Flex your Empathy Muscle

There is a big difference in my outlook on life from four years ago. I don’t become depressed, apathetic and generally negative for very long periods of time at all. It does happen, but can’t last long. I see it come up and I recognize it. I don’t make such a big deal. I’m not saying this to make me sound special or attained - I’m a product of training only. Meditation and training in compassion have a directly relatable result to the individual. I encourage everyone to learn more about mind training - to bring more peace into your lives and those around you.

But Davidson saw something more. The monks had responded to the request to meditate on compassion by generating remarkable brain waves. Perhaps these signals indicated that the meditators had attained an intensely compassionate state of mind. If so, then maybe compassion could be exercised like a muscle; with the right training, people could bulk up their empathy. And if meditation could enhance the brain’s ability to produce “attention and affective processes” - emotions, in the technical language of Davidson’s study - it might also be used to modify maladaptive emotional responses like depression.
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As much as the Dalai Lama enjoys dabbling in science, he has a greater purpose: to alleviate suffering. Buddhism has an extensive toolkit of techniques intended to reduce misery and perfect humanity through quieting the mind and cultivating compassion. The Dalai Lama wants to extract these methods from their religious context and ground them in the science of the brain in the hope that they will be widely adopted.

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