“If you’re not aware of what’s going on in your mind, you can’t transform it.”
Dr.Richard Davidson has believed that strengthening our minds has the power to change the world since he was a teenager. He’s been a pioneer studying emotion, well-being, and our brain for decades. Yet, it was when he met His Holiness the Dalai Lama that the true seed of his life’s work was planted. The Dalai Lama encouraged him to study how practices like meditation influence our brain, and if they made a difference, to spread them as far as he could. Dr.Davidson advances this mission every day as the Founder of the Center for Healthy Minds and Healthy Minds Innovations and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
I was captivated when I learned about Dr.Davidson’s dedication to the advancement of human flourishing, which he describes as “the process by which we can harness the innate capacities that every human being has.” His illumination that we’re wired for love is brought to light by the impact these traits, like awareness and compassion, have on our brain — and how quickly. Studies show that meditation can produce a change in our brain in just eight minutes.
He views these traits as skills that can be developed and shares practices to do so in our conversation. Here’s an excerpt of one I found particularly valuable…
“The cultivation of compassion requires exercising our compassion muscle and generalizing it to more and more individuals. One of the standard ways of doing that is to envision people who are suffering.
We can start with people who are really close to us. We can bring them into our minds and our hearts and cultivate the genuine aspiration that they be relieved from that suffering. We might say in our mind silently: May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
We then can begin to generalize that to other groups as we become more comfortable. We can extend it to people we don’t know very well but don’t have any positive or negative relationship with. It may be someone who delivers your mail or works in a local grocery store. You can imagine a time in their life when they may have had some difficulty because everyone has difficulty.
Eventually, we can get to a person who challenges us and recognize that they’re just like us. They have the same wish to be happy and to be free of suffering as any other human being. They may do things that are annoying, even terrible. But, at their core they are human beings. They do things that may not be very good because they’re confused. So, we can have compassion for their confusion and the suffering that at some deep level they must be experiencing. In that way, we can begin to expand our compassion to more and more of our out-group.
Someone like the Dalai Lama really doesn’t have an out-group. Everyone is part of the in-group: All seven billion people on the planet. That is the ultimate extension of where this kind of practice can go.”
Dr.Davidson powerfully demonstrates that strengthening our mental well-being is significant not only in enhancing our own life experience. It shapes the way we influence each other.
“There’s deep interdependence that is a biological reality…So, the question really is: How can we harness that plasticity? When we cultivate healthy habits of mind, it actually changes our brain and our bodies. So, when we show up with another person and we’re kind, it’s not only affecting our biology. It’s going to affect the biology of the person with whom we’re interacting.”
All this leads to his beautiful invitation, which I’m grateful to leave you with today…
“We have a moral obligation to cultivate love.”
Who comes to mind as you reflect on this compassion practice? How might you hold them in your heart today?
Wishing you well-being,
Jenna