Welcome back.
This week we are talking about compassion and I'll give you a little practice to take away.
We've been on a series about love,
This whole month of love,
Moving through the four immeasurables,
The things that we can't have enough of,
And they have this sort of slight little difference to each of them.
The first one being loving kindness or metta,
Which is just offering,
You know,
Kindness to ourselves,
To each other,
Warmth,
Care.
And then upekka,
Which has to do with equanimity and balance.
How can we,
As Jack Kornfeld talks about,
Everything is always out of balance and there's always a balance in the background behind the out of balanced nature of things.
So how do we contact the balance that's already here,
The groundedness.
And then mudita,
The genuine joy for other people's joy.
And today we're talking about what can be the most difficult one,
Which is compassion.
And I'm a psychologist and there's a lot of emphasis right now in psychology around self-compassion,
But in traditional teachings of Buddhism,
Self-compassion was never separated from compassion.
It's just when the Dalai Lama came to the West,
A researcher was talking to him about it,
He was like,
I just,
It's just sort of understood as part of compassion,
That why do we need to separate out the self.
So this definition in psychology,
The definition of compassion has two wings that really map on to,
I would say,
Contemplative practice as well,
Which is first the ability to be sensitive to suffering,
To feel it.
And when researchers like Richard Davidson,
They've studied monks' brains,
People that have thousands of hours of meditation,
And they study their brains,
What happens when they look at a distressing image,
Like of a woman who's,
You know,
Crying.
And actually a monk's brain will show higher sensitivity to that image.
They've actually dialed up their sensitivity,
Not dialed it down.
But increased sensitivity to suffering without the second part of compassion,
Which is commitment to alleviate an action to alleviate suffering,
Can make us actually feel overwhelmed by suffering.
So the second aspect of compassion is how do you respond with yourself,
Inner compassion?
How do you respond with the person who is suffering?
And can you receive compassion from others?
So my husband and I went to San Yanez this weekend,
Beautiful,
It's so,
You just want a nervous system regulator,
Go to San Yanez.
There's like acres upon acres of green,
And you go into the little town,
And you talk to the people,
And they're like,
Yeah,
All the people from Santa Barbara come to San Yanez because we're trying to escape.
And so we were walking,
We took these really long walks,
And it was so good.
So we were walking,
Walking,
Walking,
And had very little self-service.
And all of a sudden I'm walking,
And I get a text from my mom.
And so I was kind of,
You know,
Paying attention to my mom who was helping care for my kids.
And the text was the video.
So she's sending me a text of my son who's like doing this thing down at Shoreline Park,
And she's sending me a text of my other son who's doing,
His band is playing.
And so she sends me this video.
And I'm like,
Oh.
And the video is down at Carrillo Rec Center where my son was,
He was Willy Wonka in the chocolate factory.
And right behind Carrillo Rec Center,
It's two agents that are holding the man down.
And I'm like,
Ah.
Right?
And so it made me think about,
You know,
We watched the video,
And then my husband and I had this long conversation.
And I started thinking about compassion and responses to that,
And seeing that,
And what is the human,
What is our human condition when we see a video like that,
Or when we're in a circumstance like that?
And what do we know from psychology about compassion?
And I was reminded of Stanley Milgram,
The Milgram experiments.
Do you guys remember the Milgram experiments?
You will,
Because you did a Psych 101 class.
So Stanley Milgram in the 1960s at Yale put an advertisement out saying,
We're going to do a research study on memory and punishment.
Do people get worse at remembering things when they're being punished?
And so he brought people in to this Yale experiment,
And you were randomly assigned to either be a teacher or a student.
But the truth was,
Nobody was randomly assigned to be students.
Everyone was teachers.
And they said to you,
Okay,
We're going to put these students on the other side of a wall,
And you as a teacher are going to list a number of words,
And it's going to be increasingly hard,
But if they get the words wrong,
You're going to shock them.
And you're going to shock them.
We'll start at 15 volts.
But each time they get one wrong,
You're going to increase the shock.
And it says on the little shock machine,
Like,
Slight discomfort,
Increased discomfort.
And then at the last one says,
Like,
Strong warning,
XXX.
And just to let you know,
Some of the people,
Some of the students on the other side might have some heart conditions.
We've screened them ahead of the time,
So we'll let you know if they have a heart condition.
Okay?
So just think about the ice situation.
The guy that's being held on the ground,
The two ice agents that are holding him down,
And the whistleblowers that are around them.
Think about another situation where maybe you've been harming yourself,
And you don't have compassion for yourself.
Okay.
So in the experiment,
What ended up happening was the teachers were told to shock the students.
They were behind the wall,
But they could hear the students.
And they could hear the students say,
Stop,
Ouch,
This hurts,
And then pounding on the wall.
And the teachers would look to the experimenter,
And the experimenter would say,
You need to continue.
You need to continue.
And so they kept on dialing up and dialing up and dialing up,
All the way to when they would stop the experiment is if you reach 450 volts,
Or if you asked as a teacher,
You asked four times,
Four times,
Please,
Can we stop this?
So the results of the study,
They've been replicated in different countries,
It's been replicated with different populations,
And we think Yale and,
You know,
The 60s,
It's a very specific population,
But it's been replicated pretty well.
And what they found was that 65% of people continued all the way to the end.
And if the person had a heart condition,
61% continued.
And when they looked at what was going on there,
The people that were continuing to shock felt aversiveness.
They didn't feel good.
Sometimes they're shaking,
Sometimes they're crying,
But why are they continuing?
What is happening?
Like,
Why are we not taking compassionate action?
Again,
Think about your own way you respond to yourself and ways in which you're not compassionate with yourself.
You push yourself through that.
All the times I've pushed myself through a day,
Like I've had to pee,
And I'm like not going to pee between clients,
Or push myself beyond something that was out of my zone,
Right?
You've done that.
If you've pushed yourself beyond what your body is saying,
Stop.
Why do we do that?
Or why are you just turning away and not seeing any of it?
So when we look at compassion,
There's blocks.
And those blocks showed up,
And they show up in our self-compassion,
But they show up in compassion for others too.
And one of the biggest blocks is our avoidance and inability to be with difficult feelings.
We actually need to increase,
And part of our work here is to increase our sensitivity to suffering and our capacity to stay grounded in the presence of suffering.
I went to a reading with Susan,
Who is an incredible energy worker,
And she does healing readings.
And a lot of the practice that she taught me in our reading was how do you ground yourself when something really dysregulating is happening?
What do you do if there's pain,
You know?
So we have a difficulty.
We need to increase our sensitivity and increase our capacity to stay grounded and wise and present in the presence of pain and not to escape it,
Not avoid it,
Not run away from it.
And that's a lot of what our practice is here and a lot of what compassion practice is.
This is what the monks are training themselves in.
And then another block is something in psychology called the just world phenomena,
Which is an interesting phenomena.
It's another one of these cognitive biases where we believe that people do bad things and bad things happen to people because they're bad people.
And we don't see the context in which,
Wait,
If I were in that Yale Milgram experiment,
65% chance I'd be shocking the guy.
You too.
What's the context there that's leading to the dysregulation that we experience?
What is the context?
Sometimes that context is authority.
Sometimes that context is our stress.
Sometimes that context in that Milgram experiment was they were doing this outer authority thing where they were passing the authority onto someone else and they were having a diffusion of responsibility.
It's not my fault that I'm shocking them.
It's that guy's fault who's in charge of this whole thing.
So we actually need to shift towards away from the just world to a just like me.
Just like me.
All humans have the capacity to be in a place where we're choosing compassion or where we're choosing harm.
And we also need to shift from outer authority,
Which is one of the real dangers I think right now in our world,
To inner authority and that inner authority of what are your values and the courage to know your values and root in them.
And then diffusion of responsibility to taking response ability.
So when we're in a place of maybe even our own difficulty with self-compassion,
Self-compassion is or compassion is particularly helpful when we're experiencing shame or guilt.
Okay here's a disclosure.
This past week,
The first time in my 20 years of practicing,
I had a client fire me.
And it kind of was my fault.
I've had a bad couple of weeks and I was really off in terms of my schedule.
I'm like a kind of already a scheduling kind of mess,
But I was a really a scheduling mess.
And I was I was not good in the session and I was off and I was like rattled and and he fired me.
Diffusion of responsibility or take response ability in a self-compassionate way.
Understanding why that happened but also understanding how I can help myself and help my clients so I'm more grounded so it doesn't happen again.
Right.
So the skills are to first be able to attune to suffering in yourself or attune to suffering in others and increase our dial of that attunement.
Increase the dial of it not looking away but looking at looking toward being with being with ourselves attuning to our own inner world.
And then with that in the Susan Mo way I did the jackhammer because she does this jackhammer action.
Jackhammer yourself.
Ground yourself.
Ground yourself in down to the center of the earth.
We're gonna do it today in our meditation in a way that you can stay compassionate abiding is what Pema Chodron talks about.
Can I stay without flipping out?
Can I stay?
And if we can stay and we can do that this fear this fear of if I open to suffering I'll be overwhelmed I'll be weak I'll be I'll let myself off the hook I'll let them off the hook I'll be I'll get hurt.
Those are all the fears that we have around compassion which are actually true.
You will be overwhelmed you will get hurt you will let yourself off the hook or them off the hook if you do not have the capacity to ground and stay attuned.
So then we tap into what is our wise motivation?
What are our values?
What do we what what do we want to stand for?
What's important to us?
Whether we're in a conversation with a parent or a child or a partner or ourselves or an ICE agent.
What are your what are your values?
What's important to you?
What what do you want to have the courage to show up to and for?
And then from there we practice wise action.
This is all sounds good on the board but it's a lot harder in practice and so we practice in small ways in here with our meditation and then in slightly bigger ways with ourselves when we make mistakes and we experience little bits of shame or you know and then in slightly bigger ways with our family and our loved ones and then slightly bigger ways with strangers and then in much bigger ways with people that we don't understand.
And if we can get to the place where we can do it with people that we don't understand then we can actually get to a place of civil discourse.
Civil discourse.
How do we have conversations with people that are different from us that we don't understand?
And I believe it's from the place of these really simple practices that we start small with ourselves.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Wise Effort podcast.
Wise Effort is about you taking your energy and putting it in the places that matter most to you and when you do so you'll get to savor the good of your life along the way.
I would like to thank my team,
My partner in all things including the producer of this podcast,
Craig.
Ashley Hyatt,
The podcast manager and thank you to Bangold at Bell and Branch for our music.
This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and it's not meant to be a substitute for mental health treatments.
