old … grew up without a good man’s love, without a father’s understanding and affirmation.” Rohr, who was a jail chaplain for 14 years, claims that “the only universal pattern I found with men and women in jail was that they did not have a good father.”

Scott Kriens, former CEO of Juniper Networks and founder/director of the 1440 Foundation, concurs: “The most powerful thing we can do for our children is be the example we can hope for.”

3. Strive to transcend gender stereotypes

All of the compassionate men interviewed broke out of the “act-like-a-man” box. At a certain point in his life, Dr. Rick Hanson realized that he was too left-brained, so he made a conscious effort to reconnect with his intuitive, emotional side. When Elad Levinson, program director for Spirit Rock Meditation Center, first encountered loving-kindness and compassion practices, his first reaction was one he claims is fairly typical for men: “Come on! You are being a wuss, Levinson. No way are you going to sit here and wish yourself well.” So the actual practice of compassion instigated his breaking free from gender stereotypes.

Ted Zeff cites a study that found infant boys are more emotionally reactive than infant girls, but by the time a boy reaches five or six years old “he’s learned to repress every emotion except anger, because anger is the only emotion society tells a boy he is allowed to have.” If society restricts men’s emotional spectrum to anger alone, then it is obvious men need to transcend this conditioning to become compassionate.

Dr. Doty points to artificially defined roles as a major problem in our society because they prevent men from showing their vulnerability. “If you can’t be vulnerable, you can’t love,” says Doty. Vulnerability is a key to freedom from the “act-like-a-man” box, for it allows men to remove the armor of masculinity and authentically connect with others.

Both Dr. Doty and Scott Kriens emphasize authenticity as a necessary pathway to compassion. Kriens defines authenticity as “when someone is sharing what they believe as opposed to what they want you to believe.” This opens the door to compassion and true connection with others.

4. Cultivate emotional intelligence

In his book Raising Cain, Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson argue that most boys are raised to be emotionally ignorant: “Lacking an emotional education, a boy meets the pressure of adolescence and that singularly cruel peer culture with the only responses he has learned and practiced—and that he know are socially acceptable—the typical ‘manly’ responses of anger, aggression, and emotional withdrawal.”

In contrast, most of the men I interviewed were “emotionally literate.” They seemed to see and feel things with the sensitivity of a Geiger counter. Tears welled up in Doty’s eyes a number of times when he talked about compassion. Hanson explained how he landed in adulthood “from the neck up” then spent a large part of his 20s becoming wholeagain. Much of Chade-Meng Tan’s Search Inside Yourself training that he developed for the employees of Google is based on emotional intelligence developed through attention training, self-knowledge, and self-mastery.

Similarly, Father Richard Rohr leads initiation groups for young men that force initiates to face pain, loneliness, boredom, and suffering to expand their emotional and spiritual capacity. It is no coincidence that these initiations are held in nature. Nature seems to be an important liminal space that allows boys and men to reconnect with their inner world. Dr. Hanson is an avid mountain climber. Ted Zeff advocates spending time in nature with boys to allow their sensitivity to develop.

5. Practice silence

Almost all of the men I interviewed regularly spend some time in silence. They’d hit “pause” so that they can see themselves and others more clearly. When our interview approached two hours, Dr. Rick Hanson asked to wrap it up so he would have time for his morning meditation. Meng Tan had just returned from a week-long silent meditation retreat a few days before our interview. Scott Kriens started a daily sitting and journaling practice almost ten years ago that he rigorously practices to this day.

Father Richard Rohr practices Christian contemplative prayer, which he says leads to a state of “undefended knowing” that transcends dualistic, us versus them thinking. Rohr argues that true compassion can’t happen without transcending dualistic thinking. “Silence teaches us not to rush to judgment,” says Rohr.

Self-awareness through mindfulness practices like meditation, silent prayer, or being in nature allow compassionate men to embrace suffering without reacting, resisting, or repressing. Thich Nhat Hanh says that mindfulness holds suffering tenderly “like a mother holding a baby.” That poetic image is backed up by more and more research, which is finding that mindfulness can help foster compassion for others.

So the path to making more compassionate men is clear: Understand compassion as a strength, get to know yourself, transcend gender roles, look for positive role models—and become one yourself. If that sounds too complicated, 84-year-old Marvin Maurer sums up being a compassionate man in five easy words, “Be in love with love.”

Kozo Hattori is a writer and counselor at PeaceInRelationships.com. His current book project is titled Raising Compassionate Boys.

This article was originally written by Kozo Hattori, M.A., for Greater Good, where it first appeared.

Raising Compassionate Boys Means Having Compassion for Boys

February 1, 2015 By Tosha Schore

The other day on the way home from school, my 8-year-old suddenly interrupted his own excited play-by-play of his day’s highlights with a roaring rendition of “Tomorrow,” the famous tune from Annie. “The sun will come out tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow ther’ll be sun…”

“Why are they always talking about the sun?” he asked, interrupting himself yet again.

“Well,” I responded. “The sun is seen as a symbol of brightness, hope, warmth and possibility.” I continued. “Remember that those girls didn’t have parents caring for them. They were stuck in an orphanage with that evil Miss Hannigan, hoping and praying that someone kind would show up at the door, looking to adopt them.”

Again, I was was interrupted. “Miss. Hannigan’s not evil,” my son said, in all seriousness. “She just has special needs.”

As often happens in my parenting journey, I was caught off guard. First I had a good long belly laugh like only those improbable kid proclamations can bring on. And then I felt proud. Yet another children’s movie had attempted to simplify human nature by dividing us into two bland categories of good and evil, all the nuances of our lives left to fall by the wayside. But my 8-year-old was having none of it!

Underneath her alcoholism and abusive behavior, even Miss Hannigan had a story.

What my son knew instinctively, that Miss Hannigan’s behaviors were a call for help that no one was answering, is often lost on us big people. Rather than moving towards others when they show behaviors indicative of struggle, we often pull away, insulting or shaming them for their differences, slaves to our own inner struggles.

I’m not advocating for a free-for-all of dysfunctional or hurtful behavior. Interventions and limit setting are vital. First and foremost we need to keep everyone safe. But we can’t just be compassionate when it comes easily. Having compassion requires taking a virtual trip into the dark depths of those who do wrong by us, or by others, learning their stories, letting go of anger, disappointment or embarrassment, and moving on.

Easy to do, no? But necessary in teaching our boys about compassion. We, adults, are often limited in our ability to be compassionate with those who break certain social norms, and in my life as the mother of three boys and an advocate for young boys and their parents this often looks like a jab, a grab, a hit, a loud voice, a big movement, an inappropriate joke, or a joke at an inappropriate time… the list is long.

Young boys have it hard. For many, from the start of traditional schooling, they are square pegs of energy and curiosity shoved into round holes of sitting quietly at desks, doing what someone else has on their agenda. I think about all the squashed potential! I think about someone forcing me to perform well in a career that taps none of my talents, but only magnifies my struggles and weaknesses. I cringe, experiencing the feelings of embarrassment and shame I imagine I would feel as I tried over and over again to be successful at something that did not come easily, while others criticized and punished.

And outside of school, even where I live today, in what is supposedly one of the most open-minded places on the planet, I constantly see boys’ energy, spirits and feelings being squelched by adults who choose only to be bothered, or even scared by them, rather than appreciate their uniqueness or offer them an ear when they need to talk, a shoulder when they need to cry, or a hand when they are stuck in some unworkable behavior.

As parents, we must work hard to change this! We must reach for our boys when their behaviors are ugly, aggressive, or mean. Keeping sight of their goodness is our job. The more we see it, the more compassion we will feel towards them. And the more love and compassion they feel coming their way, the greater their ability to share their goodness with the world.

It can be hard to see past Miss Hannigan’s screaming and drinking, but we can imagine that her road was a rocky one. And it can be equally difficult to see through a boy’s defiance or anger. But those boys have stories too. In helping our boys share their stories, we are, in effect, cultivating compassion.

Tosha Schore is the mother of three boys, and the owner of Tosha Schore, Your Partner in Parenting.

Thie piece was originally published on http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.