Compassion - Bridging Practice and Science - page 315

The Science of Subjective Experience
What does the compassionate life feel like, and does that feeling matter? In a later section of this
book, you will have the opportunity to read first-person accounts of felt compassion and to
immerse yourself in imagining the diverse emotions, thoughts and perceptions that accompany the
experience of compassion. You will also learn that regularly having the subjective experience of
compassion is accompanied by changes in structural, endocrine, immune and epigenetic systems.
But are these two things related? In other words, is “feeling” compassion simply an indicator that
one’s meditative practice is going well? Or is there something special, something substantive about
experiencing love for self and others, having positive intentions towards others, and directing one’s
attention towards others that results in biological and behavioral change?
Many scientists have argued that a person’s subjective experiences are just as substantive and
meaningful a venue for impactful change as their immune system or HPA axis[1],[2]. After all, life
is ultimately experienced through the lens of the subjective – the shock of the first few drops of rain
on bare skin, the euphoria of a first kiss, the lead weight of loneliness – and thus any changes that
compassion enacts on the body must be filtered through the inner subjectivity. If compassion does
not change a person’s subjective experience, how can it reach deeper to change their body and
brain?
In discussing the interrelations between compassionate experiences and neurological and
physiological change, I first describe the impact on the body and brain of two subjective
experiences, positive emotions and perceived closeness to others, that characterize the
compassionate experience. Then I describe a series of studies that track how loving-kindness
meditation, a form of compassion training, induces changes in these subjective experiences that
lead to changes in physiological functioning. Finally, I discuss how the relationship between
subjective experience and physical state is ultimately bi-directional, making compassion a
potentially self-sustaining state.
The Subjective Experience of Social Closeness and Loneliness
Feelings of social closeness are a critical component of compassion (seechapter 15). Recent
research suggests that feeling socially connected may be as necessary to basic physical
functioning as the need to eat, drink and sleep. A recent meta-analysis found that feelings of social
closeness decreased overall mortality risk by 50% to 91%, an effect three times greater than
engaging in physical exercise or maintaining a healthy weight and comparable to quitting
smoking[3].More specifically, the perception of oneself as enmeshed within a variety of social
relationships is associated with lower susceptibility to cardiovascular disease [4],some types of
cancer[5]and various infections[6], [7].In an experimental study, researchers increased
participants’ feelings of social closeness over eight weeks relative to an active control group, and
found that participants in the social closeness condition increased in vagal tone, a measure of
autonomic regulation linked to a wide variety of positive health outcomes[8].
Just as social closeness leads to positive health outcomes, social isolation is associated with a
wide variety of negative health outcomes[9]. More importantly, the subjective experience of feeling
isolated, called loneliness, strongly impacts physiological functioning. Feeling lonely is an
independent predictor of negative mental and physical health outcomes in adults above and
beyond actual frequency of social contacts[10].Lonely adults are at a greater risk of cardiovascular
315