Cultivating Empathy and Compassion

3: Cultivating Empathy & Compassion

Has four subdivisions:

1. Taking our Own Layers of Suffering into Compassion for Others

2. Extending Compassion to Others in Layers of Suffering we Share

3. Generating a Strong Will of Compassion for Action

4. Extending Compassion for Social and Ecological Actions

You can progressively practice Meditations one thru six for months before taking up Meditations seven, eight, nine, and ten on compassion regularly. Compassion is a form of love, the form of love that wishes beings free of suffering and its causes so they can be deeply well. The next meditation, seven, draws on the secure core of love, compassion and awareness that we have established in all the prior meditations. With that secure core in place, it can now feel safe enough to become more conscious of our own difficult feelings, so we can let them inform our empathy for others who have similar feelings. In this way, we learn to experience our own suffering feelings as connecting instead of isolating, drawing us into compassionate solidarity with others right through our feelings. This meditation can be a joyful discovery, because it provides a way to experience our own painful feelings not as disconnecting and meaningless but as profoundly meaningful and deeply connecting.

Compassion for self and others helps the mind release its grip and settle into its deep nature—the unity of space, cognizance and warmth that is our natural wisdom. By resting in its expansive natural wisdom, the mind can further unleash its capacities of love and compassion. As compassion and wisdom empower each other in that way, they become a force for healing and compassionate action. Please familiarize with Meditation seven for several weeks or months in daily practice. That establishes the foundation for Meditations eight, nine, and ten. For fuller explanations, please study the manual Awakening through Love by John Makransky.

1: Taking our Own Layers of Suffering into Compassion for Others

Meditation seven has five subdivisions:

1. Settling into the body and breath

2. Reconnecting with love

3. Experiencing a suffering feeling as a doorway to empathy

4. Receiving compassion for all

5. Releasing

Meditation seven helps us become more conscious of layers of struggle, stress and suffering in ourselves that others also experience in their own ways, as a basis of empathy and compassion for them. To prepare for this, you need first to recall your field of care, to access the secure core of love and compassion that is needed to feel safe to explore your feelings. After that, you bring to mind a difficult feeling that is familiar to you, which many others also experience in their own ways. Below is a sample list of difficult situations and associated feelings. Please examine the list and select one feeling to explore in the meditation below. As you do the meditation repeatedly over time, you can explore many such feelings, and let repeated practice evoke your own personal list of further feelings to explore.

• Become conscious of a feeling of physical pain anywhere, or of anxiety that you feel about your body or your health, or any fears you have of severe illness or injury.

• Recall a feeling of not being seen, of being looked down upon, or of humiliation.

• Recall a feeling of strong anger from being betrayed or hurt by what someone did. 

• Bring to mind a feeling you have of failure, hopelessness, or despair.

• Recall a feeling of intense longing, loneliness, or feeling abandoned.

• Bring to mind any fear you have about supporting yourself or your loved ones, or of meeting all of your obligations or debts.

• Bring to mind any grief you feel at the loss of a relationship, a job, or a way of life. 

• Recall any grief you feel from the loss of a loved one who has died.

• Recall any fear you have for a loved one now alive, in their vulnerability and mortality.

• Bring to mind any fears you feel at your own impending death.

Important: If you have difficulty at any stage of this meditation, you can settle back into your field of care, let the feeling of difficulty be embraced in its loving qualities, and just rest there. Then return to this meditation as you feel ready. You can do that repeatedly as needed.

1: Settling into body and breath

Sit in a relaxed way, with back straight, eyes gazing gently downward. Come down from the thinking mind into the body, feeling the body as a whole. Let the breath flow naturally, while breathing from the abdomen. Let the feeling of the abdomen, moving with the breath, draw you into that feeling more and more, breath by breath.

2: Reconnecting with love and compassion

Now bring to mind your field of care as present here with you now. You are being seen and held in deep care, compassion, acceptance and warmth beyond judgements. Relax into the felt sense of this experience, steeping in its loving energy and tender qualities, and letting them infuse your whole being. Accept these loving qualities into your whole body and heart and mind—every part of you loved in its very being. 

3: Experiencing a suffering feeling as a doorway to empathy

Now, with this loving environment as support, bring to mind the distressing feeling that you selected for this meditation. Take time to sense what it’s like for someone to experience this feeling: How does it feel in your heart and mind and body? What other feelings arise in association with it? Let the loving environment of your field of care support you in sensing those things.

(If you are having too much difficulty with this, settle back and reunite more fully with the healing environment of your field of care, let that feeling of difficulty be embraced in its loving qualities, and rest there. Then, when you feel ready, freshly recall the distressing feeling you chose for this meditation and sense what it’s like for someone to experience it).

After a little while recall: many other people experience feelings like this in their own ways. So now, while supported by your field of care, sense right through your feeling what others feel. Feel through your feeling what they feel. In this way, sense this feeling as not just your own, but as your deep connection to many others.

4: Receiving compassion for all

Experience now more vividly that your whole being is held in the unconditional love and compassion of your field of care, and let all of your feelings be embraced in this luminous energy, every part of you loved in its very being. By accepting this loving energy into your own suffering feelings, imagine you are accepting it into everyone who has similar feelings, by letting the radiance of this energy extend through you to them all, while wishing them deeply well and free of suffering. As this radiance pervades them all, imagine they are becoming free of the suffering, each in their own best way, and let yourself take joy in their relief and joy.

5: Releasing

After some time, let this loving environment of warmth and acceptance help your mind to relax deeply and release all its frameworks of meditation, worry or concern. Let the mind settle back a bit inwardly and come to rest in the background of its awareness, which is naturally wide open and luminous like a sunlit sky. As thoughts and feelings arise, let them just metabolize themselves and release within this sky-like openness of awareness, by letting everything be.

Processing Meditation Seven: Often our experience of suffering makes us feel terribly isolated from others in our own pain. With this meditation, we learn to experience our own painful feelings not as isolating us from others but as connecting us to them—as compassionate solidarity with others. People all over the world experience hidden layers of suffering like the feelings listed above, though they do so in their own ways in their contexts and cultures. This meditation prepares us for meditation eight, in which we sense all those around us as harboring hidden layers of suffering, just as we do, which empowers deepening compassion for all of us, beyond bias.

We get overwhelmed by suffering when it feels like it comprises our whole reality. This practice prevents that, by helping us experience suffering feelings as encompassed in a larger awareness of compassionate openness, deep acceptance and warmth, where such feelings can heal, transform and release.

2: Extending Compassion to Others in Layers of Suffering we Share

Meditation eight has four subdivisions:

1. Settling into the body and breath

2. Reconnecting with love

3. Including others

4. Releasing

1: Settling into body and breath

Sit in a relaxed way, with back straight, eyes gazing gently downward. Come down from the thinking mind into the body, feeling the body as a whole. Let the breath flow naturally, while breathing from the abdomen. Let the feeling of the abdomen, moving with the breath, draw you into that feeling more and more, breath by breath.

2: Reconnecting with love and compassion

Now bring to mind your field of care as present here with you now. You are being seen and held in deep care, compassion, acceptance and warmth beyond judgements. Relax into the felt sense of this experience, steeping in its loving energy and tender qualities, and letting them infuse your whole being and your whole world. Accept this loving energy and its qualities into your whole body and heart and mind—every part of you loved in its very being. Let yourself also become aware of inner layers of stress, pain, suffering, and struggle within you, and let them all be embraced in this loving, healing environment.

3: Including others

Now think of someone dear to you that you’d like to include in this same loving environment, sense them in their inner layers of stress and suffering, and let them also be included in this field of loving energies, compassionate warmth, and acceptance. Let these energies and qualities permeate their whole being. Let this help you to commune with them in the depth of their being, to sense them in their inner layers of stress, struggle, and pain, and to wish them deeply well and free of suffering. (Pause)

Now let a few more beings come to mind that you’d also like to include in this field of

loving energies and compassionate warmth, and let them also be included, along with the first person. Let these energies and qualities permeate their whole being. Let this help you sense them in the depth of their being and hidden layers of stress, struggle and pain, and to wish them deeply well and free of suffering. (Pause)

Now let this practice expand to include larger circles of beings that come to mind, including them all in this field of loving and compassion, sensing them all in their depth and hidden layers of stress and pain, while wishing them deeply well and free of suffering. Let one or more strangers also be included among them, and as you can, also one or more persons you’ve disliked – sensing them all in their inner sufferings and depth of being as worthy of care and compassion.

If part of you has trouble with this, or draws your attention away, settle back into your field of care, reunite with its healing environment, and become compassionately aware of that part of you with acceptance and warmth. When it settles, you can return to extending love and compassion to beings.

Finally, you can let the vast underlying capacity of warmth and compassion from your basic awareness expand much more fully to include all beings, human, animal, all creatures, or imagine this is happening. Let this help you commune with them all in the depth of their being and hidden sufferings, while wishing them all deeply well and free.

4: Releasing

Now let this pervasive environment of warmth and compassion help your mind to relax deeply and release all its frameworks of meditation and concern. Let the mind settle back a bit inwardly and come to rest in the background of its awareness, which is naturally wide open and luminous, like a sunlit sky. As thoughts and feelings arise, let them just metabolize themselves and release within this sky-like openness of awareness, by letting everything be.

Processing Meditation Eight: We do this practice in the morning as an anchor for the day, and reconnect with it throughout the day in many moments. As we do so, we increasingly sense everyone around us as possessed of hidden layers of stress and suffering analogous to our own. By sensing those hidden layers in all others, including strangers and even those we have disliked, the practice further breaks down biases that impede more inclusive and unconditional love and compassion. It thereby prepares us for Meditations nine and ten below. Meditation eight can also further empower us to be less self-defended, readier to listen to others whose culturally, socially, racially, ethnically, sexually or religiously embedded experience differs from our own. Accessing our capacities of care, empathy and compassion through meditation is necessary to support our empathy for others, but not complete. To further educate our empathy, we need to build relationships with others whose life experiences differ from our own, through ways of coming to know each other: opening new spaces for people to connect and find their voice, literature, film, theatre, etc.

3: Generating a Strong Will of Compassion for Action

Meditation nine has four subdivisions:

1. Abdominal breathing

2. Reconnecting with love

3. Letting what touches your heart evoke strong care and compassion

4. Releasing

The next meditation, nine, makes us very present to others’ suffering without getting overcome by it or thinking that we have to turn away. With our field of care practice, we learned to establish a secure inner core of love and compassion. With that secure core in place, our awareness of others’ suffering can fuel a power of compassion for them that does not get overwhelmed or depleted and can generate a strong motivation for action.

Compassion empathizes with others in their suffering and wishes them free of it. The empathy of compassion resonates with others in their adversity, sensing or imagining what it must feel like for them to experience that. Empathic distress occurs when we turn inward and get caught up in the pain of our own empathy for others who are suffering. Repeated empathic distress in caregivers and activists can lead to emotional exhaustion and burnout. In this meditation, we learn how to avoid empathic distress, by letting the power of love and compassion from our field of care guide our empathic attention caringly outward toward others, so we don’t internalize the suffering as empathic distress. Instead, we generate a powerful energy and attitude of compassion that is ready to respond.

Two key purposes of this meditation, then, are to develop skill at channeling empathy into compassion instead of empathic distress, and to bring out a strong willpower of compassion for action. You will begin by reestablishing your secure core of love and compassion with your field of care. Then you will bring to mind someone, or some group, whose suffering deeply touches your heart—like you can’t bear that they have to experience that. You may think of someone in your family or community in that way. Or you may think of someone or a group you have heard of anywhere in the world, whose suffering moves you.

The meditation asks us to sense and imagine the suffering feelings they are experiencing, but to avoid getting stuck in the pain of our intensifying empathy, by directing its energy outward to them as a radiant energy of compassion.

1: Abdominal breathing

Sit in a relaxed way with back straight, eyes gazing gently downward. Come down from the thinking mind into the body. (pause) Take a slow deep breath, inhaling from the abdomen so it expands, then exhaling slowly and completely. Relax for a moment before inhaling again. Repeat several times. Now, while still breathing from the abdomen, let the breath settle into its own natural flow. Feel the belly expand and contract with each breath. Let that feeling draw you into it more and more, breath by breath. (Pause).

2: Reconnecting with love and compassion

Now bring to mind your field of care as present here with you now. You are being seen and held in deep care, compassion, acceptance and warmth beyond judgements. Relax into the felt sense of this experience, steeping in its loving energy and tender qualities, and letting them infuse your whole being and your whole world. Accept these loving qualities into your whole body and heart and mind—every part of you loved in its very being.

3: Letting what touches your heart evoke strong care and compassion

Now, with this loving environment as support, bring to mind a person or group whose suffering deeply touches your heart, sensing the suffering they must be experiencing. How must it feel for them in body, heart and mind? What other feelings may be arising for them? Take some time to deepen your empathy in this way.

But don’t get stuck in the pain of this empathy. Instead, supported by your field of care, let your empathy for those beings become a strong energy of compassion that wishes them free of the suffering and deeply well. Let this intense energy and wish of compassion radiate powerfully from your heart as light to that person or group, infusing their whole being and world in the healing power of compassion. Imagine that this radiance supports them in their process of becoming free of distress and suffering, each in their own best way, and let yourself take joy in their relief and joy.

After a little while, let this strong, compassionate wish and energy radiate now to all others who undergo similar kinds of suffering, infusing their whole being and world in its healing power. Imagine that this radiance supports them in their process of becoming free of distress and suffering, each in their own best way, and let yourself take joy in their relief and joy. After a little while, let this compassionate wish and energy now extend to all beings who experience the sufferings of living and dying in this world, infusing their whole being and world in its healing power. Imagine that this radiance supports them in their process of becoming free of distress and suffering, and let yourself take joy in their relief and joy.

4: Releasing

After some time, let this loving environment of warmth and compassion help your mind to relax deeply and release all its frameworks of meditation or concern. Let the mind settle back a bit inwardly and come to rest in the background of its awareness, which is naturally wide open and luminous like a sunlit sky. As thoughts and feelings arise, let them just metabolize themselves and release within this sky-like openness of awareness, by letting everything be.

Processing Meditation Nine: Again, empathic distress occurs when our attention turns inward on ourselves, so we get caught up in our own feelings of pain from empathizing with others that are suffering. In contrast, the power of love and compassion in this meditation directs our empathic attention compassionately outward toward others, so we don’t internalize the suffering as empathic distress. A further protection from empathic distress is the wisdom we have cultivated in all prior meditations of SCT—the awareness that suffering is never the only reality here, but is embraced in a much larger reality of openness, warmth and care in which it can transform and deeply heal. The instruction of Meditation 9 also points us in a direction of creative responsiveness for action, by turning our attention to others’ ways of becoming free from suffering, encouraging us to deepen our learning in support of their liberative process.

4: Extending Compassion for Social and Ecological Action

Meditation ten has four subdivisions:

1. Settling into body and breath

2. Reconnecting with love

3. Extending

4. Releasing

When we progressively train in meditations one through nine in daily practice, they empower meditation ten, which applies SCT to activism for social and ecological change.

Think of some issue you deeply care about in empathy for those who are suffering, e.g. protection of immigrants and refugees, protecting living beings and the natural world, racial injustice, women’s rights, affordable healthcare for all, protecting victims of violence or war, protecting the unborn, protecting LGBTQ+ persons, gun laws, good education for all, protecting the imprisoned, or another problem you care deeply about. Think first of those who are suffering in that way, for whom you deeply care. Then think of someone who fights for the other side of that issue, against the changes that you believe are necessary to address that suffering.

1: Settling into body and breath

Sit in a relaxed way, with back comfortably straight, eyes gazing gently downward. Come down from thinking mind into the body, and settle into the grounded feeling of the body on your seat. (pause) Let the breath flow naturally while breathing from the abdomen, so you feel the belly expand and contract with each breath. Let that feeling draw you into it more and more, breath by breath.

2: Reconnecting with love and compassion

Now bring to mind your field of care as present here with you now. You are being seen and held in deep care, compassion, acceptance and warmth beyond judgements. Relax into the felt sense of this experience, steeping in its loving energy and tender qualities, and letting them infuse your whole being and your whole world. Accept these loving qualities into your whole body and heart and mind—every part of you loved in its very being.

3: Extending

Let the loving energy come through you to those who are suffering under the injustice (humans or other beings). Let this caring energy help you connect with them in their dignity and potential, sensing them also in their layers of suffering, and wishing them deeply well and free of the causes of the suffering. After a little while, let the loving energy come through you both to that first group who is suffering, and now also to those who are fighting the changes you think are needed to address that suffering. Let the loving energy help you connect with them in their dignity and potential, sensing them also in their hidden layers of suffering, and wishing them deeply well and free from the causes of their suffering.

If part of you is having difficulty with this practice, notice that part of you and what it’s feeling in a completely accepting way, deeply allowing it to be here. Let it be gently included in the warmth and acceptance of this loving environment. If it settles, you can return to the extending practice.

4: Releasing

After some time, let this loving environment of warmth and compassion help your mind to relax deeply and release all its frameworks of meditation or concern. Let the mind settle back a bit inwardly and come to rest in the background of its awareness, which is naturally wide open and luminous like a sunlit sky. As thoughts and feelings arise, let them just metabolize themselves and release within this sky-like openness of awareness, by letting everything be.

Processing Meditation Ten: The purpose of this meditation is to help us retain connection with the dignity, worth, and potential of all the persons involved in any issue, without erasing disagreement on the issue. The aim is to empower our ability to confront people’s ways of thinking and acting, not only on behalf of those suffering from an injustice, but also out of care for those who oppose the changes we see as necessary to end the injustice. From this fundamental posture of care for all involved can come a fuller capacity to hear others, and the layers of pain that they may be speaking from. We need this to more fully inform any work we may do for social and ecological change.

This approach aligns with the principle of “nonviolent resistance” that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught and modeled: “There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies. When we look beneath the surface, beneath the impulsive evil deed, we see within our enemy-neighbor a measure of goodness and know that the viciousness and evilness of his acts are not quite representative of all that he is. We see him in a new light. We recognize that his hate grows out of fear, pride, ignorance, prejudice, and misunderstanding, but in spite of this, we know God’s image is ineffably etched in his being. Then we love our enemies by realizing that they are not totally bad and that they are not beyond the reach of God’s redemptive love.”