New neuroscientific interest in the practice comes largely at the urging of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and politial leader of Tibetan Buddhists, for
whom compassion meditation is a time - worn tradition.
That's no great surprise, given that
compassion meditation aims to produce a specific emotional state of intense empathy, sometimes call «lovingkindness.»
Stanford psychologist Jeanne Tsai and colleagues found, for example, that after taking a
brief compassion meditation course, people were less fearful of showing compassion to themselves and others and of accepting compassion.
The researchers trained a group of participants
in compassion meditation, a form of Buddhist meditation, for 30 minutes daily for two weeks.
Davidson believes his results support the theory that
consistent compassion meditation makes it easier to understand what other people are going through, and may motivate us to intervene when someone else is in distress.
The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education will study the biological roots of benevolent behavior and investigate whether mental exercises derived from the centuries - old tradition of
Buddhist compassion meditation — but stripped of religious trappings — can foster compassion in nonbelievers.
Begin with a brief period of loving kindness meditation, then shift into a brief self -
compassion meditation dealing with personal suffering you have experienced — suffering you know other people have also experienced.
First, the skinny on CBCT: Instead of focusing on breath and awareness — like you do with mindfulness meditation —
compassion meditation involves contemplating specific things, like your affection for other people, in an effort to refocus your attitudes toward the people you interact with on daily basis, says study co-author Jennifer S. Mascaro, a postdoctoral fellow in the anthropology department at Emory University.
The conference includes presentations about the five empirically supported compassion training programs, a panel discussion on working with specific communities of need and the variations they may require,
compassion meditation sessions, and more.
Indeed, researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, found that
compassion meditation affected the brain regions that make people more empathetic to other peoples» mental states, according to a 2008 Science Daily report.
One recent study by Davidson's team found that novice meditators stimulated their limbic systems - the brain's emotional network - during the practice
of compassion meditation, an ancient Tibetan Buddhist practice.
More recently, contemplative neuroscience has turned toward
compassion meditation, which involves generating empathy through objectless awareness; practitioners call it non-referential compassion meditation.
Weng's team found that people who practiced
compassion meditation were more willing to shell out money to help the unfortunate victim, compared with those in the control group.
In this book, you will also discover parenting practices such as setting limits with love, working with difficult emotions, and forgiveness and
compassion meditations that place discipline within a context of mindfulness.
However,
compassion meditation did not reduce activity for images of human suffering, suggesting that the compassion meditation increased a person's responsiveness to suffering.