Working with Emotions in the Cultivation of
Compassion
In this chapter we share our experience as teachers in helping people with the emotional
challenges that occur during the training of compassion. We will use the lens of our shared
experience teaching the Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT see
program of Stanford
University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE).
As teachers, our backgrounds inform our approaches to the training of compassion.
Erika
Rosenberg
occupies a unique niche at the interface of science and practice as a
teacher/practitioner of meditation and a scientist who studies how meditation impacts one’s
emotional life.
Margaret Cullen
initially joined the team at CCARE to help with curriculum
development, having met Thubten Jinpa through the Mind and Life Institute. She is currently a
senior instructor at CCARE and is involved in the training and supervision of students learning how
to teach CCT.
The Emotional Challenges of Growing Compassion
To grow compassion one must meet suffering directly and commit to being moved by it enough to
liberate oneself and others. This process can be very emotional, potentially involving a myriad of
feelings such as sadness, joy, grief and love (to name but a few). Teachers can facilitate, attend to
and make use of these affective changes to encourage the growth of compassion.
We aim to show how emotions are part and parcel of compassion training and describe a few
specific cases among the infinite variety of emotions that can arise in this inner work. Our main
goal is to examine
how
and to
what
end one might work with emotions in the training of
compassion. In so doing, we will share techniques from our experience as teachers; specifically,
we will share some actual practices and other tools from teaching CCT (
.
Which Emotions Occur in the Cultivation of Compassion?
There are dangers of becoming too formulaic in describing the kinds of emotions that occur in
compassion cultivation. Still, some predictable things happen when people are invited to cultivate
an engaged concern for others’ welfare. We discuss a few examples.
Fear. Many compassion meditations involve conjuring the mental image of a “target person” (be it
a loved one, stranger or foe) who may be suffering. We ask our students to imagine a person they
know who is suffering, to try to notice what it feels like to see this person suffering. When people
begin to contemplate the other person’s suffering, they often pull back. This is a natural, defensive
response. The root of this withdrawal is the fear of touching another’s discomfort, perhaps based
on fear of contagion (see also more about fear of compassion
. Helping students to be
spacious and patient enough to remain present with that urge to withdraw is key to the progression
of the training. One must be able to let go of the fear – or at least make room for it to gradually
dissipate on its own – before one can move ahead to potentially help another. People who have
not learned how to be spacious in this regard will encounter difficulty when they try active
compassion practices like
Tonglen
, which requires opening your heart to another’s suffering for the
97
