A Radical Buddhist Antidote for Anxiety | John Makransky and Paul Condon
John Makransky (Tibetan Buddhist lama & professor) and Paul Condon (psychology professor) discuss their Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT). They argue compassion is our natural state, a radical antidote to anger and overwhelm, and a path to happiness and health.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Introduction: Compassion as an Antidote to Anger and Overwhelm
The 'Sales Pitch' for Compassion: Why it's Attractive
Compassion as Our Natural State and its Evolutionary Roots
Understanding Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT)
The Initial 'Receptive Mode' Practice
Traditional Buddhist Approach vs. Modern Adaptations of Compassion
Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective on Relational Practices
Research Benefits of Attachment Priming and Receptive Mode
Transitioning to the 'Deepening Mode' in SCT
Accessing and Understanding Deepening Mode and Non-Dual Awareness
Integrating Compassion into Daily Life
Applying Compassion to Frustrating People and Conflict
Compassion's Role in Addressing Burnout and Institutional Dysfunction
The Dalai Lama's Perspective on Compassion and Effectiveness
Three Ways to Relate to Our Feelings
Broad Applicability of Sustainable Compassion Training
8 Key Concepts
Compassion as a Natural State
Compassion and kindness are presented as human beings' natural, evolved state, a primal expression of our fundamental being that feels like 'home.' This state is considered prior to socially conditioned reactions and is supported by developmental and evolutionary psychology.
Secure Base (Attachment Theory)
Traditionally, this refers to an external caregiver providing safety and comfort for an infant. In Sustainable Compassion Training, this concept is adapted to help individuals identify and reconnect with internal resources or experiences from their own life that provide a sense of safety and care.
Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT)
A method developed by John Makransky and Paul Condon that helps people tap into and bring out their underlying natural capacities for care and well-being. It focuses on identifying inner resources, like a caring memory, to empower compassion for others, rather than trying to self-generate it through sheer effort.
Receptive Mode (SCT)
This is an initial practice in SCT, serving as a relational starting point. It involves recalling a simple caring moment with another person or pet and bringing it to mind as if it's happening now, sensing oneself as being held in deep care, compassion, and acceptance.
Embodied/Grounded Cognition
From cognitive neuroscience, this idea suggests that when the mind conjures an image or concept, the brain simulates the experience as if it's happening now, rather than just representing it definitionally. This simulation is leveraged in relational compassion practices to stimulate actual feelings of comfort and safety.
Deepening Mode (SCT)
Following the receptive mode, this stage involves learning to relax the grip on the usual worrying, reacting mind. It allows one to gently settle into simpler, more intrinsically tranquil and grounded dimensions of awareness that are prior to constant thinking and worrying, letting a deeper level of consciousness naturally emerge.
Non-Dual Experience
This refers to a foundational simplicity of experience that is prior to the construction of a separate self and another, or 'me and the world as separate.' It's a non-conceptual space that is described as ultimately safe, secure, and the ground or source of qualities like love and compassion.
Healing Holding Environment
This is the practice of learning to embrace all arising thoughts, feelings, and reactions within a context of warmth, acceptance, and deep allowing. Instead of suppressing or fully identifying with feelings, one becomes a compassionate container for them, fostering intimacy without being controlled by them.
9 Questions Answered
Compassion and kindness are a natural state for humans, making us feel better and more at home when embodied. It's presented as a medicine for what ails you, making you happier and healthier without making you weak or a doormat.
Evolutionary psychology and attachment theory suggest infants are instinctually prepared for connection and seek out sources of comfort and safety, preferring pro-social interactions, indicating a natural baseline for caring connection with multiple adults.
SCT emphasizes starting with a 'receptive mode' by tapping into an internal resource of care and safety (like a benefactor memory), rather than solely relying on individual effort to self-generate compassion. This approach mirrors traditional Buddhist 'going for refuge' practices that begin by relating to embodied powers of love and compassion.
Through embodied or grounded cognition, the brain simulates the experience of safety and comfort as if it's happening now, rather than just conceptually representing it. This simulation helps to draw out natural capacities for compassion by interrupting ordinary self-focused perspectives.
Research shows benefits including increased tolerance of negative emotion, increased patience while listening to others, greater willingness to help reduce others' suffering, and establishing a deeper sense of security and ease beyond just positive feelings.
First, become very familiar with a receptive mode practice through regular meditation. Then, weave it into your day by touching in on those qualities many times in little breaks or moments, allowing them to empower you for further practice.
By establishing a 'healing holding environment' for your own anger and frustrations, you become compassionately present to your own emotions. This allows you to see the other person beyond their annoying actions and respond with more agency and effectiveness, rather than being fully identified with or controlled by your reactions.
Yes, while institutional changes are often needed, cultivating compassion by becoming a holding environment for your feelings can empower you to challenge dysfunction without reactivity, sensing the humanity in all involved, and potentially being a more effective healing power in the situation.
People either reject, deny, or suppress their feelings, or they fully identify with, rationalize, and act upon them. Both methods keep individuals under the feelings' power, lacking freedom. The third way, taught in compassion practice, is to become a profoundly healing holding environment for them, allowing intimacy without identification or reaction.
23 Actionable Insights
1. Cultivate Compassion for Well-being
Develop your capacity for warmth and compassion, as it is the medicine for what ails you, making you happier and healthier without making you weak or a doormat.
2. Practice the Third Way with Feelings
Learn to become a profoundly healing holding environment for your feelings, neither suppressing nor fully identifying with them, which allows for intimacy, freedom, and agency.
3. Heal Your Own Triggered Feelings
Recognize that your own feelings, triggered by others, are what truly bother you, and practice becoming a profoundly healing holding environment for all your feelings as they arise.
4. Reject Isolated Self-Help Framework
Avoid approaching compassion cultivation as an autonomous, isolated individual trying to remake yourself solely through self-help techniques. This framework creates inner obstacles and is not how successful practitioners traditionally engaged.
5. Begin Compassion with Relational Support
Start your compassion practice by tapping into an external resource of care, like a benefactor memory or saintly figure, to feel held in love and compassion. This relational starting point initiates deeper practices and draws out innate capacities.
6. Inhabit Present Care and Warmth
Re-experience a recalled caring moment as if it’s happening right now, sensing yourself held in deep care, compassion, acceptance, and warmth. Relax into and steepen these loving, tender qualities, letting them infuse your entire being and world.
7. Embrace Reactions in Warmth
When thoughts and reactions arise during practice, notice them and allow them to be embraced within the current experience of warmth, love, and acceptance. Become a healing holding environment for them rather than identifying with or reacting from them.
8. Trust Non-Conceptual Simplicity
Learn to connect with and trust the non-conceptual, basic simplicity of the deepening mode, relaxing into it more and more. This space is considered our most natural state, offering ultimate safety and being the ground for love and compassion.
9. Cultivate Foundational Simplicity
Allow yourself to become simpler and simpler, becoming more receptive to the power of simplicity from your being’s depth, rather than trying to think hard about non-dual experience. Overthinking takes you further away from this foundational simplicity.
10. Respond Effectively Without Hatred
Engage in strategic action and respond to others without being in the grips of hatred, allowing emotional reactions (anger, fear, anxiety) to rest in a space of warmth, safety, and curiosity. This provides access to the full brilliance of the human mind and increases agency.
11. Combat Burnout with Emotional Holding
To address burnout, become more of a holding environment for all your feelings, which can empower you to challenge institutional dysfunctionality without excessive reactivity. This allows you to act with more effectiveness, sensing the humanity in all involved.
12. Daily Receptive Mode Integration
After becoming familiar with a receptive mode practice in a dedicated meditation, weave it into your daily life by touching in on it many times during little breaks or moments of waiting. Repeatedly accessing these loving qualities will empower you for further practice.
13. Recognize Everyday Benefactors
Pay attention to simple, everyday experiences that help you feel at ease and relaxed, recognizing them as “benefactor experiences” that can interrupt mental streams and serve as doorways to a more relaxed state.
14. Observe Kindness’s Positive Impact
Pay attention to your internal state when acting with kindness, gentleness, or curiosity towards others. This helps confirm that you feel better when being kind and compassionate, reinforcing it as a natural state.
15. Repeat Relational Compassion Practice
Repeatedly engage in relational compassion practices, calling to mind resources of comfort and safety, like visualizing professional athletes or piano players do. This simulates the experience and helps natural capacities for compassion emerge effortlessly.
16. Utilize Attachment Priming
Briefly call to mind a resource of security by looking at an image, visually imagining it, or reading words related to safety and security. This technique increases tolerance of negative emotion, patience, and establishes a deeper sense of security.
17. Address Frustration with Awareness
When dealing with frustrating people, be honest about your anger, then remember that their actions don’t define their entire being. Simultaneously, cultivate an embodied stance of warmth and stillness to compassionately hold your own anger and frustrations.
18. Settle Into Your Body
Gently come down from the thinking mind and settle into your body by relaxing, letting it unify you, especially when transitioning from thinking. This prepares you for deeper awareness and connection.
19. Recall a Caring Moment
Recall a simple, heartwarming caring moment with a person or pet where warmth, happiness, or deep listening was present. This helps access feelings of care and upliftment.
20. Settle Into Simpler Awareness
Learn to gently settle your mind into simpler, intrinsically calmer dimensions of awareness, moving beyond constant thinking and worrying. This helps access deeper levels of consciousness that are more peaceful and grounded.
21. Relax into Deeper Tranquility
Relax the grip of your worrying, reacting mind and allow it to settle into tranquil states, letting tender qualities from receptive mode help your mind and body relax deeply. This allows another level of consciousness to naturally emerge without force.
22. Begin with Embodied Refuge
Before cultivating qualities like love, compassion, or mindfulness, bring to mind a figure (e.g., Buddha, saintly figure) who embodies love, compassion, and wisdom. This acts as a traditional starting point for contemplative practice.
23. Embrace Universal Compassion Training
Explore compassion training, as it is applicable and beneficial for people from any religious, spiritual, secular, or scientific worldview. The principles draw from various traditions and cognitive science, making them universally relevant.
9 Key Quotes
Compassion is closer to what we really are.
John Makransky
Our factory setting is compassion.
Dan Harris
It's not just that compassion makes us feel more at home here. It's an expression of our true home. It's an expression of a kind of a primal expression of the very ground of our being.
John Makransky
Humans are specifically prepared to be in connection with multiple adults. So it's our sort of natural state or natural baseline to be in a caring, compassionate connection with more than just one caregiver.
Paul Condon
What's happening within the brain is we're actually simulating the experience as if it's happening now.
Paul Condon
The harder you look and the more you think about it, the further away it goes.
Dan Harris
Other people do not bother us. What bothers us is the feelings in us that are triggered by them.
John Makransky
We have access to the full brilliance of the human brain and mind when we are not in the grips of hatred.
Dalai Lama (as quoted by Dan Harris)
Fundamentally, what's going wrong is that most people don't know how to be with their feelings.
John Makransky
1 Protocols
Introductory Receptive Mode Meditation
John Makransky- Come down from the thinking mind into the body, relaxing a bit and letting the body unify you.
- Recall a simple caring moment with another person or a pet that makes you happy to recall or feels heartwarming/uplifting.
- Bring this to mind not just as a memory, but as happening right now, sensing or imagining that you are being seen and held in deep care, compassion, and acceptance beyond all judgments.
- Feel it, inhabit that now, and relax into it.
- Steepen its loving energies and tender qualities, letting them infuse your whole being and your whole world, every part of you and your world loved in its very being.
- Relax into that and let these tender qualities embrace all of your body and mind, and just let everything be.