Contemplative Dyads

embodied empathy, a combination of cognitive empathy and compassion that keeps you anchored in your body.

For Reflection How do loving-kindness and compassion practices manifest as communal experiences? How do they affect the objectives and outcomes of our collectives, groups, and organizations? How do members of one sociocultural community develop, maintain, and deepen their awareness of a different sociocultural community? What harm would we be able

1. both traditions base their theory and practice on the premise that every mental activity is causally effective, and has determinate consequences that shape ongoing development; 2) they both view the mind as embedded in an evolutionary continuity of ever-adapting forms of life, conceiving development as an interactive, intergenerational process info

By optimizing the brain’s full capacity for social learning, these practices expand the mind’s openness to shared introspection and corrective dialogue; and by cultivating that shift in a stable, supportive social learning environment, they sustain that openness though repeated practice over time. As a result, they facilitate a gradual dismantling

Researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute in Leipzig taught volunteers a version of loving-kindness meditation.7 The volunteers practiced generating such loving-kindness in a six-hour instructional session, and at home on their own. Before they had learned this loving-kindness method, when the volunteers saw graphic videos of people suffering,

The Buddhist teacher Matthieu Ricard calls this dilemma “empathy fatigue.” In a study of doctors and nurses, Ricard and his collaborator Tania Singer, a neuroscientist and director of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, found that those who have empathy—who identify directly with their patients’ difficulties—get burned out. Those who have

Greg calls his interpersonal meditation practice Insight Dialogue. While engaged in conversation, instead of immediately responding when someone speaks, we pause for a moment, relax our body and mind and mindfully notice what we are experiencing. We might inquire, “What really wants attention?” and notice the feelings and thoughts that are arising.