Stories have an ability to move us, to mobilize the body and mind towards certain situations and
sentiments. In CCT we often use stories or poems to mobilize the students this way, which makes
them more responsive to meditations. The ground is fertile, so to speak.
Justin Horner read by Erika L. Rosenberg
“The Tire Iron and the Tamale”
4:53 min
A more traditional approach to softening the heart works directly with meditative exercises, by
manipulating targets of practice to optimize the easy flow of love and/or concern. For this reason,
we often work with loved ones first, as they are considered “easy targets” for love and
compassion.
The function of such approaches in teaching – and this goes back to the ancient
teachers – is to make use of easy connections to bring the student into his or her own body to
notice what it feels like to love, to have love be sent from one’s own heart to another, to be witness
to another’s condition, be it suffering or not. This is a form of priming the compassionate
connection. The logic here is thus: if we can get it going easily, then we can extend it towards less
familiar targets. This is a time-tested, well-established method for priming the compassionate
response.
Developing Emotional Literacy. As we have discussed, when one comes into contact with
suffering, various emotions may emerge, everything from sorrow to joy. The type and intensity of
emotion varies with person and situation, but these emotions can be important indicators of how
we view ourselves and others in relation to difficulty and pain. Using tools of noticing, naming,
acknowledging and enhancing the feeling of emotions in the body (see
), we help people
develop
emotional literacy
of the affective terrain around what might emerge in compassion
cultivation. This includes recognizing the signs of a closed heart, inviting emotions to surface, as
well as seeing the near enemies that masquerade as compassion (see
). Returning to
these sensations again and again – as a practice – makes people more at ease with them when
they arise in spontaneous interaction.
Some Practical Tools for Compassion Cultivation
we share a few practical tools that have been helpful to us in training
compassion in our teaching. Any of these poems, essays or videos can be used for moistening the
heart – to move people – to help them engage empathically with the others and embrace common
humanity. We find that exposure to these kinds of materials enhances receptivity to more formal
meditation practices. Our toolkit is ever-changing, depending on what new items we encounter in
the news or arts. We present some of them here in hopes they will be useful to teachers and
students alike. More details on the CCT program specifically can be found in the chapter by
Thubten Jinpa and Leah Weiss-Ekstrom in this book (see
.
Although we see emotions as crucial to the development of compassion, not every compassionate
act need involve an emotional response. Our friend and colleague, Paul Ekman, once posed this
question (paraphrased here) to His Holiness the Dalai Lama: “What if I write a large check to give
to the people in Haiti, for example, and at the moment I write it I feel nothing? Is it still a
compassionate act? Must I feel something for it to be compassion?” (Paul Ekman, Stanford
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