I've been meditating for a long time, but there were many years, when I kind of kept this a secret Mostly because I dreaded the question, why? Even if I was asked with genuine open curiosity what my motivation was for putting time aside every day for sitting quietly doing nothing, I didn't really know how to explain why. This was especially true of compassion meditation. I felt very shy about volunteering the fact that I trained in becoming a a more loving, and concerned person. Would people think I wasn't loving enough, or would they think I was being boastful about my goodness?
Then I read Mingyur Rinpoche's book Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness. And I came across a line that really helped me have a better understanding and explanation for what I was doing. He wrote that calm abiding meditation (the kind of meditation we do when we are meditating on breath, on a stable object, or in a natural, open awareness, is like charging your mental and emotional batteries. Compassion meditation (focussing on our innate desire to be free of suffering) is the mental and emotional "technology" that uses the recharged batteries in a proper way.
There was something so practical about this explanation. The reason why I meditated was simple. It made my brain stronger and it gave me the emotional tools to use that stronger brain to have an impact on my life and on other lives.
Science supports this
Over the last twenty years there is an increasing amount of science to explain the mechanics behind the "technology" of compassion. For one, brain scans of advanced meditators show that compassion meditation, more than any other type of meditation activates and strengthens the part of the brain that produces dopamine, a chemical that manages motivation, learning, and motor control.
Dopamine is involved when we act, but also when we don't act. People with addictive or obsessive personalies often have very high levels of dopamine and suffer alot when those levels start to drop. People who suffer from Parkinson's disease have crititically low levels of dopamine, and so are unable to control their motor movements.
Dopamine is very powerful. We can leverage it for learning, or we can leverage it to stay on a hedonistic treadmill. But we can also leverage it to motivate ourselves to more pro social and constructive behaviour, that creates well being for ourselves and people around us. That's where compassion meditation comes in.
Compassion meditation is really about recognizing this desire to be free from suffering, which is arguably our natural regulation system. In doing this we train in harnessing and strengtheing our motivation and directing it to the right objectives and behaviours.
The power of compassion meditation
Compassion is very powerful, so a couple of caveats before you start bingeing on it.
First, it's important to distinguish between compassion, the desire to be free from suffering, and empathy, the tendency to feel other people's pain. Empathy actually engages a different neural network, and if we spend too much of our time feeling other people's pain we can develop something called empathy fatigue. When we spend too much time feeling other peoples stress and suffering, our bodies can actually take on this stress and the suffering and become increasingly depleted and demotivated. Compassion is not about feeling others suffering as much as it is feeling the desire to relieve the suffering.
Though it's less likely to cause burnout, like all dopamine activitating behaviours, it needs to be balanced, with time to re-charge you batteries with practices like open awareness, or meditating on the breath.
So feel free to explore its motivation charging qualities, but also feel free to take it slow.
I would also recommend exploring the ways that compassion motivation and its dopamine management powers can also motivates us to not act. To not say and do things that cause suffering.
In training in not doing, we're re-charging those dopamine levels. This is not about being passive, but about training in letting go of our tendency to act impulsively. By balancing calm abiding with compassion, what we're aspiring to is more effective behaviours that in the long run increase our drive because the rewards are ultimately more meaningful, more skilled and more rewarding.
An interesting that that science is revealing is that compassion will change your brain more quickly and more significantly than any other practice.
So compassion really is the great secret of meditation.
But don't feel like you have to keep it a secret.
