HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY
published: 11 September 2020
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02249
Sustainable Compassion Training:
Integrating Meditation Theory With
Psychological Science
Paul Condon 1* † and John Makransky 2* †
1
Department of Psychology, Southern Oregon University, Ashland, OR, United States, 2 Department of Theology, Boston
College, Chestnut Hill, MA, United States
Edited by:
James Kirby,
The University of Queensland,
Australia
Reviewed by:
Gaelle Desbordes,
Mind & Life Institute, United States
Alicia May Carter,
The University of Queensland,
Australia
*Correspondence:
Paul Condon
condonp@sou.edu
John Makransky
john.makransky@bc.edu
† These
authors have contributed
equally to this work
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Theoretical and Philosophical
Psychology,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 27 May 2020
Accepted: 11 August 2020
Published: 11 September 2020
Citation:
Condon P and Makransky J
(2020) Sustainable Compassion
Training: Integrating Meditation
Theory With Psychological Science.
Front. Psychol. 11:2249.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02249
Meditation programs continue to proliferate in the modern world, with increasing
participation from scientists and many others who seek to improve physical, mental,
relational, and social flourishing. In developing such programs, the meditation practices
have been adapted to meet the needs of modern cultures. However, through that
adaptation, important contextual factors of traditional contemplative cultures are often
dropped or forgotten. This article presents a system of compassion and mindfulness
training, Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT), which is designed to help people
cultivate increasingly unconditional, inclusive, and sustainable care for self and others.
SCT aims to recover important contextual factors of meditation that flexibly meet the
diverse needs of modern secular and religious participants. SCT draws on Tibetan
Buddhism in dialogue with caregivers, other contemplative traditions and relevant
scientific theories to inform meditative transformation for secular contexts. We provide
an overview of SCT meditations that includes both contemplative and scientific
theories that draw out important features of them. Each meditation includes novel
hypotheses that are generated from this dialogical process. We also provide links to
audio-guided meditations.
Keywords: empathy, care, compassion, loving kindness, mindfulness, meditation
INTRODUCTION
Meditation continues to gain traction in Western medicine, mental health, and among the general
public (Clarke et al., 2018). At the same time, many scholars have expressed concerns about
the fidelity of modern meditation programs with the contemplative traditions and cultures that
inspired those programs (Sharf, 1995; McMahan, 2008; Harrington and Dunne, 2015; Condon,
2019; Thompson, 2020). Of particular concern, most modern meditation programs have filtered
out traditional aspects of meditation that have been situated in communal frameworks of support
for broad ethical horizons, because such traditional forms were viewed as too devotional or
ritualistic. By deleting those communal dimensions of meditation, a uniquely individualistic,
self-help orientation to meditation was newly established in the modern world. Yet patterns
of practice that have structured traditional forms of devotion and ritual may be crucial for
developing mindful awareness, wisdom, and compassion. Through the lens of attachment theory,
we assert that devotional and ritual practices prominent throughout religious traditions—including
contemplative forms of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism,
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and many indigenous religions—function to help practitioners
develop an unlimited secure base, which they can return to
again and again for replenishment, healing, and empowerment
(Condon and Makransky, 2020). Through such patterns
of practice, these meditators experience themselves and
their world as held within the unwavering support of their
spiritual benefactors, which empowers them, like their
spiritual benefactors, to extend increasingly unconditional,
inclusive, and sustainable care to others. We have called this
pattern of practice the relational starting point for meditation
(Condon and Makransky, 2020).
To recover the relational starting point of meditation
for secular application in modern contexts, we developed a
meditation program called Sustainable Compassion Training
(SCT)1 . SCT draws on scientific theories and patterns of
contemplative practice from Tibetan Buddhism that are shared
with other contemplative traditions, to empower meditative
cultivation of increasingly sustaining, unconditional, and
inclusive care and compassion (Makransky, 2007, 2011, 2012b,
2019; Lavelle, 2017; Condon and Makransky, 2020; Makransky
and Condon, manuscript in preparation). In this article, we
present a series of SCT meditation practices and discuss their
correlation with theories and findings in modern psychological
science. Our aim here is not to validate Buddhist or other
religious practices, but rather, to provide a detailed tutorial in
an innovative form of contemplative training in compassion,
which draws on several major theories of psychology to show
how they can newly inform many specific aspects of meditation
training for modern people. Scientific theories can be a great
support for translating diverse contemplative practices into
accessible forms for people who hold modern, scientifically
informed worldviews. In addition, dialogue between science and
Buddhism can be advanced by inviting in other religious and
cultural perspectives (for a similar view, see Thompson, 2020).
Here, we provide a description of the theory and practice of the
SCT meditations, with links to their audio-guided instructions,
to inspire dialogue, hypothesis generation, and research efforts
on modern engagement with meditation.
people from three different groups: (1) people who work in
caring professions or social activism who seek a sustaining
power of care and compassion that can empower their lives
and work; (2) modern Buddhists who seek reunification with
the non-dual, primordial state of awareness that grounds those
caring qualities (i.e., nature of mind); and (3) people from
other spiritual and religious traditions who wish to deepen their
own spiritualities through experiential encounters with Buddhist
meditation practices. An emerging fourth category includes
scientists who wish to investigate the effects of meditation
training and draw on such practices to generate new hypotheses
about the mind and human potential. In any given teaching
setting, participants typically include members of at least the first
three groups, many of whom occupy more than one of those
identities. SCT is framed and presented so as to meet the goals
of all those participating groups.
Three different modes of contemplative practice form the
basis of SCT: (1) receptive mode; (2) deepening mode; and
(3) inclusive mode. Each mode includes a set of meditation
practices that inform the practices of the other two modes. The
receptive mode helps practitioners find new access to hidden
qualities of love, compassion, inner safety, acceptance, and
wisdom. The deepening mode helps them settle into the source of
those qualities in the depth of their awareness—with increasing
relaxation, inner peace and spaciousness that is healing and
freeing in mind and body. The inclusive mode helps them come
from that depth of awareness to respond to others in their deep
dignity and potential, with more replenishing, unconditional
and expansive powers of care, compassion and discernment
for action. On the basis of those three modes of practice,
further meditations for cultivating empathy and compassion are
introduced, which are designed to help generate compassionate
solidarity with others in a sustainable and inclusive way that
can avoid empathic distress, compassion fatigue, exhaustion, and
burnout (see Figure 1).
There are four key features of SCT that distinguish it
from other modern meditation-training programs2 . First, SCT
meets the varied goals of the four groups of participants
noted above by constructing an open secular space (Makransky,
2012b; Lavelle, 2016). An open secular space explicitly invites
practitioners to draw on their own worldviews and religious
or scientific backgrounds to inform their meditation practice.
SCT accomplishes this by inviting participants to find their own
unique way of establishing the relational pattern of practice
noted above. This contrasts with the closed secular space of many
modern secular meditation programs, which avoid discussion of
spirituality and religion in favor of creating a singular, scientific
framework that everyone must agree to (Gleig, 2019). Of critical
import, an open secular space allows practitioners to engage more
deeply with the meditation practice than is possible in a closed
secular space, because participants are invited to map the pattern
of SCT into their own particular worldview, whether religious,
scientific or both. For people of diverse religions, the pattern of
SCT can map directly into their own religious framework. For
OVERVIEW OF SUSTAINABLE
COMPASSION TRAINING
Sustainable Compassion Training is a series of meditation
practices that have been adapted from three practice traditions
of Tibetan Buddhism: Nyingma, Kagyu, and Geluk, informed
by dialogue with psychological science and other religious
traditions (Makransky, 2007, 2011, 2012b, 2019; Lavelle, 2017;
Roeser et al., 2018; Condon and Makransky, 2020; Makransky
and Condon, manuscript in preparation). Although SCT was
originally adapted from Buddhism, it has been continuously
informed by dialogical encounters with participants who work
in many fields of service—including healthcare, mental health,
education, business, social work, activism, etc.—who represent
a diversity of spiritual traditions and scientific perspectives.
SCT has been taught in many settings that regularly include
1
2
For a discussion of SCT in comparison with other meditation programs, see
Lavelle (2017).
SCT has also been called “Innate Compassion Training” (e.g., Makransky, 2011).
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FIGURE 1 | Sustainable Compassion Training Meditations.
feelings and thoughts as a basis for settling into increasingly
non-dual states of awareness. These traditions of Tibetan
Buddhism, together with Zen traditions of East Asia, suggest
that the primordial state of our awareness is a non-dual unity
of pervasive openness, pure cognizance, and compassionate
capacity3 . From an attachment theory perspective, we view
this kind of awareness as an unlimited secure base (Condon
and Makransky, 2020), since it is the primordial source of
inexhaustible love and compassion (Makransky, 2007, pp. 33–68;
Thondup, 1996; Rinpoche, 2012, pp. 41–80; Varela, 1999, pp. 65–
75). This dimension of awareness can function as the ultimate
holding environment (Winnicott, 1960; Hoffman, 2015) by
providing the unconditional spaciousness and warmth in which
patterns of difficult feeling and thought can deeply relax, heal, and
release. In accord with this view of primordial awareness, SCT
adopts the perspective that caring capacities are an innate feature
of the human mind (rather than a skill that must be created). This
perspective aligns with some evolutionary perspectives on care
and compassion, which suggest they are an innate feature of the
human mind that contributed to the survival and flourishing of
the human species (Hrdy, 2009; Goetz et al., 2010; de Waal and
Preston, 2017; Gilbert, 2019; Marsh, 2019; Tomasello, 2019).
The fourth distinctive feature of SCT is the theoretical view
that liberation is available within suffering. This perspective
draws on the Mahayana Buddhist position that all emotions are
constructed and therefore empty at their core. Liberation occurs
with the experiential insight (vipaśyanā) of the emptiness of
emotions, and the unity of that emptiness with awareness. In this
view, “destructive” emotions are distorted expressions of the nondual awareness that precedes them. Freedom from the so-called
destructive emotions, such as greed, hatred, and delusion, is
non-religious people, the pattern of SCT can map onto scientific
frameworks for understanding the relational development of
care, as in attachment theory, social baseline theory, and related
perspectives (Condon and Makransky, 2020).
The second distinctive feature of SCT is its explicit emphasis
on the relational starting point of meditation noted above
(Condon and Makransky, 2020). SCT begins not with self-care or
extending care, but with receiving care by constructing a relational
field in which one is held in the unconditional love of caring
connection, benefactors, and/or ancestors. This relational field
serves as an outer secure base that evokes the inner secure base
of caring capacities that the practitioner needs to extend care
reliably to others. This relational starting point of training, by
establishing a secure base from which to extend care, mirrors the
pattern of emotional development in attachment theory (Cassidy,
2016; Shaver et al., 2016). This pattern of practice also aligns
with Social Baseline Theory (Beckes and Coan, 2011; Coan and
Sbarra, 2015), which suggests that the presence of supportive
others enhances emotion regulatory capacities. The relational
pattern of SCT also accords with theories of enactive cognition,
which suggest that cognitive capacities are embedded in larger
cultural and social contexts (Thompson, 2017). SCT aligns with
enactive cognition by embedding its participants in communities
of practice that support them in the inevitable challenges they face
when attempting to cultivate more unconditional and inclusive
compassion for self and others. Practitioners within practice
communities can scaffold on mature practitioners who have
experienced and overcome similar challenges.
Third, SCT draws on Dzogchen and Mahamudra traditions of
Tibetan Buddhism to provide ways for practitioners, empowered
by their outer and inner secure base, to settle into the depth
of their awareness. This is the deepening mode of SCT, and
is accomplished by becoming compassionately present to all
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3
Some empirical studies have explored the neural correlates of adept practitioners
who have stabilized in such a state of awareness (e.g., Fucci et al., 2018; Schoenberg
et al., 2018).
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content of the meditation in the way that feels most connecting
and uplifting for that person. This can be done with a moment
from any time in the practitioner’s life when another person
was seeing her in her deep worth, was happy to be with her,
offered support, listened to her, or wished her well. Or the practice
can be engaged by imagining the presence of a benefactor to
whom the practitioner feels grateful, or spiritual figure(s) from
that practitioner’s own tradition who are inspiring to her. The
practice can also be engaged by calling to mind a moment with
a pet or a moment in a special place, perhaps in nature, where
the practitioner felt deeply well, safe, and at home. Finally, the
practice can be carried out by calling to mind a moment of care
between others that the practitioner witnessed and that brought
joy to her, similar to the concept of moral elevation (Schnall et al.,
2010)6 . The important element is that the field of care evoked
by the practitioner genuinely brings joy to or feels uplifting to
her, which signifies that it is already providing access to loving
qualities from her fundamental awareness. After settling more
and more fully into the felt sense of those loving qualities—
such as deep acceptance, warmth, being seen as worthy, love,
inner safety, joy, etc.—the practitioner is instructed to release the
visualization of the field of care, and to relax her mind directly
into that felt sense of love, warmth and acceptance. This can
help the mind to relax deeply, release its images and mental
frameworks, and fall gently, completely open like space. We refer
to this final portion of the meditation as the “releasing phase,”
which supports deepening trust and unification with the spacious
source of the caring qualities in one’s fundamental awareness,
from which further such qualities can emerge (for this purpose,
all SCT meditations end with the releasing phase)7 . A guided
meditation can be accessed here.
An important feature of receptive mode practices is their
consistency with current perspectives on grounded and situated
cognition (Barsalou, 2008, 2016). According to theories of
grounded cognition, when we recall a memory from our life,
it is re-enacted in multiple systems of the brain: motor, visual,
kinesthetic, affective, and so forth. During the receptive mode
of practice, when practitioners reinhabit a caring moment from
their past as happening now, visualizing and simulating its felt
sense of security, they are experiencing that moment as fully
embodied experience, with all the qualities of care, love, warmth,
acceptance, peace, and well-being that come with that.
Following the first receptive mode meditation, it is helpful
to name the caring qualities that were experienced during the
meditation. By naming felt qualities, such as love, warmth,
acceptance, ease, tenderness, safety, feeling seen, gratitude, inner
freedom, openness, peace, feeling at home, joy, restfulness, etc.,
practitioners begin to cultivate an increasing awareness of, and
receptivity to, a full spectrum of their innate capacities of care.
The capacity to name a full spectrum of caring qualities is
analogous to the concept of emotion granularity in affective
available within the emotions themselves (Ray, 2002, pp. 91–107).
This view corresponds with the Theory of Constructed Emotion,
which suggests that emotions have no underlying essence
(Barrett, 2017). That view can empower the practitioner to be
with suffering in an unconditional, spacious way that provides
the holding environment for difficult emotions to relax, unwind
and release by themselves, i.e., to self-liberate. The self-liberation
of emotions appears distinct from meditation programs that
foreground self-compassion, which focus on bringing kindness
to one’s emotions, rather than simply allowing them to free
themselves by revealing their emptiness from within4 .
In the following sections we describe each mode of SCT
in turn. Each mode includes one or two meditations. We
present practical instructions for doing each meditation along
with scientific theories and findings that help draw out
important features of the meditations and inform them. Each
meditation includes novel hypotheses that are generated from
this dialogical process.
RECEPTIVE MODE
The receptive mode of SCT draws on patterns of devotional
practice found in Tibetan Buddhism and other contemplative
practice cultures and translates them into newly accessible forms
for modern people of diverse backgrounds. Those patterns
of practice are mirrored in scientific research findings on
attachment priming. In such research, participants are asked
to visualize a supportive person, or simply think of concepts
like “love,” “care,” “safety.” (Gillath et al., 2005; Mikulincer
and Shaver, 2005; Gillath and Karantzas, 2019). Hundreds of
studies have shown that such priming can temporarily increase
a felt sense of security, even for people with predominantly
insecure attachment histories. Most importantly, attachment
priming temporarily causes people to offer help to others, have
more patience listening to others’ difficult emotions, and have
less bias (Mikulincer and Shaver, 2015). This research suggests
that attachment priming can be integrated with meditation to
recover the relational starting point of contemplative cultures
(Condon and Makransky, 2020).
Meditation 1: Field of Care
A core practice of SCT involves establishing a field of care, by
identifying and reinhabiting a moment of caring connection that
makes one happy to recall, or by bringing to mind an inspiring
benefactor or deeply meaningful spiritual figure(s)5 . To do this,
practitioners are provided with examples of diverse examples
of caring moments and benefactors, and invited to fill in the
4
Learning to experience feelings in a safe and liberating way does not mean
that one must accept the oppressive structures that evoke those feelings. Instead,
the practice can give the practitioner more equanimity, courage, discernment,
and care with which to challenge those structures (Manuel, 2015; Rogers, 2015;
Owens, 2020).
5
The field of care practice is adapted from Tibetan Buddhist practices of refuge
and guru yoga (Thondup, 1996, pp. 165–173; Rinpoche, 1996, pp. 29–36, 73–86;
Rinpoche, 2009, 146–149). The adaptations presented here make this pattern of
practice accessible for a wider public to find a simple, direct entry into the heart of
this pattern of practice, and for Buddhists or other spiritual practitioners to help
enhance their practice.
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An additional way to construct a field of care in SCT is to call to mind a moment
when the practitioner herself offered care to another. This may be the best starting
point for some people who initially have difficulty receiving care. Nevertheless, we
hypothesize that moments of receiving care will eventually also need to be engaged
for this practice to reach its maximal effect (Condon and Makransky, 2020).
7
The meaning of the term “fundamental awareness” will be further discussed in
the next section on the deepening mode of SCT.
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scholars and teachers refer to this fundamental awareness as
the primordial ground of experience or “the nature of mind”
(Makransky, 2007, pp. 33–68; Thondup, 1996; Rinpoche, 2012,
pp. 41–80; Varela, 1999, pp. 65–75)8 . Receptive mode meditations
help cultivate an increasing receptivity to, and trust in, caring
qualities and their source in one’s fundamental awareness, which
undercuts the attachment scripts that assume the source of those
qualities lies only in the external world, in other people.
In the second receptive mode meditation, practitioners begin
by calling to mind a caring moment or a benefactor as in
Meditation 1 to access caring qualities from one’s awareness, now
with the additional instruction to notice any difficulties with the
meditation that arise within it and to let the sense of self that
is having that difficulty and its feelings be included within the
compassionate space of those caring qualities. In this way, a
space of deep acceptance, care and compassion is provided for
all the difficult reactions and feelings that are generated by one’s
attachment scripts and triggered by the meditation. That space
of care and acceptance allows all such feelings and reactions to
relax deeply, settle, and heal in their own time. Any difficulty
experienced within the meditation is no longer a distraction, but
becomes material to be taken into the process of deepening in
practice. As with the first meditation, this meditation concludes
with the releasing phase, in which the practitioner releases the
visualization and conceptual frameworks, allowing patterns of
thought and feeling to unwind and release within the openness,
clarity, and warmth of her fundamental awareness. A guided
meditation can be accessed here.
Four key hypotheses emerge from Meditation 2. First, the
loving qualities experienced when recalling a caring moment
or benefactor are enhanced to greater levels of unconditionality
through the instruction of the practice. The caring moment
or benefactor may be relatively unconditional, but the qualities
of care that the field of care visualization evokes can become
stronger and more unconditional through the instruction to
incorporate all self-representations (all “parts”) and feelings
that arise into that field of care. Second, by including selfrepresentations within the field of care, the mind learns that
it does not have to be identified with any one sense of self.
By letting each sense of self be embraced by caring qualities,
one’s innate capacities for care and compassion are freed from
the restrictive lens of any one self-representation. Instead, the
practitioner’s identity shifts from any given self-representation
to his larger awareness that holds that self-representation in
care and compassion (similar to the hypothesized function of
mindfulness to transform self-understanding; Hölzel et al., 2011;
Desbordes, 2019). Third, by letting all senses of self and feelings
be deeply accepted within the field of care, they can begin to
relax, settle, heal and release. Finally, by learning to include
any self-representation within a field of care, the practitioner
is already learning to extend greater unconditionality to others.
We hypothesize that a person’s strengthening ability to let
his own self-representations and difficult emotions be held in
compassion can strengthen his ability to hold others and their
science, in which labeling emotions with increasing precision
and specificity leads to a richer emotional life characterized by
greater well-being, discernment, and flexibility around emotional
responding (Barrett et al., 2001; Quoidbach et al., 2014;
Kashdan et al., 2015; Grossmann et al., 2019). We hypothesize
that increasing granularity for caring qualities should lead to
an increasing ease with which to notice, access and draw
upon such qualities.
Meditation 2: Becoming More Deeply
Receptive to Love and Compassion
Although receptive mode meditations can provide immediate
access to inner capacities for care and a felt sense of security (i.e.,
an inner secure base), this style of meditation can also provoke
reactive tendencies associated with relationships from the past.
According to attachment theory, each person has a general
attachment orientation, but also a hierarchy of attachment
representations accumulated from a lifetime of interactions with
people in various contexts (Collins and Read, 1994; Shaver et al.,
2019). These interactions form the basis for internal working
models, which include procedural knowledge and script-like
expectations for how it is to be in relation with others (Bretherton
and Munholland, 2016; Waters and Roisman, 2019). In many
cases, these models operate outside of conscious awareness and
can include a diversity of implicit messages, including feelings
of shame or self-criticism, e.g., “I am not worthy of love” or “If
others really knew me, they would not care about me.” Another
common working model reinforces a care giving mentality, that
dismisses the need for oneself to receive support, such as “I
should only focus on caring for others.” Any moment of caring
intimacy can re-activate these internal models. For this reason,
SCT expands on Meditation 1 by explicitly noticing internal
working models and incorporating them into the receptive mode
of practice in Meditation 2.
To integrate internal working models into the receptive mode,
SCT also borrows from a modern form of psychotherapy, called
Internal Family Systems (IFS; Schwartz and Sweezy, 2020).
IFS asserts a model of the mind in which people have a
multitude of self-representations or “parts of self ”—analogous
to an array of attachment representations and internal working
models in attachment theory. The theory of IFS asserts that
these self-representations emerged early in one’s life and took
on survival strategies for controlling one’s environment. From
an attachment theory lens, these self-representations function as
internal working models that lead people to believe that sources
of care and love are external and therefore must be controlled.
In the case of avoidant attachment scripts, for example, a given
internal working model that replays a familiar protective strategy,
such as “If I am receptive to care, I will get hurt by others.”
These protective strategies can interfere with the receptive
mode of practice by shutting down the practitioner’s receptivity
to the loving qualities of his own fundamental awareness.
However, SCT challenges those beliefs by pointing to the actual
source of one’s caring qualities and capacities: the spaciousness,
warmth, simplicity, and clarity available in the ground of one’s
experience—in one’s fundamental, non-dual awareness. Tibetan
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These terms for the deep nature of conscious experience will be further discussed
in the next section on deepening mode.
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1997), yielding greater sympathetic nervous system reactivity
(Gross and Levenson, 1993), which manifests as physical
and emotional tightness, including heightened blood pressure,
vasoconstriction, and avoidance motivation (Mendes et al., 2003;
Mauss and Gross, 2004). In turn, suppression also disrupts
interpersonal communication and relationship quality (Butler
et al., 2003; Richards et al., 2003). With repetition over time, these
physiological and psychological effects of emotional suppression
could lead to negative health consequences, including loneliness,
hypertension, and coronary artery disease (Uchino et al., 2007;
Appleton and Kubzansky, 2014). The consequent tendencies of
inner stress and tightness make it difficult to open to the qualities
cultivated in all SCT practices—qualities of openness, kindness,
compassion, equanimity, and wisdom. One cannot relax and
settle more fully into the source of those positive qualities in
awareness when one’s mind and body are so caught up in habitual
reactions of aversion to feelings. Such stress and tightness also
make it difficult to be more fully present to other people in an
open-hearted way. These tendencies are exacerbated by many of
the systems that shape all of our emotional lives, including our
families, communities, educational institutions, and professional
environments. Each such kind of community often conveys
and reinforces regulation strategies to suppress, avoid, deny, or
distract ourselves from emotional feelings (von Scheve, 2012;
Thompson, 2014; Menakem, 2017; Brackett, 2019).
All such difficulties with emotional suppression and avoidance
suggest a need for innovative practices to process feelings and
emotions in a deeply healing way. The first deepening mode
meditation, called compassionate presence to feelings9 , provides
a healing, relaxing and releasing way for feelings that arise
in one’s life and work to process themselves. This offers a
life-giving alternative to the systemic tendency to suppress or
distract ourselves from difficult feelings, while further evoking
our underlying capacities of care and compassion.
In this meditation, the practitioner learns how to welcome
her feelings into a compassionate space where they can relax,
settle in their own time, and as needed, heal in their own
natural way. “Feelings” here refers to the pleasant, unpleasant,
and neutral feeling tones that accompany our physical and
mental experiences and to all the emotions with which they are
associated. This kind of meditation shows practitioners that they
do not have to avoid or suppress their feelings and reactions or
habitually act them out. Instead, the practitioner becomes safely
aware of feelings in a gentle, deeply allowing way that gives them
all the space they need to relax, settle, and find their own place—
ultimately a place of inner healing and releasing. Because of their
constructed nature, emotional feelings can release and heal in that
way if they have the space and freedom to do so. This view builds
on constructivist theories of the mind in modern psychology
and neuroscience.
The Theory of Constructed Emotion (Barrett, 2017) points
to the underlying emptiness of all emotions: emotions are
constructed from domain-general capacities (e.g., attention,
perception, conceptualization, interoception) in relation to
difficult emotions in care and compassion without contributing
to compassion fatigue and burnout.
These hypotheses garner support from research on the benefits
of cultivating granularity for emotion states. Just as practitioners
can cultivate granularity for loving qualities by naming them,
so too they can cultivate granularity for various parts of self,
i.e., self-representations, with their corresponding attachment
scripts. Several empirical findings show that naming feelings
with emotion labels can help people become less identified with
emotions. Labeling emotionally evocative images, for example,
reduces emotional reactivity (Lieberman et al., 2007). Similarly,
granularity is associated with greater emotional stability (Hill and
Updegraff, 2012; Pond et al., 2012), and less reactivity to social
rejection (Kashdan et al., 2014).
Emotional granularity also helps one’s judgments of others
become immune from incidental emotion. Incidental emotion
refers to a common empirical finding that emotions from one
context carry over to other contexts in ways that inappropriately
influence subsequent perceptions, judgments, and behavior
(Petty et al., 2001). For example, emotional reactions to
disgusting images sometimes distort one’s moral judgments of
others in a different context (Cameron et al., 2013). Because
cultivating emotional granularity supports the ability to disidentify from emotions, judgments of others become immune
from incidental emotion (Cameron et al., 2013). This research
suggests that cultivating granularity with senses of self while
holding them in a space of acceptance and compassion could
support one’s ability to dis-identify or “unblend” from those
self-representations, and thereby become more unconditionally
present to oneself and to others (Schwartz and Sweezy, 2020).
DEEPENING MODE
Receptive mode practices activate innate capacities of care and
compassion, by establishing an outer and inner secure base of
loving qualities, and by shifting one’s identity from one selfrepresentation to a fuller, more expansive awareness that can
hold any sense of self in care. Deepening mode practices of SCT
help practitioners increasingly settle into the source of those
caring qualities—the utter openness, clarity, and compassionate
capacity to be found in the depth of their fundamental awareness
(for empirical investigations of non-dual awareness, see Fucci
et al., 2018; Schoenberg et al., 2018). According to Dzogchen,
Mahamudra, and Zen traditions, this underlying, expansive
fundamental awareness is one’s most natural state of being prior
to social conditioning. It includes the backdrop of pervasive
openness and awareness that is always present behind the narrow
focus of one’s conscious attention.
Meditation 3: Compassionate Presence
to Feelings
Intense, stressful aspects of daily life trigger many difficult
feelings. People often seek to avoid such feelings by trying
to suppress, ignore or distract themselves from them. But
when people seek to avoid or suppress feelings, over time,
those feelings ironically increase (Wegner et al., 1993; Wegner,
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This practice has been adapted from the “Handshake practice” taught by Tsoknyi
Rinpoche (Rinpoche, 2012, pp 146–153).
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experienced. This profound core of comfort and security, found
in the empty essence of feelings, has been called “essence of love,”
an aspect of fundamental awareness that provides a secure base
from which naturally to love and care for others (Rinpoche, 2012,
p. 61). Third, this practice can empower inner steadiness and
courage: the process of letting feelings open and heal from within
generates equanimity toward feelings and the situations that
evoke them. There is a growing awareness that the practitioner
does not need to be afraid of the feelings that others trigger in her,
which gives her the courage to work with challenging people and
circumstances. Fourth, this practice can facilitate compassionate
presence to others: the power to be with her own feelings with
such compassion and steadiness becomes a power to be with
others and their feelings in the same way. Fifth, in the ways noted
above, compassionate presence meditation further establishes the
core of security that is needed to extend care and compassion to
many others in a more reliable, inclusive and unconditional way.
This is possible as the practitioner becomes more unconditional
and steadfast with regard to her own feelings.
A final key lesson of this meditation is its relevance to
each of the other SCT meditations. All of the meditations in
SCT introduce a new way of being that deviates from what a
practitioner has been used to. This deviation from familiar ways
of being—for example, challenging an attachment script that has
dismissed all caring moments—gives rise to various emotional
feelings and reactions. In this way, all SCT meditations generate
the material for compassionate presence to feelings. Whenever
any difficulty occurs, the feeling associated with that reaction
can prompt the practitioner to do the compassionate presence
meditation. And that practice, in turn, accustoms practitioners
to become compassionately present to feelings as they arise
throughout their days, when not in formal meditation.
social conditioning without any underlying essence. Although
emotions have a relative, social reality, they do not have an
ultimate, substantial reality (Barrett, 2012). SCT adds to the
Theory of Constructed Emotion by establishing a “holding
environment” (i.e., Winnicott, 1960; see also Hoffman, 2015) in
which emotions can self-release. By providing a space in which
emotions are not elaborated on, ruminated about, or responded
to, the process of constructing an emotion can relax and unwind
within the space of compassionate awareness, revealing the
underlying emptiness and healing property available right within
the emotion. This view from the Dzogchen and Mahamudra
traditions aligns with research on mindfulness and emotional
reactivity, which shows that acceptance is a key ingredient of
mindfulness meditation (Lindsay and Creswell, 2017; Lindsay
et al., 2018) and allied therapies that relieve stress (Hayes, 2002;
Robins et al., 2004).
In this SCT practice of compassionate presence to feelings,
the practitioner learns to be more at home with her emotional
feelings, even difficult emotions, and they feel safer with her,
since they are not being rejected, denied or avoided. This
transforms her way of being with others, since her ability
to be present to her own feelings safely, with openness
and compassion, is what enables her to be present to
other people and their feelings in the same way. It is
important to highlight that this practice differs from selfcompassion: the intention is not to bring extraneous kindness
to emotions, but rather, to simply allow them to be, with
a space of deep acceptance that lets them free themselves
by revealing their emptiness from within. Nothing extra is
applied to the emotion.
This meditation has four aspects: (1) notice the feeling within
whatever state of mind or body is occurring; (2) allow the
feeling to have all the space it needs to find its own place;
(3) rest with or within the feeling; (4) then just let everything
be, with spaciousness. In the meditation, the practitioner is
instructed to become aware first of a physical sensation, then of
an emotional feeling by sensing how it feels within one’s body—
not just thinking about it in an analytical, disembodied way. The
practitioner is guided to become aware of any such physical or
emotional feeling in a fully allowing way, gently welcoming it
in a spacious, accepting way that lets it settle in its own way.
Then, if another physical or emotional feeling replaces the first
feeling, the practitioner becomes aware of that sensation in the
same deeply allowing, spacious way. A guided meditation can be
accessed here.
Several key hypotheses emerge from this compassionate
presence to feelings meditation. First, there can be a healing
power to this meditation. For a practitioner to be with all of
her physical and emotional feelings in such an unconditional
way helps her mind and body to relax deeply, unclench, and
begin to heal from within. Second, this practice provides the
compassionate holding environment that emotions need to reveal
their empty nature and further positive qualities of awareness that
emerge from that. In compassionate presence practice, emotional
feelings are provided a safe space to open into underlying feelings
and eventually into the empty core of the feelings, where a
deep sense of relief, warmth, inner safety and well-being can be
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Meditation 4: Letting Be
Each of the prior SCT meditations help practitioners access
capacities for care, acceptance, inner safety and compassion from
their fundamental awareness that can embrace all perceptions,
thoughts, and feelings. In the releasing phase of all those
meditations practitioners let the spacious experience of those
loving qualities help the mind feel safe enough to relax its grip
on contracted frameworks of self and world and relax into the
spacious ground of those qualities—a pervasive openness, clarity,
and simplicity of awareness beyond all narrow frameworks of
mind. In the releasing phase of every SCT meditation, in essence,
practitioners settle back into the spaciousness and simplicity
of awareness that is always available in the background of
their experience.
According to the non-dual perspectives of Dzogchen,
Mahamudra, and Zen, there has always been a background of
spaciousness in all that we are experiencing, though generally
not conscious. The reader may remember a moment when
that pervasive background of awareness dawned, perhaps when
resting after a long hike while gazing upon a vast sunset sky, or
when deeply relaxed and looking panoramically upon the sky
over the ocean. In such a moment, a sense of utter openness,
simplicity, peace, and clarity may dawn—a totally open, pervasive
quality of awareness that was always available in the background
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With support of meditation teachers and a community that
practices deeply in this direction, a practitioner may also go
beyond tranquil abiding as it was described above. When a
practitioner is tranquilly abiding on the naturally spacious
backdrop of awareness, the experience of subject-object duality
is much attenuated, since the mind is resting in itself. But
there remains a subtle, subconscious framework of duality—a
sense of someone meditating on something, with a little effort
to continue to abide in that way. With further progress of
practice supported by mature practice community, one’s mind
can reach a point that it may open into a more fully nondual glimpse of its essential nature experienced as a total unity
of emptiness, clarity and compassionate capacity—beyond all
frames of reference, beyond all dualistic construction, beyond
all effort or doing10 . In that moment, the mind reverts to
its most natural, primordial state (Tibetan nay lug), which
is experienced as a unity of space and pure cognizance that
is unimpeded, pervasive, self-cognizant, and self-manifesting.
Patterns of thought, feeling and reaction naturally release or
“self-liberate” (Tibetan rang drol) when this fully non-dual
depth of awareness dawns. This non-dual unity of space and
pure cognizance provides deepest freedom from identification
with self-clinging patterns of thought and reaction, which frees
up the innate compassionate capacities of one’s awareness to
unfold with greater ease, spontaneity, and inclusiveness. If
this thoroughly non-dual recognition of the empty nature of
mind dawns, it is typically very brief before dualistic structures
of conceptuality and self-representation again draw the mind
into identification with them. The training then becomes the
instruction to reconnect again with that non-dual recognition in
little moments, many times (Rinpoche T, 1998).
Tranquil abiding without support, as described above,
provides a stable inner secure base for people in all groups of
interest in SCT, including those in service roles and professions
who need a secure core of care and awareness from which to
become a reliably caring presence to others. The more fully nondual recognition of the empty nature of mind is often what
Buddhists are seeking in SCT—to reunify with their Buddha
nature in support of their paths of awakening. This direction
of practice through the Letting be meditation into tranquil
abiding and non-dual awareness draws from Tibetan Dzogchen
and Mahamudra traditions, and can help practitioners in other
spiritual traditions explore analogously deep levels of mental
settling, centeredness, and inner freedom to love that are part of
their own traditions.
but is now brought forward by the panoramic quality of the sky.
That is a momentary experience of the pervasive openness and
clarity that is always available in the background of experience,
but had been hidden by usual habits of thought and reaction.
The next meditation of “letting be” in body, breath, and
mind helps the practitioner settle directly into that tranquil,
stable background of pervasive openness, simplicity and purity
of fundamental awareness. In this meditation, the practitioner
is guided to let his awareness settle naturally within the felt
experience of body, breath, and mind in sequence, while noticing
any feeling of tension, or holding on, within them. Starting with
the body, he allows bodily awareness to settle naturally, while
letting any sense of holding on within the body relax and settle.
The instructions do not suggest he actively try to make anything
happen. Instead, they specify a way to let the body draw awareness
naturally into increasing unity with itself, as if letting the body
do the meditating, while allowing any bodily tension to unwind
and settle in its own time, by letting all be. The same process is
then carried out with the “letting be” of the breath. In the “letting
be” of mind, the practitioner is instructed to notice any grasping
within the mind to any mental framework or pattern of thought,
and to let that feeling of holding on relax deep within. This gives
the mind permission to release its grip on its mental schema
and open into the spaciousness available in the background of
its awareness, beyond grasping to any framework of thought.
The practitioner learns to let that unity of openness and pure
cognizance draw his awareness into oneness with it, as if letting it
do the meditating. A guided meditation for the three “letting bes”
of body, breath and mind can be accessed here.
The first two “letting be-s” draw on the natural power of
body and breath to bring the practitioner increasingly into
unity with his somatic experience. The third “letting be” of
mind helps the practitioner settle into the basic openness,
clarity, and simplicity of his fundamental awareness, letting
it draw him into increasing unity with it. This third letting
be of mind enters the practitioner into a meditative state
referred to in Tibetan Buddhist traditions as “tranquil abiding
without support” (“tranquil abiding” translates the Sanskrit
term shamatha). Here the practitioner is not focusing on a
particular object or support—like a sound, image, thought or
feeling, but settling directly into the basic openness and pure
cognizance of his fundamental awareness, no matter what he
is perceiving in the foreground. That backdrop of openness
and pure cognizance is inherently stable, even though his sense
perceptions in the foreground may be shifting and changing.
In tranquil abiding without support, the mind learns to settle
into the stability of that cognizant background, naturally wide
open and radiant.
By learning in that way to abide in the stable backdrop of
cognizance and openness, one gains further access to many
positive qualities of fundamental awareness: steadiness of mind,
stability of attention, inner peace, equanimity, ease of being, joy,
with fuller presence to self and others. When the mind is at rest
in its stable background of cognizance and openness, it is not
caught up in shifting patterns of self-focused reaction, so there
is a natural readiness to share, to care, to empathize with, and to
love (Rinpoche, 2003, pp. 55–58).
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org
INCLUSIVE MODE
Research in social, cognitive, and developmental psychology
reveals the readiness with which the mind engages in
categorization that reduces others to a stereotype or limiting
judgment. We use the term “reductive impressions” to highlight
the pervasiveness of these judgments and the barrier they pose to
sustainable and inclusive compassion (Condon and Makransky,
10
Tibetan and Zen Buddhist traditions refer to this empty, non-dual essence of
awareness as the deep “nature of mind,” or “Buddha Nature” (Rinpoche T, 1998).
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and inclusive mode meditations construct implicit relational
knowing to inform one’s ability to commune with others in a
preverbal, affective, embodied manner. Our use of “communing”
also corresponds with what the philosopher Martin Buber
called I-Thou, rather than I-it—relating to another in their
fuller humanity and unconditional worth, rather than as an
instrumental means to an end or as an object of dehumanization
(Buber, 1970).
In meditation, the practitioner first reinhabits a field of care,
through a caring moment or benefactor, and settles into its felt
sense of love and care. While continuing to receive the caring
energy from their field of care, the practitioner allows that energy
to come through her now to whoever is nearby or whoever
the practitioner thinks of, infusing their whole being with that
loving energy. The practitioner is instructed to let this flow of
energy help her commune with others in their deep dignity and
worth, to sense others beyond reductive impressions, in their full
life experience and potential, while wishing them deeply well.
When ready, the practitioner can let the caring energy come
through her more broadly to everyone nearby or in widening
circles. If the practice becomes too effortful or rigid at any stage,
the practitioner can return to the receptive mode (analogous
to returning to a secure base as needed for support). The
meditation concludes, like all SCT meditations, with a releasing
phase that helps the mind relax into the openness, clarity and
warmth of its fundamental awareness. A guided meditation can
be accessed here.
Three key hypotheses emerge from Meditation 5. First,
this meditation helps practitioners experience themselves as an
extension of the field of care in which they are held. In essence, the
practitioner learns to hold others as she is held and to see others
as she is seen in their deep worth and potential. By repeatedly
practicing the inclusive mode in daily life, whoever is nearby or
comes to mind is included in the practice, which thereby becomes
increasingly all-inclusive in a natural way. Second, within this
practice, if there is difficulty seeing another person as more
than a reductive impression, the mind is identified with a selfrepresentation that is only seeing the other through the lens of
that self-representation. When the practitioner notices that, she
can settle back into the receptive mode (her secure base), and
bring compassionate awareness to that self-representation. When
that sense of self begins to feel safer and more at ease, the lens on
the other person can open, to sense the other in their fuller life
and dignity. This practice introduces a new degree of freedom
to choose whether to continue to relate to familiar, often socially
conditioned, reductive impressions of others, or to the actual
persons beyond those impressions.
The process of unblending from self-representations and
reunifying with the openness and clarity of non-dual awareness
in the releasing phase can help the practitioner to sense more
possibilities in each situation beyond any one lens upon it, with
greater space in the mind for innovation, creative responsiveness,
and humor (i.e., skillful means, Pye, 2004; Rinpoche, 2012, pp.
211–228). The practitioner can also find greater freedom to take
up various roles or self-representations as needed, without being
so fully identified with any one of them. In this way, there is
greater space and flexibility in the mind to be who or what is
needed in the situation.
2020). Reductive impressions are a well-known barrier to
extending care beyond one’s narrowly identified in-group (Zaki
and Cikara, 2015), but reductive impressions also interfere with
care for close others. Whenever one loses contact with an inner
core of security, appraisals of threat in any context can foster
hostile or unfavorable impressions of any person, including
close others. A primary purpose of the receptive mode and the
deepening mode meditations is to empower and strengthen one’s
inner core of security and the corresponding ability to recognize
and relate to the fuller humanity in all others (Condon and
Makransky, 2020). The inclusive mode meditations aim to make
the practitioner more fully conscious of reductive impressions
and learn to relate to others beyond those impressions.
There are three features of the earlier meditations that
prepare the practitioner in inclusive mode meditation to extend
more unconditional, inclusive, and sustainable care. First, when
the mind is completely identified with one protective selfrepresentation, perceptions of others are automatically reductive,
and one’s capacities for care and compassion become impeded.
For example, in a moment when one’s mind is completely
identified with a self-representation that is focused on managing
things, other people in that moment are reduced just to objects
of management. Or if one’s mind is completely identified with
a self-representation that is angry at another person, the other
is perceived in that moment as just an object of anger, as just
bad. This is analogous to research on affective realism, in which
affective states bias how a person perceives others (Siegel et al.,
2018; Wormwood et al., 2019). Second, when the mind unblends
from a given self-representation, by holding that sense of self in
compassionate awareness (as in Meditation 2 above in receptive
mode), one’s perception of others starts to open, so that others
can be sensed in more of their humanity and potential—e.g.,
sensing them now not just as objects of management or anger,
but as fuller human beings who have deep dignity, potential
and want to be well and happy just like oneself. Finally, with
this opening of perception, one’s capacities of care, love, and
compassion become less impeded, so that one can be more
compassionately present and responsive to others (Schwartz,
2001, pp. 35–50).
Meditation 5: Extending Love
To begin the inclusive mode meditation of extending love, the
practitioner starts in the receptive mode by accessing caring
qualities and energies (as in Meditations 1 and 2 above). She
then lets the flow of those energies extend to others, helping
her to commune with them—to sense them beyond reductive
impressions in their fuller life, dignity, and potential while
wishing them deeply well. We use the term “communing”
to connote a preverbal sense of closeness to another, sensing
the other as a subject, a whole life and fuller person beyond
superficial impressions and reductive judgments, possessed of
great worth and potential. 11 Communing with others in this way
is a kind of “implicit relational knowing,” which refers to nonverbalized forms of communication and affective experiences
in relationships (Lyons-Ruth et al., 1998). Both the receptive
11
We thank Lama Willa Miller for this insightful understanding of communing in
the context of this practice.
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compassion without empathy can reduce the effectiveness of
one’s work, and risks personal negative effects stemming from
emotional suppression.
To cultivate effective, empathetically informed care, while
avoiding empathic distress, SCT proposes that people can make a
conscious choice to feel empathy for others in a way that informs
and energizes compassion rather than in a way that devolves into
empathic distress. This view aligns with motivated choice theories
of empathy (Cameron and Payne, 2011; Zaki, 2014, 2019), which
assert that empathy is not a limited resource, but rather through a
conscious choice, people can feel empathy and expand the scope
of their care (Schumann et al., 2014; Cameron et al., 2019). In
SCT, we adopt and expand this perspective with the additional
resource of the relational starting point, which provides the outer
and inner secure base needed to direct one’s empathy for suffering
others into compassion rather than empathic distress.
The addition of the relational starting point to support
empathic choice aligns with social baseline theory (SBT; Beckes
and Coan, 2011; Coan and Sbarra, 2015), which suggests that
people serve as a bioenergetic resource that supports emotion
regulation for each other. The mere presence of supportive others
can reduce one’s reactivity to threat (Coan et al., 2006). The
energetic resources made available by others are not limited to
their physical presence; reduced threat reactivity can also occur
by imagining supportive others as illustrated by research on
attachment priming (Mikulincer and Shaver, 2015). A relational
starting point of meditation provides the energetic resource and
secure base needed to transform the pain of empathy for others
who are suffering into empathic concern for them rather than
self-involved empathic distress.
An additional concept from health and social psychology,
called “reappraisal,” informs SCT compassion meditations. The
biopsychosocial (BPS) theory of stress suggests that threat and
challenge are two different physiological responses to stress
(Blascovich, 2013). Challenge is characterized by heightened
sympathetic activity, a more efficient cardiovascular profile (e.g.,
vasodilation in arteries), and stronger approach motivations.
Threat is characterized by heightened sympathetic activity, HPA,
a less efficient cardiovascular profile (e.g., vasoconstriction in
arteries), and avoidance motivations (i.e., avoiding challenges,
giving up, preparing for defeat). When stress is reappraised as
helpful, rather than harmful, people experience a physiological
challenge response rather than a threat response, which improves
performance and well-being (Jamieson et al., 2016; Borman et al.,
2019). Reappraisal is an effective strategy for making use of the
physiological energy of stress.
SCT extends the application of reappraisal to one’s own
suffering and pain of empathy when encountering others’
suffering. First, the practitioner can reappraise his own layers
of suffering not as isolating himself from the world, but rather
as a source of connection with all others who share similar
layers of suffering. In this way, he learns to experience even his
most painful feelings not just as an awful experience but as a
precious resource for generating expansive compassion for many
beings. Second, in the same meditative process, the practitioner
transforms the pain of empathy for suffering beings into an
energy of compassion for them. This is a form of reappraisal,
The loving qualities evoked within the receptive and inclusive
mode meditations help the mind to trust and settle into
the source of those qualities in one’s fundamental awareness,
which is a unity of spaciousness, clarity, and loving capacity.
As the mind settles into that expansive awareness in the
releasing phase of each meditation and in deepening mode,
its patterns of thought and reaction can increasingly unclench
and release, which lets the energies and attitudes of love and
compassion emerge more freely. In this way, a virtuous cycle
of loving power and spacious awareness can increasingly unfold
(Makransky, 2007, pp. 87–90; Condon et al., 2019; Thondup,
2015). To promote this synergy of loving capacity and spacious
awareness within its three modes of meditation, SCT training
encourages ongoing practice of each mode to empower each of
the other modes.
Finally, in our view, authentic love and compassion have the
discernment to affirm people in their deep dignity while also
confronting their harmful behaviors. This set of practices does
not involve accepting anyone’s destructive ways of thinking or
acting. Instead, it puts the practitioner more fully in touch with
others’ humanity and essential dignity. By learning to connect to
that dignity and potential in them, the practitioner can challenge
people’s harmful ways of thinking and action on behalf of their
fuller potential, on their behalf, not only on behalf of others whom
their actions may harm (cf. Keller and Pfattheicher, 2013).
GENERATING EMPATHY AND
COMPASSION FOR ACTION
In SCT, we define compassion as a caring concern for beings that
empathizes with them in their suffering and wants to take action
to alleviate it. Our definition of compassion includes affective
empathy for others’ suffering. This contrasts with a recent claim
that compassion which bypasses affective empathy would be
more effective and sustainable than compassion with affective
empathy (Bloom, 2016). But suppressing affective empathic
feelings can lead to ineffective care by making the caregiver
less sensitive to others’ felt experience (Sloman et al., 2005;
Staton et al., 2007; Haque and Waytz, 2012). Suppressing affective
empathy can also lead to negative health and social consequences
for the caregiver (Meier et al., 2001). At the same time,
however, it must be acknowledged that empathy, as ordinarily
experienced, does carry risks of empathic distress, compassion
fatigue, and burnout (Williams, 1989; West et al., 2006; Zaki,
2019, pp. 94–118).
Empathic distress occurs when people empathize with others
who are suffering and one’s attention turns inward upon oneself,
so one gets caught up in the pain of one’s own empathy
(Batson et al., 1983; Klimecki et al., 2014). Compassion fatigue
occurs when the caring motivation for others shuts down,
often because of repeated experience of empathic distress,
secondary trauma, or limited efficacy in supporting others
(Figley and Figley, 2017). These risks yield a paradox between
empathy and compassion: empathy supports effective care
for those in need in its sensitivity to what they feel, but
can cause burnout for the caregiver. On the other hand,
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akin to reappraising stress as a helpful energy for responding to
challenges in the environment (Jamieson et al., 2012).
In this section, we present two meditations adapted from
Tibetan Buddhism that employ this application of reappraisal.
Within both meditations, the practitioner is guided to make a
conscious choice to reappraise the pain of his empathy in such
a way as to energize and inform his compassion for many others,
instead of getting caught up in empathic distress.
In the meditation, the practitioner begins with the receptive
mode by calling to mind and reinhabiting her field of care. While
continuing to resonate with a felt sense of care, the practitioner
brings to mind a difficult feeling that many others share, like
those in the list above, and takes time to experience what it
is like to have that feeling, through her own experience of it.
To facilitate this exploration, the meditation instructions ask
the practitioner to contemplate the following questions: “How
does it feel in your heart and mind? How does it feel in your
body? What other feelings come up in association with that
feeling? How does the whole world look and feel from within
this feeling?” After exploring in this way, the practitioner is
reminded that many other people experience feelings like this in
their own ways, and is guided to sense through her experience
how others feel. Then, the practitioner recalls that her whole
being is held in unconditional love and compassion from her field
of care, and allows all of her suffering feelings to be embraced
in that care. In doing so, the practitioner also imagines she is
accepting the same powers of love and compassion into everyone
else’s analogous feelings, by allowing the caring energy to extend
through herself to them all while wishing them deeply well
and free of their sufferings. As with prior SCT meditations,
the meditation concludes with the releasing phase, allowing all
patterns of thought and feeling to unwind within the utter
spaciousness, clarity, and warmth of fundamental awareness.
A guided meditation can be accessed here12 .
Several hypotheses emerge from this practice. First, people
often get overwhelmed by suffering when it feels like it comprises
their whole reality, but this practice prevents that, by helping
people experience suffering feelings as encompassed in a larger
awareness of compassionate openness, acceptance and warmth,
where all such feelings can deeply relax, settle, and heal.
Secondly, with that secure base in place, the practitioner can
learn to experience her own painful feelings not as isolating
her from others but as connecting her to others—as a power
for compassionate solidarity with them all. The practitioner can
increasingly sense everyone around her as possessed of hidden
layers of stress and suffering analogous to her own. Thirdly,
Meditation 6: Taking Our Suffering
Feelings Into Compassion for Others
The first compassion meditation in SCT assumes that the
practitioner’s own experiences with suffering can serve as a
source of empathic resonance with others’ suffering, which
then motivates compassionate responsiveness and action. The
establishment of a secure base in meditation practice empowers
the practitioner to become more fully conscious of layers of
suffering in herself and others, so such suffering can serve
as an energetic and informational resource rather than as a
cause of empathic distress, fatigue, and burnout. The receptive
and deepening mode meditations above help establish and
deepen one’s secure base in the protective qualities of love,
compassion, and spacious awareness, so one can feel safe
enough to permit layers of their own suffering to become more
conscious. This reveals similar hidden layers of suffering in
everyone else, informing and strengthening one’s empathy and
compassion for them.
In Meditation 6, the practitioner consciously allows herself
to experience difficult kinds of emotional feeling that she may
have previously sought to avoid or suppress, motivated by the
altruistic intention to employ them as a fuel for compassion,
while supported by her inner secure base of spacious love and
compassion (see Table 1 for a list of difficult situations and
associated feelings). The practitioner can explore many such
feelings as she repeats the meditation, letting repeated daily
practice evoke her own list of further difficult emotions to
explore. This meditation supports increasing granularity for
difficult emotions and suffering feelings, which can inform
increasing discernment of others’ analogous kinds of emotion
and feeling (Israelashvili et al., 2019).
12
This meditation is adapted from Tibetan lojong practices, which are likewise
supported by refuge in an unlimited secure base (Rinpoche, 2006; Makransky,
2007; Lewis, 2018; Hur, 2019).
TABLE 1 | In Meditation 6, the practitioner is instructed to examine the list below and select one such situation and feeling to explore in the meditation.
• Become conscious of a feeling of physical pain anywhere, or of anxiety that you feel about your body or your health.
• Recall a feeling of not being seen, or of being looked down upon.
• Recall a feeling of strong anger from being betrayed or hurt by what someone did.
• Recall a feeling of intense longing, incompleteness, or addiction.
• Recall a feeling of failure, hopelessness, or despair: “I’m hopeless, unimprovable.”
• Recall a feeling of grief at the loss of a loved one; or grief at the loss of anything such as a job, a relationship, a way of life.
• Recall a feeling of anxiety over meeting all of your obligations and responsibilities, or of attaining enough security for yourself or your family.
• Recall a moment when you were at your worst, saying or doing something that makes you ashamed to recall. What feelings come up when recalling that moment?
• Recall feeling lonely, abandoned, or cut off.
• Recall a feeling of fear for a loved one in their vulnerability or mortality.
• Bring to mind fears you have of severe illness, accident, violence, or injury.
• Bring to mind any fears you may feel at your own impending death.
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same radiant power of compassion, wishing them well and free.
The meditation concludes with the releasing phase, in which the
compassion evoked by the meditation helps the practitioner relax
deeply into the openness, clarity and warmth of his fundamental
awareness, where all patterns of thought and feeling are permitted
to unwind and release. A guided meditation can be accessed
here13 .
Several key hypotheses emerge from Meditation 7. First, as
noted, empathic distress occurs when a person’s attention turns
inward on himself, so he gets caught up in his own feelings
of pain from empathizing with others in their suffering. In
contrast, the power of love and compassion in this meditation
directs one’s empathic attention compassionately outward toward
others, so the practitioner does not internalize the suffering as
empathic distress. Second, a further protection from empathic
distress includes the wisdom that has been cultivated in all prior
meditations of SCT—the awareness that suffering is never the
only reality here, but is embraced in a larger reality of openness,
warmth and care in which it can transform and deeply heal
or release. Finally, the instruction of Meditation 7 also points
to a direction of creative responsiveness for action, by turning
one’s attention to causes of distress and suffering, encouraging
the practitioner to deepen his learning and response to
such causes.
by sensing hidden layers in all others, including strangers and
disliked others, the practice can further break down biases that
impede more inclusive and unconditional love and compassion.
It can also empower people to be less self-protective, and more
ready to listen deeply to others whose culturally, socially, racially,
ethnically, or religiously embedded experiences differ from their
own. Finally, although this meditative way of accessing capacities
of empathy and compassion profoundly supports one’s empathy
for others, it is not complete. To more specifically educate
empathy, people need to gain perspectives from others (Eyal
et al., 2018) through various ways of getting to know each other:
connecting with, opening new spaces for people to find their
voices, communal activity and activism, literature, film, theater,
etc. (Mar and Oatley, 2008; Mar, 2011).
Meditation 7: Generating a Strong Will of
Compassion for Action
Meditation 6 above revealed suffering layers of the human
condition that a practitioner shares with many others, reframed
one’s own experience of suffering into a basis of compassion
for others, and broke down reductive impressions of others
by sensing them all as harboring hidden layers of distress
and suffering like oneself. Meditation 7, in turn, helps the
practitioner become more fully present and responsive to others’
suffering without being overwhelmed by empathic distress or
thinking that he has to turn away. Instead, the practitioner
can experience his deepening awareness of others’ suffering as
a fuel of empathy and compassion that makes him more fully
present to them while generating a strong motivation for caring
action. Two key purposes, then, of Meditation 7 are: (1) to
develop skill at channeling empathy into compassion instead
of empathic distress and (2) to bring out a strong will of
compassion for action.
As with the inclusive mode meditation and Meditation 6
above, the practitioner begins with the receptive mode by
reinhabiting his field of care. While continuing to resonate with a
felt sense of care as a secure base, he then brings to mind a person
or group whose suffering deeply touches his heart, while sensing
the suffering that they must be experiencing. The practitioner is
guided in generating empathy for the others’ suffering by asking:
How must it feel for them in heart, mind, and body? What other
feelings may be arising for them? The practitioner is encouraged
to take time to deepen his affective and cognitive empathy in
this way. At the same time, the practitioner is explicitly told to
avoid getting stuck in the pain of this empathy. Rather, he makes
a conscious choice to let the power of this empathy become an
intense energy and attitude of compassion that wishes others
free of all the pain and suffering that impedes their wellbeing
and happiness. The practitioner lets this wish and energy of
compassion radiate powerfully from his heart to that person
or group, infusing their whole being and environment in its
radiant power, wishing them deeply well and free of the causes
of their distress and suffering, each in their own best way. After
some time, the compassionate wish and energy is extended more
expansively to all beings who experience the various sufferings
of living and dying, infusing them and their environment in the
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THE CONTINUING NEED TO
RECONNECT WITH A SECURE BASE IN
BOTH SCT AND ATTACHMENT THEORY
Throughout SCT in all facets above, it is not the case that
the practitioner leaves behind the receptive mode. The field
of care becomes the starting point for all of the inclusive
mode and compassion meditations. One never leaves behind the
receptive mode—one will need to come back to her secure base
recurrently throughout all aspects of the training, to deal with
many challenges that arise for anyone learning to become so
unconditional toward all one’s feelings and to all other beings,
both in their worthiness to be loved and in their layers of
suffering. Whenever difficulties arise in any practice or in any
aspect of one’s life, receptive mode practices can be re-engaged
to reestablish the secure base necessary to proceed.
This enduring connection with receptive mode practice in
SCT parallels a lifespan perspective on security within attachment
theory. According to attachment theory, one description of
security is autonomy within relatedness, suggesting that one feels
the support from which to explore and navigate the world on
one’s own with the confidence that, if one becomes distressed,
there is a secure base to return to (e.g., Powell et al., 2013). A core
of security includes a strong felt sense of basic safety, comfort
with, and curiosity about the world, together with the trust and
vulnerability to return the sources of security as needed. Young
children are dependent on attachment figures, and gradually,
13
This practice draws upon meditations on all realms of suffering in Tibetan
cosmologies, which are likewise supported by refuge in an unlimited secure base
(see Rinpoche P, 1998; Makransky, 2012a).
12
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Sustainable Compassion Training
inner secure base of loving qualities and spacious awareness,
evoked by a relational field of care, that the practitioner can
repeatedly access as needed for replenishment and support.
This pattern of practice mirrors both the basic framework for
cultivating all-inclusive love and compassion found in many
of the world’s spiritual traditions and the kinds of patterns of
human emotional development that are described in attachment
and social baseline theories. While our perspective needs further
empirical investigation, our hypotheses are informed by the deep
philosophical and contemplative experiences of long-standing
lineages and their intersection with a vast array of theories
from modern psychological science, spanning affective, cognitive,
social, health, and developmental psychology. SCT meditations
and the dialogical approach within this article may be fruitful
ground for empirical investigation and ongoing innovations
within contemplative practice for modern cultures.
responsive and sensitive caregivers encourage the children’s
autonomy. But even so called “secure” adults can have traces
of insecurity from diverse relationship contexts, and thus are
never fully and always "secure.” They will always continue
to depend on support from others. In that way, people with
security are able comfortably to navigate back and forth between
autonomy and relatedness14 . This pathway to security parallels
that of SCT. Receptive mode practices lead to increasing
realization of an unlimited secure base in one’s fundamental
awareness and its caring qualities. But the receptive mode
practices are never dropped, even among highly advanced
meditators in traditional Tibetan culture. In this way, receptive
mode practices help the practitioner respond to challenges that
arise both in her ongoing practice and in all the challenging
circumstances of life.
CONCLUSION
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
The seven meditations of SCT reviewed in this article are
designed to give access to innate capacities of love, compassion,
equanimity and discernment from the depth of one’s fundamental
awareness, capacities that support increasingly unconditional,
inclusive, and sustainable care for self and others. This power
of care and compassion is sustainable because it draws from an
Both authors contributed equally to this work and approved it
for publication.
FUNDING
14
We thank Kent Hoffman for sharing his perspective on the meaning of security
within attachment theory (Hoffman, personal communication, July 2019).
The Boston College Open Access Publishing Fund provided
funding for this article.
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Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the
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potential conflict of interest.
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