Mindful Compassion and our brain

I've recently embarked on a Compassionate Living course. It's sort of the next logical step after immersing myself in Mindfulness meditation for the last couple of years.

Once you start paying attention to how the mind works, an understanding grows that there is very little about the workings of our brain that we have any control over. Our thoughts are the accumulation of a lifetime of conditioning by our upbringing, education, society and probably a whole host of other things.

This growing understanding comes with a sense of acceptance ; you feel what you feel, there is no point in trying to fight what's already present.

What you can change though, is your attitude towards the feelings that arise and this is where compassion comes in. Compassion is the awareness of suffering of others and a desire to relief this suffering. A fairly active definition, really: not only acknowledging suffering but also wanting to offer something to relieve that suffering.

As always, the work starts at home, with yourself. After all, how can we be compassionate towards those around us if we haven't yet learned to extend compassion to ourselves? Or to quote RuPaul:

"If you can't love yourself, then how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?"

I think most of us can understand the benefit of being more compassionate towards ourselves. And most of us will have at least a vague desire to extend compassion to others. In reality, doing this can be more complicated than we think!

We may feel resistance to being compassionate towards ourselves because we think that giving ourselves a break will mean we're less motivated to achieve our goals. We may also feel resistance to letting ourselves feel the suffering of others, we may feel like we don't have any more compassion to give. There is a lot of suffering out there and taking all that in can be very overwhelming and exhausting.

So why is compassion such a major thing then in many spiritual practices? It appears time and time again in different forms.

As it turns out, practising compassion has a huge benefit for our own wellbeing.

Tania Singer, a social neuroscience researcher, decided to have a good old look at the brain when it is asked to be compassionate and the findings were pretty cool!

She showed test subjects with a background in meditation images of children in an orphanage. As the subjects watched these images the areas in their brain that are responsible for registering pain lit up. Seeing others suffer quite literally hurts us.

But then she noticed something far more fascinating. The reward centres of the brain associated with romantic love and reward starting lightning up! When she asked the test subjects what they had been doing at that point, they answered that they had started practising loving kindness; the practice of sending well wishes into the world with a deep wish to relieve suffering.

Or in other words: they had consciously chosen to be compassionate.

Of course the sceptic in me (and perhaps in you) is now going " That's all very well and good, but it's not like that made a material difference to the children in that orphanage that were suffering"

And this is true. The reality of life is that we often cannot relieve suffering, even if we want to. And sometimes all we can do is have a deep wish that others are well, happy, healthy.

There are wider implications here of course: If we are able to always acknowledge the suffering of others, and approach this with a genuine wish to relieve their suffering, then are we more likely to act when we can act? Can we stop turning away to avoid being overwhelmed? Can we give ourselves the opportunity to help when we are in a situation to help?

Food for thought for sure :)

Source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.341.6152.1336 (I'm afraid it's behind a pay wall, but you can read the intro to it)