How Compassion Works

Uncover your innate capacity for love, presence, and wisdom with compassion training adapted from Tibetan Buddhism and contemporary psychology. Everything we care about--our mental and physical well-being, our relationships, our spiritual life, our ability to be useful to others--depends on our ability to access love and compassion within ourselves first. This clear, step-by-step guide offers a way to cultivate this power through an evidence-based meditation method called Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT). With practices drawn from Tibetan traditions, attachment theory, and cognitive science, How Compassion Works uses a progressive series of meditations to gradually build our capacity for mindfulness and presence--and to help us avoid empathic distress, compassion fatigue, or burnout. Organized into three categories--receptive mode, deepening mode, and inclusive mode--these practices help us cultivate unconditional care and discernment from within. With a flexible framework that allows practitioners to integrate their own religious or spiritual beliefs, this book offers practices suitable for people of all faiths and those seeking a purely secular path.