How Compassionate Action Could Change Your Life
Image by Jackson Hendry/Unsplash
What does compassion mean to you? I’m guessing it might be a certain way of feeling, perhaps a sensation of warmth inside, or a caring attitude. Perhaps you have compassionate thoughts, in response to a friend or loved one who is struggling, wishing them well and hoping their suffering ends soon.
You might be moved by a news story, of those suffering after a natural disaster or living in poverty. Sometimes I find a photo, especially of children suffering in some way, breaks my heart, cutting through the deluge of news stories we must all navigate in this digitally overwhelming world.
All of this is helpful and good. In fact, we know from an increasingly large body of research that feeling compassion has a whole range of benefits for your mind and body. Not only does it feel good, but it does you good – helping to reduce inflammation, lower cortisol and other stress hormones in your bloodstream, reduce chronic stress, anxiety and depression. After decades of research the evidence is compelling: compassion is clearly good for your health.
But reading a wonderful book has reminded me that compassion is not just a feeling, it’s a way of behaving, a form of action we can take in the world. Engaged Compassion: Seven Practices to Cultivate Resilience, Connection and a Joyous Life, by Dr Lobsang Tenzin Negi, is a beautiful book. And Dr Negi is a remarkable person – I first came across him on Sharon Salzberg’s podcast, The Metta Hour (here is the episode, if you’re interested).
Trained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, he travelled to the US to complete his PhD and share the deep wisdom of Buddhism with students in his adopted country. Listening to him speak, Dr Negi embodies all the qualities of kindness, warmth and compassion that he teaches. And he has developed a groundbreaking programme, Cognitively Based Compassion Training (CBCT), which has helped many thousands of students to foster compassion in their own minds and lives.
Living a compassionate life
How could all this be life-changing for you? Well, let’s start with the idea that in the West, we have absorbed one small piece of Buddhist theory and practice – meditation – and think that’s all we need to do. Of course meditation is wonderful (I practice it every day), but it’s just one piece of the Buddhist pie. Once you study the Buddha’s teachings, you quickly learn that most of his guidance concerns how to live, not just how to sit for 20 minutes a day.
This guidance comes in various forms, including the five Buddhist precepts, which I try to follow in my life. And the Noble Eightfold Path offers a more detailed guide to living mindfully and ethically. There is guidance on how to think, speak, earn a living, have relationships, whether to consume drugs/alcohol or not, how to be honest, how to interact with Nature, and a great deal more. The Buddha laid out a pathway for how to live a good, kind and interconnected life, realising we humans are not above or apart from Nature, but we are Nature.
And compassion is the warm, vibrant thread running through all of this, because if we start from a baseline of compassion – feeling deep empathy for others’ suffering, with a strong intention to help relieve it – we can’t go wrong.
What could you do today?
The brilliance of Dr Negi’s rigorously researched CBCT programme is that it adds to the global research demonstrating that compassionate thought, feeling and action has a profound effect on every level of our mind-body system. We become more stress-resilient, bouncing back quicker from adversity. Our relationships improve, because our hearts are open and more loving. We feel less loneliness, because we become exquisitely aware of both our evolutionary and present-day relationship with all living beings.
And we can gain these benefits in surprisingly easy ways, because compassionate action doesn’t have to mean running a marathon for charity. Even the smallest acts of compassion light up the regions in your brain associated with this transformative feeling – as the old saying goes, neurons that fire together, wire together, so the more times you engage in acts of kindness, the more you strengthen neural networks in your brain, making it easier to give and receive compassion.
Simple acts of kindness could involve:
Donating to a cause or charity that is meaningful for you
Giving up a few hours to help at your local food bank
Planting a small patch of wildflowers in your garden, to help pollinators thrive
Smiling at someone you pass in the street. Sharon Salzberg practices compassion as she walks down the street in New York, thinking, May you be happy, May you be well, to each stranger she passes on the sidewalk
Checking on your elderly neighbour, to see if they need any help – especially when the cold weather arrives
Doing some batch cooking for a friend you know is having a rough time, perhaps struggling with their mental health or dealing with bereavement
Any of these small, simple, human acts of kindness will benefit others, as well as helping you feel better about yourself and the world. I also see these small moments of grace as crucial in countering all the anger and division we see mushrooming in our world today. Every little act of goodness has a ripple effect, helping one person feel happier, so they treat others close to them better, and out and out the ripple spreads, helping more people than you could ever imagine.
So, practice compassion. It’s good for you. Good for those you encounter as you move through your day. And good for the world.
Love,
Dan ❤️
Enjoying Dan’s blog? Please make a small donation to support his work – all donations received will go to help Dan offer low-cost therapy or free resources to those who need them. Thank you 🙏🏼