Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT)
“The beautiful thing about compassion is that when it spontaneously arises in you, an inner door
opens onto that infant’s experience of love, which is part of your fundamental reality.”
His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) is an eight-week program designed to develop and
enhance the qualities of compassion, empathy, and kindness both for oneself and for others. The
course integrates contemplative practices, secularized and adapted primarily from the Tibetan
tradition, especially
lamrim
and
lojong
meditation practices, as well as dyadic interactive exercises
with insights from psychology and scientific research
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The program was developed at
Stanford University.
CCT is thus comprised of the following four elements:
1. Psycho-cognitive education that focuses on developing skills pertaining to greater awareness
and facility with cognitive and affective processes, as well as their connection to behavior and
habitual patterns.
2. Training in secularized meditations that draw on visualization and reflective processes
adapted from the Tibetan Buddhist contemplative practices.
3. Dyadic interactive exercises that are aimed at eliciting and embodying specific affective
states.
4. Informal homework assignments, including a daily guided meditation, that support participants
in integrating the skills they are developing into their personal and professional lives.
Introduction
This protocol on the Compassion Cultivation Training program was developed under the auspices
of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education
at the Stanford
Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neuroscience (SINITN), Stanford University.
CCARE’s founder, Dr. James Doty, describes the goal of the protocol in these words:
The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) is comprised of
a multi-disciplinary team of scientists and scholars at Stanford University whose goal is to
bring the tools of psychology and neuroscience to the study of empathy, compassion and
altruism. While the scientific understanding of these complex behaviors is itself a noble and
worthy goal, ultimately such work would be of little value unless the knowledge gained could
be utilized for the benefit of not only the scientific community but society as a whole. The
ultimate goal of these efforts is to create tools that individuals can use to develop and
cultivate such behaviors within themselves.
The protocol for CCT was developed by Thupten Jinpa, with contributions from an interdisciplinary
team of researchers including neuroscientists, psychologists and contemplative scholars. CCT
belongs to the educational part of CCARE or the E in the acronym CCARE.
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