Sustainable Compassion and Wisdom Training

Sustainable Compassion and Wisdom Training

Has five subdivisions:

1. Preliminary Foundations

2. Receptive Mode

3. Deeping Mode

4. Inclusive Mode

5. Cultivating Empathy and Compassion

Sustainable Compassion and Wisdom Training (SCT, also called Innate Compassion Training, ICT) is a method to help us realize a power of unconditional care from within that can be healing and sustaining, make us more present to ourselves and others and help empower compassionate action that can be less subject to emotional exhaustion. SCT highlights our need to experience how it feels to be held in love and compassion in order to extend love and compassion inclusively to others, our need to be seen in our unconditional worth in order to see the same in others, and our need to become present to our feelings with kindness in order to become sustainably present to others with kindness.

For these purposes, SCT meditations cultivate three modes of practice: The receptive mode helps us find access to energies and qualities of love and compassion from the depth of our awareness. This establishes the secure base needed for the other two modes of practice. The deepening mode helps us deepen into the non-conceptual source of those qualities—the openness, clarity, and compassionate capacity available in the deep nature of mind (buddha nature). The inclusive mode draws on those qualities and energies to help us extend love and compassion inclusively to others. On the basis of those three modes of practice, further meditations for cultivating empathy and compassion are engaged, which are designed to generate compassionate solidarity with others in a sustainable and inclusive way that helps avoid empathic distress and compassion fatigue.

The meditations instructed here are engaged progressively. Start with the meditation that is most connecting and meaningful to you. For many, that has been Meditation one or two below in receptive mode. Do it each morning for a little while as your anchor for the day. Then reconnect with that meditation in many brief moments of the day. Frequent repetition for short periods each day gradually retrains the brain to access qualities of love, compassion and wisdom with greater ease, empowering our lives and work with others.

As we familiarize with that first meditation through such daily repetition, it empowers us to explore further meditations that build on that one in each mode of practice.