How Compassion Works

John Makransky: From a Tibetan Buddhist perspective, we all possess a tremendously positive, innate potential right in the ground of our experience, which is sometimes called buddha-nature, our buddha-nature, and a way of describing it is it’s the basic space of our being undivided from vast capacities of awareness and warmth and unconditional love and compassion and wisdom, capacities for all those things. These awakened capacities, our qualities, are always available below our surface consciousness, in the ground of our experience, but they’re hidden by our limiting habits of thought and reaction.

James Shaheen: Hello, I’m James Shaheen, and this is Life As It Is. I’m here with my cohost, Sharon Salzberg, and you just heard John Makransky. John is a lama in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, and he previously worked as a professor of Buddhism and comparative theology at Boston College. In his new book, How Compassion Works: A Step-by-Step Guide to Cultivating Well-Being, Love, and Wisdom, he draws from Tibetan Buddhism and contemporary psychology to lay out practices for uncovering our innate capacity for wisdom and compassion. So in today’s episode, we talk about why compassion is essential to our survival, how meditation can help us tap into our basic goodness, and how we can integrate compassion into our service and action in the world. Plus, John leads us in a guided meditation. So here’s our conversation with John Makransky.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with my cohost, Sharon Salzberg. Hi Sharon. It’s great to be with you.

Sharon Salzberg: It is great to be with you too.

James Shaheen: So we’ll be joined later by John Makransky to discuss his new book on compassion, but I thought I’d ask you a few questions about compassion since you’re one of the experts.

Sharon Salzberg: Oh, thank you.

James Shaheen: Well, how do we understand compassion from a Buddhist perspective?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think the definition I like the most is a two-part definition, and that’s the trembling or the quivering of the heart when facing suffering. That’s the first part. So that’s like an empathy building block. You know, we feel into the situation. And then the second part is a movement toward to see if we can be of help. And so we really need both those, the trembling of the heart and the movement toward, for it to be compassionate. There are a couple of reasons I really like that definition. One is it’s a movement toward, not a movement into to burn up ourselves. So that’s different for a lot of us. And then it’s a movement toward to see if we can be of help, not a movement toward to vanquish the situation and be in control and be the savior. And it’s also got a lot of implications about balance, about equanimity, about compassion for oneself as well, because we might have that moment of recognition of a state of suffering, but we’re so exhausted anyway. We’re so depleted. We feel so overcome that we can’t move toward, or we might be frightened by what we sense and we can’t move toward. And there’s so many other factors that need to be in place for that to be genuine compassion. And so I think it’s a fascinating exploration.

James Shaheen: Yeah, well, it’s one of the four brahmaviharas, and another one of the brahmaviharas is equanimity. So how can equanimity temper compassion? I’ve often heard you teach, and often you include that balance.

Sharon Salzberg: Mmm. Well, I think equanimity in this context is the articulation of wisdom. It’s the voice of wisdom. And so it’s both balance in that we might have compassion for ourselves as well as compassion for others, but it’s also the wisdom that we’re not in control, that we will do everything we can to try to ease the situation or change a situation, and in the end, we’re not in control of the universe. Too bad. I always think, you know, I wish I was in control of the universe, but I’m not. And it’s also the wisdom of limits, like, This what I can do right now. And that’s not selfishness or negligence; that’s wisdom that things don’t always happen on our timeframe either. We need to plant the seeds of change perhaps or help and let nature take its course in a way. And so I think compassion is only strengthened by the infusion of wisdom and balance.

James Shaheen: Yeah. You know, sometimes you do feel compassion and you wish you could do something, and you understand that there’s nothing you can do to change that situation for that person. In that case, just being with them might be the answer, or just listening.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, and you know, that’s not to say that we don’t look for means to affect change or be of help, but it needs to be skillful. And sometimes the bottom line is this is what we can do is be present and also see what emerges.

James Shaheen: So how is compassion cultivated? You know, you’re often associated with teaching metta, or loving-kindness, another of the brahmaviharas. But there are differences. It’s very nuanced. How is compassion cultivated?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think that’s really interesting because I also find that there tends to be a kind of Western conditioning that seems to say that compassion is a gift, and you’ve either got it or you don’t, and if you don’t, you’re out of luck, whereas certainly within the Buddhist psychology and Buddhist philosophies, it’s absolutely something that can be cultivated because like loving-kindness, compassion is an emergent property of how we pay attention. And you’re right, it is nuanced to see the distinction between loving-kindness and compassion. But one of the ways loving-kindness is cultivated is by the reflection that all beings want to be happy. Everybody actually wants to be happy. It’s our confusion about where genuine happiness is to be found that misleads us, whereas compassion is cultivated by the reflection that we are all vulnerable, not that we all suffer to the same degree or in the same ways because we don’t in life, but life is so fragile. It’s so unsteady for every one of us that any one of us can get a phone call and pick up the message and have a different life than we had before we picked up that phone. And so compassion is cultivated by realizing we all share that. It’s not like, “Oh, you way down there, your life’s fallen apart, and mine is so intact.” It never could, because, guess what? So we reflect on that, and it brings up that slightly different flavor of compassion. Barbara Frederickson, the researcher from University of North Carolina who studies these qualities a lot, once said that compassion is love that’s looking at suffering. So while it’s closely aligned with loving-kindness, that sense of connection and caring, it’s got a little different flavor to it.

James Shaheen: You know, you mentioned the misconception that we either have compassion or we don’t, and honestly, I felt that way in the past. You know, I have felt that way: Gee, what is wrong with me? I’m not feeling compassion. What are some of the obstacles to developing compassion?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think you’re a greatly compassionate person personally, so let me just say that.

James Shaheen: Oh, thank you.

Sharon Salzberg: The obstacles are usually different extremes, like feeling genuine compassion means you need to be broken by witnessing a situation and that whatever resonance you might have could never be enough. And so we hold back the reluctance to do the good that’s in front of us because it also seems like not enough. It’s always not going to dispel the huge problems that we’re witnessing. So discounting those small steps, I think, is a big problem. There’s a kind of general attitude that it’s going to weaken you. You’re going to care too much. People will take advantage of you. You’ll be a mess. It’s sentimentality. That real strength is in things like vengefulness, you know, or it is a dog-eat-dog world, and that kind of endless competition, whatever we might hold as a worldview. And so we challenge those worldviews in thinking about wanting to develop compassion.

James Shaheen: Yeah. You know, sometimes if I note that I’m not feeling compassion, it’s usually an interesting thing to investigate, like what is going on? And more often than not, I’m feeling fear or anxiety, and I become steeped in my own concerns and I stop seeing the other. Can you say something about that?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think most of the time if we intuit the disconnection, the suffering, the limitation someone else’s bound to, we do feel compassion, but sometimes it’s really hard if they don’t look like they’re struggling or they look pretty self-satisfied, especially in the political realm. But I think we use our own bodies and minds as a kind of laboratory, like I see from looking within that when I am being reckless, like in speech, and I just say something that’s hurtful, it is coming from a place of confusion within me, you know, wanting to appear superior or something stupid, you know, that’s coming in effect from a place of pain within me. And even though I can’t necessarily explicitly see the pain in someone else, using myself as the laboratory, I think, “Oh, that’s where those actions come from.” In fact, there’s also a big confusion about how if you’re compassionate, you’re going to be weak, you’re not going to do anything, you’re not going to take a stand, you’re not going to be forceful, you’re not going to try to effect change, and that really is not the case. You know, I think that’s a real misunderstanding, and it takes the exploration of the force of compassion and how it can manifest to dispel that.

James Shaheen: You know, it’s so interesting. I can identify with all of those misconceptions. For instance, thinking in the past certainly when I was younger, that engaging politically, I needed to be holding onto a certain fire or anger or outrage at what I perceived as injustice. Can you talk about the role of compassion in motivating social change or political engagement? Because initially when we talked about having these discussions we were specifically interested in addressing our lives in a time of great and disruptive and sometimes frightening change, and all around us, and ourselves included from time to time, it’s tempting to be motivated by anger. Bob Thurman has talked about the spiritual warrior, and he talks about anger and burnout, and being motivated by compassion is very much a more effective way to approach this. Say something about the role of compassion as opposed to, say, anger or outrage in motivating our  engagement politically and socially, wherever we find ourselves on the spectrum.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, you used the key word, which is motivation and the motivation for action. Anything we do, anything we say, anything we hold back from doing or saying, which is also an action, is different from what we may perceive to be the skillful means in that context, in that moment. So I think that’s an important thing to understand, that we can be motivated by genuine compassion, but our best guess of the most skillful way to act in a certain situation is really being fierce, really being intense, really having a strong boundary, saying no, something like that. And that’s part of the great confusion people have. I think if we’re motivated by anger, it makes a lot of sense—there’s a lot to be outraged about. And yet it is a matter, I think, of personal exploration, like what’s the cost, and I don’t mean just feeling anger or outrage, I mean really having it be a powerful force in guiding our actions and our choices or being an overwhelming or chronic feeling. There’s a cost. For one thing, when we’re overcome with anger, we lose a lot of information. It’s like the exercise I usually invite people to do, which we can do, is right now, just bring up a moment in your life when you were really, really, really angry at yourself. Just bring it up and feel what it’s like. Now, that also tends to be a time where the five great things we said the same morning that we said that stupid thing that’s bringing up all that anger, they’re gone. It’s like all we remember and what we collapse into and completely identify with is that stupid thing we said at the meeting and what a horrible person I am, and it’s such a kind of wholesale condemnation of ourselves. So we lose a lot of possibility. We lose options. We lose creativity. And it doesn’t have to be that way. We can have strength and power in our actions but based on the different motivation of compassion.

James Shaheen: You know, you’ve mentioned a few times, Sharon, that we equate compassion with weakness, and it’s likewise with metta or loving-kindness, and of course I’ve really, under your guidance and certainly your encouragement, you know, engaged in these practices, and I likewise had that fear of sentimentality or weakness or whatever it was. But it turned out that it required a lot of bravery cultivating those qualities. Can you say something about that? I mean, it really required courage, and I really did feel stronger and more effective in my engagement with those qualities. Without them, there’s anger and aversion and that hostility toward others, and I quickly burn out. So it’s pretty ironic that precisely what I had an aversion to was really a source of strength.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, that’s why I think that it’s really a matter of experimentation. It does take a kind of courage or risk-taking, some willingness to step outside of our conditioning, which is defensive and naming something like vengefulness as real strength and feeling so cut off from others. Many of us are just conditioned that way, and we think that’s the right way to be. And so I know it sounds like the goofiest thing ever, and people ask the right questions all the time like, “What do you mean, try to have compassion for this person who thinks people like me shouldn’t even exist? What do you mean? Are you crazy?” And those are the right questions. But the only answer, I think, is through that personal experiment, like see for yourself, what’s your experience?

James Shaheen: Right, I think I go back to something that Joseph Goldstein often says, and I believe you said it as well: Why wouldn’t I want the people I consider my enemies, why wouldn’t I want them to be happy and feel safe? Wouldn’t we be better off if they practice cultivating these qualities too? I mean, that’s the only way I could hold that quote unquote difficult person in both metta and compassion practice.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, that’s true. Bob Thurman and I wrote this book called Love Your Enemies together, and so that question of course came up a lot. And Bob would say, you know, “Of course they’d be so much less of a jerk.” You know, they would be better, the world would be better, not only happy. It’s sometimes hard to reflect on that, but in the Tibetan system, “May you have happiness and the causes of happiness” implies a kind of wakefulness or understanding.

James Shaheen: You know, somebody I used to work with used to say, “If you spot it, you got it,” and when I’m really focused on someone else’s what I consider flaws, sometimes I think I’m looking in a mirror. So enemies are good in that way.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, that’s what they say.

James Shaheen: Yeah. OK, so now we’ll bring in John Makransky, a professor of Buddhism and comparative theology at Boston College and a lama in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Hi John. Thanks so much for joining us.

John Makransky: Hi James. Good to be here.

James Shaheen: So Sharon and I have been talking about the role of compassion in particularly challenging times, and we thought you’d be a great person to talk to since so much of your work as a teacher and scholar focuses on building up sustainable practices of compassion. In fact, your new book is called How Compassion Works. So to start off, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

John Makransky: Yeah. Well, it’s really been a culmination of about twenty-five years of experimenting and exploring in teaching meditation, particularly with a focus on cultivating the possibility of an unconditional power of warmth, care, and compassion supported by a pretty deep wisdom that’s needed for that. I learned that direction of practice and training from my Tibetan Buddhist teachers. Then events led to me sharing those practices in retreats that I was at initially with my teachers, and then over twenty-five years, I’ve just been really experimenting with how to make practices of unconditional compassion and wisdom accessible for modern people, and that eventually led to this book because that experimentation brought in a lot of input from people at retreats and workshops, and that affected how I was teaching this stuff. One of the people who came to my retreats maybe seven or eight years ago was Paul Condon, who’s a very dear colleague in social psychology and also a contemplative himself like me and deeply immersed in meditation traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, but he’s a very high powered social psychologist and very knowledgeable of developmental psychology as well. He would start visiting me in the middle of retreats at interviews to share correlations that he saw with certain areas of psychological theory with what I was adapting from parts of Tibetan Buddhism. And it got kind of exciting, because the aim isn’t so much to rationalize what I was adapting from Buddhism. I don’t really care about that, nor does he. It’s rather that there just happened to be certain areas from psychology that really align with certain key principles coming out of Tibetan Buddhism—it’s not just Tibetan Buddhism, actually; it’s coming from Buddhism in general, but there they’re very vivid in the Tibetan Buddhist way of expressing them—that align in a way that might help modern people who grow up in societies in which psychology and science and cognitive science has become part of our social background, to help them actually catch onto the meditations better. That purpose of using science in that way, not to rationalize Buddhism in terms of Western science but rather to draw on it in very targeted ways so that people can help catch on to principles coming from Buddhism that have helped people access underlying rather profound capacities for warmth, love, compassion, wisdom, openness, transparency, responsiveness, and resonance with others, to access a kind of a deep potential or capacity that’s built into us from the ground of our being, ground of our experience, which is also called in in many Buddhist traditions, buddha-nature, but without making it too foreign. It’s really referring to something available in the ground of our experience, capacities and qualities right there and ways of accessing them by interrupting the way our ordinary habits of mind are usually functioning, interrupting that in some decisive way through a contemplative practice, that interrupts those habits of mind in a way that is evoking underlying qualities and capacities of this steep nature.

So it’s kind of brilliant that these ways of interrupting and evoking have been passed down over so many generations, and now they correlated in so many other cultures and societies with forms of knowledge within those cultures in such a way that people could catch on to these deep principles of practice within their own cultures. And then when Paul starts showing up at my retreats and sharing these ways of understanding that are from social psychology and developmental psychology, something really lit up like, “Oh, this could be so helpful also here.” So that led to this book, which is really an expression of all that.

James Shaheen: Sharon?

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, that’s wonderful. So you say that everything we care about depends on the power of love and compassion and our ability to access it. So can you say more about that? What do you mean by that?

John Makransky: I think basically our minds are almost continually seeking deep well-being, and deep well-being is associated for human beings—I think for sentient beings in general, but certainly for human beings, deep well-being is found in the experience of deep warmth and acceptance of us in our very being, love, care, and compassion. That’s where we find deep well-being. I don’t think we actually find it anywhere else, and everything else that we seek to try to find deep and reliable well-being, the joy of being alive, everything else that we seek for that can’t really provide that unless it’s an expression of care, warmth, compassion, and the kinds of deep knowing that support that deep care. By deep knowing, I don’t mean something vague and abstract or overly intellectual. I mean a kind of knowing that knows that there’s more to everyone than our superficial, limited impressions of them, that knows that that’s a deeper knowing from below the level of our more superficial consciousness that’s almost continually mistaking everyone for our current superficial impression or image of them, which is based more on our own conditioning and habits of perception than it is on them in their mystery and depth and capacity and the fullness of their being and their life. So leaning into sensing more of those things I just named almost automatically opens up our capacity for warmth, for care, for deeper acceptance, for compassion, and vice versa. To experience that capacity coming online in us of sensing there’s something worthy of deep care in others, to actually sense that is expressing a kind of a knowing that knows that there’s more there in them than all the superficial impressions that all of us have been reacting to much of our lives, not only individually but communally and socially.

Sharon Salzberg: So fundamentally it’s about a way, almost, of healing connection and coming to a state of connection, which is already the truth, but we mistake it for something else.

John Makransky: It’s like harmonizing with the reality of our deep connection. I think I would go so far, drawing from the particular traditions I draw from in Buddhism, to say our ultimate undividedness, we’re so deeply connected.

Sharon Salzberg: Right.

John Makransky: To actually come into alignment with that simple reality. But that’s not a small matter because it’s increasingly come into alignment with that. I mean, it’s easy to say it or think it or believe it. But it’s been, for me, a lifetime of learning how much there is in me that’s obstructed, simply harmonizing more with that. And that’s a real learning, I think, for me. But I think for many of us, that learning really requires two things: help. We need help. And secondly, we need some kind of discipline, a discipline that we learn from those who have learned it before us.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, which brings me to the question. You draw from Tibetan Buddhist practices and modern psychology, and you lay out a model of cultivating compassion called sustainable compassion training, or SCT. So what is SCT?

John Makransky: Yeah, great question. Thanks. So from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective, we all possess a tremendously positive, innate potential right in the ground of our experience, which is sometimes called buddha-nature, our buddha-nature, and a way of describing it is it’s the basic space of our being undivided from vast capacities of awareness and warmth and unconditional love and compassion and wisdom, capacities for all those things. These awakened capacities, our qualities, are always available below our surface consciousness, in the ground of our experience, but they’re hidden by our limiting habits of thought and reaction. So in sustainable compassion training, we just explore several ways derived from Tibetan Buddhism to become increasingly receptive and transparent to the unconditional qualities of this innate awakened underlying nature through sense experience, through relational fields of loving connection, and by settling directly into the source of those positive qualities and the depth of our experience. Then, from that depth, we can learn to sense others more in their depth and to hold them in the same unconditional loving qualities.

So to just specify this a little bit more for just another minute or two, what I’ve been summarizing the pattern of sustainable compassion training, which is really modeling on the pattern not only of Tibetan Buddhism, but I think it’s a fundamental pattern within many spiritual traditions, there are three modes of practice or meditation: a receptive mode, a deepening mode, and an inclusive mode. In the receptive mode, we bring to mind a relational field of loving connection or a field of care that helps us access unconditional qualities of love and compassion and wisdom from the depth of our awareness. Buddhists often bring to mind the Buddha or the bodhisattvas, or Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus might bring to mind the divine or a communion of saints or spiritual ancestors in Indigenous traditions, bringing to mind a loving field of loving connection, which evokes unconditional qualities of warmth, care, compassion, and wisdom from the depth of our own awareness. That’s the receptive mode. Then, in the deepening mode, we let those loving qualities help the mind to settle into the source of those qualities, which is a pervasive openness and lucidity and warmth in the ground of our experience, what Buddhists might call buddha-nature. And then in the inclusive mode, we come from that depth of being to recognize and sense others in their depth, their profound dignity and positive capacity like ours, and to include them in the same unconditional qualities of openness and warmth and compassion.

So in the book, we adapt this pattern of practice from Tibetan Buddhism into the system that we call sustainable compassion training, with some assistance also from modern psychology to try to make it accessible, this pattern of practice, not only for Buddhist practitioners, certainly for them, but also for people of all backgrounds and faiths who seek an accessible way to cultivate unconditional love and wisdom.

James Shaheen: So, John, you mentioned these three modes, and I’d like to start with the receptive mode. Can you tell us more about how we can practice with a field of care and how this can help us access greater compassion?

John Makransky: Yeah. Let me just say a few words about it to give a little bit more feel of what I’m drawing from, because that can also help signal how to engage it. The idea is that when someone embodies the positive qualities of their innate, awakened nature, when someone’s embodying that, even in the moment, and if we’re receptive to the power of their presence with those qualities, it can evoke our corresponding capacity to experience those qualities and to embody them. So for example, Tibetan practitioners often bring to mind the Buddha or a field of bodhisattvas as an enlightened field of care or refuge. So they experienced themselves in their whole world as held in the Buddha’s all-pervasive love, compassion, and wisdom, which brings out their own corresponding capacities of appreciation, gratitude, warmth, compassion, and wisdom.

And then one other quick thing about it, so this is the receptive mode of practice with a field of care. This pattern of practice, which I’m drawing from Tibetan Buddhism and I see as a pattern in other spiritual traditions, actually mirrors a pattern of human emotional development described in developmental psychology called attachment theory, which has been very well-established, and that is the idea basically that in the course of our lives, human beings need to experience what it’s like to be seen and held in love and care in order to mature into persons who can see and hold others in love and care. And that’s the very pattern of this receptive mode field of care meditation, actually bring to mind something that can function the way bringing to mind Buddhas, bodhisattvas, saints, and spiritual ancestors have functioned for others, training within this pattern in other spiritual traditions, but then how to make this accessible for anyone. You can’t just assign people to think of a Catholic saint or a Muslim saint or bring to mind the Buddha if they’re not from that background; it wouldn’t be meaningful. So one way to do that is through what I’ve called a caring moment meditation, and what that involves is just bringing to mind a simple, caring moment with another person or a pet. So as I speak of it, I guess I would invite anyone listening to actually explore entering into what I’m now saying or instructing. Try to recall a simple, caring moment with anyone else, another person, or a pet. Very simple. It’s a moment that just makes you happy to recall. That’s the sign that it’ll be helpful for this practice: a caring moment that makes you happy to recall, a moment with someone where it feels heartwarming or uplifting to recall it. Try to do that right now for just a moment. Can you think of a moment like that? We’ve all had many, but we may not remember them all until asked to. And when you can remember a caring moment like that, that’ll be a moment, for example, where someone was just radiating warmth or kindness to you, was just happy to be with you in that moment or really listening or just seeing you deeply. Or it could even be a moment of snuggling with a child or a pet. So just again, just try to recall one such moment. And when you recall it, now bring this to mind not just as a memory but as happening right now. Consider it as happening right now. Try reinhabiting that moment now, and you are being seen and held right now in deep care, warmth, compassion, and acceptance beyond all judgments. Sense or imagine that it is really happening, and just relax into this experience, just steeping in its loving energies, feeling its tender qualities, and letting them infuse your whole being and your whole world, accepting these loving energies and qualities into your whole body and mind and world, every part of you in your world loved in its being. When thoughts and reactions arise in the mind, just let them be spontaneously embraced in these loving qualities. Everything that arises just arises right into this loving, healing environment to find its own place and its own time here welcome here. Everything. So that would be an introduction to meditation, using a caring moment, which is one kind of field of care, the receptive mode of meditation.

James Shaheen: Thank you, John. Sharon?

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, thank you very much for that. I think it’s just so interesting that you’re saying that the practices in the receptive mode help us tap into our basic goodness so that we can be more fully present to ourselves and to others, and that leads to the deepening mode. So, it occurred to me that that realm or that wellspring of care and understanding in a very profound way our basic goodness is like saying that in a way, self-respect is the fountain out of which compassion for others can flow. And I just think that’s fascinating because of course one hears in the modern idiom that you have to love yourself in order to love others. And I don’t think it’s exactly like that. It’s more this sense of tapping into this kind of capacity. So maybe you could say more about the deepening mode and how it helps us even further reconnect with this innate goodness.

John Makransky: Yeah. Great question, Sharon. Thank you. In the simple form of meditation that I just led, and in this method of practice, sustainable compassion training, and in this book we’re, we’re actually aiming for anybody who is really interested in this direction of exploring to be able to be included, and that means to access qualities coming from the ground of what I would call, again, this is coming from my Tibetan Buddhist traditions, but it’s coming from the very ground of our experience what’s sometimes called buddha-nature, but that’s not just an abstraction. It’s a basic openness, which is endowed with capacities of warmth and peace and well-being and ease of being and responsiveness and compassion and discernment and wisdom. Those are all capacities built into the ground of our experience, but they’ve been largely hidden by our habits of thought and reaction, but never completely hidden. Throughout our lives, we’ve had many moments of simple caring connection. We may not have been taught to notice them so vividly, but they’re actually moments of revelation. So when we catch on to that principle and realize that, “Oh, I could recall a simple caring moment,” what I’m engaging then is not just another person, certainly not one who has to be some perfect being not at all. It’s just that in that moment, that person, by being present to me in the way they were, or that dog or cat or lamb or whatever it is, is evoking qualities from the very ground of my experience. This is going into deepening mode aspects. Those qualities of warmth, care, ease of being, well-being, care, compassion, and so forth that are being evoked by this field of care and the caring moment are coming from the ground of our experience, are coming from the depth of our being. When we realize that’s happening, we can let those qualities help the mind.

In the last step of the meditation—I didn’t lead that last step earlier here, there wasn’t time for that, but in the last step, we actually let those qualities of warmth and ease and deep acceptance and deep allowing and everything is welcomed into that field, into that healing environment. We let that help the mind to trust enough by trusting that loving environment enough, help the mind to trust enough to relax its grip, to release its ordinary frames of posture, defensive posture, if you will, release its ordinary frames of reference and relax, start to relax right into the source of those loving qualities, which is a basic openness, simplicity, lucidity, and warmth. And that’s beginning to settle into the deepening mode. And what we discover there is that there is a depth or a kind of a ground that we can learn to connect with and even begin to unify with more and more, sort of like unifying with our deep nature. And as we learn to do that, it takes a lot of repetition and practice. But as we begin to learn to do that, one of the signs that we’re actually catching on to that depth in ourselves is that we sense it in others. That’s the key. That depth doesn’t really have a border around it. That’s not just a depth of me. That’s the depth of beings. And therefore, as we begin to unify with that depth, we’re sensing through it a depth in others that we naturally have reverence for. And so the respect that you’re referring to, I use the word reverence. It’s like there’s something worthy of reverence in us. We need to be given access to that in ourselves and our own experience so that we can sense right from there that same depth worthy of reverencing others, and not just as a belief but to actually know that more and more. It’s like a knowing, and in knowing that, that’s already mirroring others’ depth in them, a dignity, something so worthy of reverence and care just by sensing them as what they are from our own depth. And that’s what clued me in in my own experience of practice over the years. It clued me into what my teachers, I mean teachers that had entered me into this process from Buddhist traditions that I was practicing in. Then I began to realize that’s what was happening. They saw me in depth, from their depth. That’s what they were. I mean, I knew there was something impressive about them, but I didn’t realize from inside where they were abiding. They were abiding at this depth level of being from which it’s the most natural and spontaneous thing to recognize that depth in others and then even to look upon them or be with them, like my teachers with me. I’m not really talking just about me. I’m talking about how they were or are in general. Many people describe the Dalai Lama like this because he’s such a good example of it. But that’s what they were doing. In a sense, they were doing something that first begins with not doing anything. It has to do with the power of being, that they were settled so much into the depth of their being that the power of that was resonating with and already communicating with my depth and the depth of others. It was already communicating before they ever spoke. All this became clear and clear and clearer through practice, and that’s the pattern of practice I’ve been trying to refer to, not only in Buddhism, but I have to say because I taught in a Catholic university for thirty years, I just recently retired from Boston College, and that is something I also felt I really encountered in others as well in other faiths, and then not just not only religious people, but it’s an ability to let the depth of our being unify us with it more and more in order to sense others from that depth, that depth in them, and respond to that depth in them. So we’re speaking not just to their heads, as it were, or to their habits of thinking from our habits of thinking, which is so superficial and tends to get very reactive. We’re speaking more to the depth of their being right through their habits of thought but not to their habits of thought, through them right to their depth from our depth. And when I say that, I’m not really speaking so much about what I do, but I think about what profound teachers I’ve known have done, and not only Buddhist ones. So that’s the deepening mode.

Sharon Salzberg: Wow. Let me just ask one more question because I really want to emphasize the fact that this is a training, and so in effect, you’ve made this experiment, I’m sure, with many people before you wrote the book, and you have the wisdom not only of your own experience but of the experiences you’ve seen others go through in this development. And I think it’s a very important point that it’s a training which means it’s real, it’s actually practices and things we can do. And I’m just curious if you could state what the common challenges or struggles people have had in doing this training.

John Makransky: Yeah. Boy, great questions. Really glad I came here with you and James. First, let me just say, because I should have closed my last remarks with this. You had asked me about the deepening mode, so I described how the qualities we experience more and more with the help of the receptive mode and the field of care is evoking them. Those qualities help us settle more into their source, which is the depth of our being, and from there, we can sense others in their depth. From there, we can sense others in their depth and now begin to respond to them as the deep beings they are. That’s the third mode, inclusive mode. So all three modes we’ve now covered in a sense. So, difficulties. Well, this all sounds so good. It sounds so inspiring. I mean, even I’m inspired as we’re talking, but it’s much more challenging than it first sounds because we have so many inner assumptions that interfere with this process.

Let me just start with the receptive mode. That also sounds very nice: just bring to mind a caring moment, or we also extend that into other possible fields of care or fields of refuge, someone who you feel is really a benefactor for you, someone you’re really grateful has been in your life or world. It could be really uplifting to just think of someone like that.

Now, here comes the problem. What happens when loving qualities are evoked by any such field of care, let’s say a caring moment, and now you’re experiencing qualities of warmth and acceptance and love and care? One of the first things that’ll happen to many of us is a kind of a red flag will go up in the mind for many of us that says, “Careful. Careful, because these are qualities of warmth and care, and you have had experiences in your life where someone offered those qualities to you and then later they withdrew that kind of presence to you, or later were harmful to you.” And so, there would be parts of our mind that tend to come up and say, “Hold on, put on the brakes here. Sounds nice, felt nice at first, but what’s happening here is you’re cultivating a kind of vulnerability, and if you cultivate vulnerability to loving qualities like this, then you seem to be cultivating vulnerability to other people who give you these qualities, and then now you are in danger because they may decide to stop giving you these qualities.” Now, here’s the issue, and this comes partly from Buddhist understanding and also partly from modern psychology: No one actually gives us loving qualities. They might be present to us in a loving way, and if they are, that can evoke from within us our own capacity to experience appreciation and warmth and love and gratitude and things like that. But no one can actually give us those experiential qualities. Those qualities are emerging from within our own awareness. The problem is that from the time that we were small children, that’s not something that we have known. It really seemed like when I was feeling really uncomfortable and upset and my mother came in a loving way and comforted me that she gave me feelings of comfort. It really seemed that way to me. And so parts of the mind emerged even from our childhood that are oriented toward trying to protect us, really, from becoming vulnerable in ways that the external world that we have assumed is the giver of our well-being and our pleasant, loving qualities that we don’t get hurt by it when it changes its mind about us. The thing is that the external world has never actually given us these qualities, and so once we can actually help the mind come to understand that by bringing to mind a field of care, what we’re doing is evoking qualities from the ground of our awareness and when anyone, even for a moment, has been present to us in a loving way that has evoked that in that moment, and then we reinhabit that moment, we’re not dependent on them to forever be kind and nice in a perfect and unconditional way. It actually has nothing to do with that. They did us a favor by being present to us in a loving way at one moment, and as human beings like ourselves, of course, they’re not going to be perfectly loving 100 percent of the time, all day, every day. We don’t need that from others, but we do need moments of mutual care. That’s necessary for our own development, as in attachment theory. And as it turns out in a really interesting way, I think it’s part of the very core, I think, of virtually all spiritual traditions and certainly Buddhism as well. We actually need that for our spiritual development as well.

We need to experience the fact that all others who have deepened spiritually in the way that we’re exploring, all those who have deepened spiritually and realized these spiritual things before us are holding us in the qualities they’ve realized, and we need that. We need to be held in that way, and that’s foundational for entering all of us into the paths that we’re all in in the different traditions.

James Shaheen: So we’re going to close pretty soon, but, you know, as you were talking, I started thinking of how easy it is to mistake the person who awakens these qualities in us for the source of those qualities, and I think that’s sometimes how things might go wrong between a teacher and a student. I’m sure you’ve thought about this, but it’s interesting. I’ve been with teachers in whose presence I feel that possibility at least awakened, and I feel very good. I feel very hopeful, and I have a sense of possibility, and it’s just their presence because they’re coming from that place. But it would be easy to mistake that person as the source or to think that my own such qualities are dependent upon that person. What is the danger of that mistaken impression?

John Makransky: Well, the main danger, and it’s very, very common, and also I don’t want to respond to your question as if I haven’t had this problem myself. I think this is often a developmental problem in spiritual practice. As Sharon said, all this is training. I think it’s probably much more common than not that we all get stuck in that to some degree in the course of our training, and part of the learning and the training is to learn with the help of others in whatever community of learning we’re in who have been through these kinds of things and come out the other side, mature others in spiritual community, with their help to come out the other side ourselves. So the main danger is we miss the whole point. That’s the danger. We miss the entire point. The point of someone becoming increasingly actually and authentically quite a spiritual being, the point of that is not to be impressive. The whole point of that and the sign that it’s actually authentic is that they couldn’t care less about being impressive or other people paying more attention to them or thinking that they’re the source of all goodness. They couldn’t care less about that because what they’re really up to is accessing a depth in themselves that connects them to the depth in others. That’s what they’re up to. So what they’re really up to is the depth in those others, so if those others are us, their aim is our awakening to our depth, the source of these positive qualities. That is their entire aim.

James Shaheen: Well, thank you. That’s very helpful. As we get close to the end of this, I’ll bring up the final chapter in your book. You turn to how these modes of practice can inform our service and action in the world, particularly our responsiveness to others. So can you say more about how to integrate practices of compassion into how we move through the world? Because that’s so key.

John Makransky: I think once we train enough with practices like these or others like them in the sense that they can be transformative and start to shift how we feel what we are, what others are, and our way in the world with them, then it gives us a kind of a touchstone for how it is we really always intended to be but didn’t know how to get there, but now we’re learning how to get there, and that touchstone of beginning to access qualities of our depth begin even to unify with that depth, to act from that depth or speak from that depth, to see others from that depth in their depth, that touchstone. So then when we engage in anything, any kind of activity in the world and in relationship with others, we will be recurrently thrown out of that depth into a more superficial level of reactive consciousness because the world around us is conditioned in that way, and we have long been that way. That’s why we’ve been training. It’s an enormous habit that will suck the mind back into that habit of reactive consciousness that is mistaking everyone not for the depth of their being but for the superficial impression we have of them. That shows us, first of all, if we need to train more and more, because, oh, I’m just not ready to abide more in unity with my depth, sensing others in their depth, responding to that in them, I get thrown out of it too easily. The moment somebody just says anything that criticizes something I’m suggesting or whatever, I just get thrown out of it. That might be a sign I really need to train more deeply. In fact, they did me a favor. In fact, by the way, that’s autobiographical.

James Shaheen: Yeah.

John Makransky: There have been hundreds and hundreds of examples of that.

James Shaheen: Right.

John Makransky: But as we train more and more, and again, with the help of others who have trained similarly, have some maturity in all this, to be thrown out of our depth, we can more and more quickly be taken into the healing environment of our depth. So the reactive feelings and reactive tendencies, even as they’re coming up, can be welcomed into the healing environment, for example, that the field of care evokes, so that the world in a sense is helping us to purify reactive habits of thought and feeling and reaction, the world itself, because it’s evoking them. With help of mature others, I’ve trained enough that as they’re evoked, they can be welcomed into a profoundly healing environment in which they can begin to metabolize themselves and empower further depth in me.

James Shaheen: Thank you. Sharon?

Sharon Salzberg: So you say that social action is not mainly about fighting evil; it’s about bringing more goodness into the world. I’m wondering if you could say more about this. I know you’ve written, “Many are ready to fight the evil they see in others; fewer know how to bring out the capacity for goodness in themselves and others.” So I’m looking forward to your redefinition of social action.

John Makransky: Yeah. I think this is the deeper intent of all social action, whether we realize it or not consciously. We really want to try to bring more good into the world. But it’s hard to know how. But yes, I really mean that. When we think we’re fighting evil, I mean, typically we’re seeing the evil in others, and that seeing of others, seeing the evil in them, it’s not usually just a seeing that sees them as, you know, oh, there’s a little bit of evil tendencies there, but there’s all kinds of other backgrounds and experiences and wishes and hopes and dreams and sufferings they’ve gone through and fears for their loved ones. We’re not seeing any of that when we’re mainly looking and seeing evil in others. That’s mainly all we’re seeing. They’re reduced to that. And when we do that, sorry, we are now evil. Sorry. Just that very way of perceiving others and the reactions that now come, that’s the very evil that we think we’re fighting, but it turns out that it’s in us. So Martin Luther King Jr. used to say this in some of his writings. He led meditations along these lines. Actually, he raised all this up brilliantly.

So that’s why social action cannot and really should not be understood as fighting evil because when we understand it that way, we’ve now joined the evil side, but we’re just not conscious that we have. We’re now what it is that we think we’re fighting. But we can bring more good into the world, but that would require really accessing more goodness in ourselves. I think that always begins as in developmental psychology theory, attachment theory, as in what I would call the deep structural pattern of spiritual traditions that I think I’m trying to engage in others, we begin to discover a goodness in ourselves. If someone sees it in us, even for a moment, we are interdependent in that way. We’re not just interdependent in terms of provoking evil in and from each other. We can see the goodness in each other. And when that begins to happen, we can begin to realize that, oh, that’s actually available in my very being. That’s why someone can see it in me. They’re not just making it up. And that empowers me to see goodness in others, a fundamental capacity of goodness in them, whether or not they see it yet themselves. This is well known, obviously, and I know this is obvious to both of you, but in really good, mature counselors, therapists, certainly teachers, caregivers, this direction of understanding is absolutely critical. We needed mentors to become these things, mentors who saw the potential in us, and our job, I think beyond anything else, is to see that potential in others. But it’s not enough to believe that we should. We have to learn a way, a discipline and a training, that helps us to access more and more of the fundamental goodness and depth of us from which it does become the most natural thing, then to sense it in others, no matter what crazy things they’re going through, or what crazy ways they’re reacting right now. It’s all just sort of like a mirror reflection of ourselves. Haven’t we been absolutely crazy in the past at some point or another? Can we be honest? We’re all very, very deeply similar that way: deeply good and sometimes totally crazy.

James Shaheen: So we’ve sort of come full circle. Sharon and I were talking earlier, and the phrase “If you spot it, you got it” came up. But it’s good to hear you because at the same time, if I see that goodness and others, it must be in me too. So John Makransky, it’s been a great pleasure. Thanks so much for joining. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of How Compassion Works, available for pre-order now. We like to close these podcasts with a short guided meditation, so I’m going to hand it over to John. Lama John?

John Makransky: OK. Let’s just access, another very simple way to access underlying positive qualities of our being is to use a sense object now, so even the sound of a bell can be like a field of care by interrupting our usual habit of mind, our worrying about ourselves and our current worries, interrupting that decisively in a way that’s just evoking a natural power of simplicity, peace, well-being, whatever. So that can happen with anything. Any sense object can do that. It can become a field of care. Shall we do it? The sound of a bell. We’ll just do that for a couple minutes. So the instruction’s very simple: As you hear the sound, just let it draw you into that sound more and more. So you’re not trying to do anything. You’re not even trying to pay attention. You’re just letting the sound draw you in more and more. You may notice as you let the sound draw you in more and more, it has a natural power to draw your past habits of thought and reaction very gently, very naturally into a kind of simplicity or peace or a kind of natural well-being, which our quality is actually coming from the ground of our experience. So the bell’s like a benefactor. It’s kind of surprising how much power that simple exercise can have.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I love the sound of the bell. It draws me right in. Just as you said, that was really wonderful. Thank you, Lama John, it was fantastic having you on.

John Makransky: I loved being here. Thanks so much, James and Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, thank you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with John Makransky. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!