I meditate because I refuse to accept that people are things.
We are all living beings, it doesn’t matter who you are and what you have, you count. You matter just as much as anyone else.
The materialistic values that currently dominate human consciousness are illusions. Meditation keeps me real. Don’t turn inwards, we are all connected.
Things are inanimate objects, people are sentinent beings. I practice compassionate meditation to keep love alive in myself and to share it with those who wish for an end to suffering.
I am a friend to all, I will never abandon my brothers and sisters that need me. That is is one reason why I meditate.
If you wish to share the reasons why you meditate, drop us a line. In less than 100 words, tell us about your motivation to practice.
Scientific understanding of compassion meditation is at an early stage but it is already linked to many benefits.
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In Buddhist traditions, there are dozens of different forms of compassion meditation. One thing they all have in common is their potential to improve our health, happiness and well-being. By regularly engaging in compassion meditation, individuals can experience a range of positive impacts on their quality of life. Here are some of the ways that compassion meditation can help improve quality of life:
Decreased anxiety and depression: Compassion meditation has been shown to reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression by reducing negative self-talk and increasing positive emotions.
Improved emotional regulation: Compassion meditation can help individuals regulate their emotions, reducing reactivity and increasing resilience. This can lead to improved relationships and reduced stress.
Enhanced empathy and social connection: Compassion meditation helps individuals develop a greater understanding and connection to others, leading to more meaningful relationships and a greater sense of community.
Increased happiness and well-being: Compassion meditation has been linked to increased happiness and well-being by reducing negative emotions and promoting positive ones.
Better physical health: Compassion meditation can lead to improved physical health by reducing stress, lowering blood pressure, and improving heart health.
Improved cognitive functioning: Compassion meditation has been shown to improve cognitive function, including attention, memory and executive function.
A greater sense of purpose and meaning: Engaging in compassion meditation can help individuals develop a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives, leading to increased happiness and fulfilment.
Overall, compassion meditation can play a significant role in improving quality of life. By reducing stress, increasing positive emotions and fostering greater empathy and connection, this practice can improve physical, mental and emotional well-being.
Scientists have been interested in compassion for decades, but only now can we begin to see why it offers such great health benefits.
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Compassion is recognised as a fundamental human trait, a hard-wired cognitive mechanism to ensure the survival of the species. Without compassion, it’s unlikely that our most ancient ancestors could have sustained extended family units. developed them into tribes and, through collaboration, founded proto civilisations. So why is compassion important here? Evolutionary psychologists contend that collaboration underpins human societies. And it naturally follows that concern for the wellbeing of all group members was a smart strategy to sustain cohesion and allowed these groups to survive threats and challenging conditions.
There is one additional factor to introduce to complete this picture, compassion must have inevitably been nondual, supporting self and others. Only compassion extended to the whole group, including you and me, makes any sense. If I weaken myself or another group member, the loss to the group is the same. By protecting and caring for myself and other group members, the chance of individual and collective survival is likely to have been much greater.
Although this is an emerging area of scientific interest, there is ample evidence that humans get great benefits through pro-social activity and caring for others. Compassion, in particular, is seen to benefit both the person sharing compassion as well as its recipient. It seems likely then that the compassionate cognitive structures that served humans so well in the distant past are still present within us. This doesn’t mean that humans have to be compassionate but suggests compassion may be linked to our overall health, happiness and wellbeing.
So if it’s that simple, why aren’t scientists recommending compassionate meditation for everybody? Well, many renowned meditation scientists have been promoting compassion for decades. But science only reflects a relatively modern view of the human condition, and complex human traits such as compassion are still poorly understood. In addition, meditation research over the last twenty-five years has been dominated by the mindfulness revolution. And it is only now, when limitations in mindfulness research are being documented, that new, more complete understandings of meditation are being considered more widely.
If you want more details about compassion meditation in Canterbury, visit this page. If you’d like to join a free online Compassion meditation group, send us a message with ‘Compassion’ in the title.
Times and venues for the University of Kent Compassion Meditation group.
Compassion meditation at Kent, on-campus and online
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This is a University based group; for details for our open Canterbury group, visit this page.
The compassion meditation group is free, suitable for beginners and is supported by Kent’s PG Community Experience Awards. For more information, email sgm34@kent.ac.uk.
The group practices self-other compassion specifically linked to health, happiness and wellbeing. We use a secular form of traditional Tonglen meditation, designed to integrate compassion for self and other. Following meditation, refreshments are provided, and there is a chance to chat or ask questions for details of meetings and meditation advice, email sgm34@kent.ac.uk.
The group is led by Stephen Gene Morris, a meditation neuropsychologist with twenty-five years of experience in spiritual and secular meditation.
Compassion meditation practice is designed to support health, happiness and wellbeing. A new compassion meditation group has been created at the University of Kent. Supported by funding from the Postgraduate Community Experience Awards, the group meets on the Canterbury campus every Thursday.
Compassion Meditation for health. happiness and wellbeing
A new meditation group has been formed at the University of Kent to teach students compassion-based methods. Funded by the Postgraduate Community Experience Awards, the group will learn traditional approaches that focus on health, happiness and wellbeing. Stephen Gene Morris, an experienced meditation teacher, researcher and neuropsychologist, will be leading the weekly sessions.
The group’s founder, Stephen, has practised meditation for 25 years and studied its structures and operational components. He will teach a secular compassion practice, rooted in traditional methods, supported by reliable scientific evidence. Care for oneself and the wider community is a foundational concept in many spiritual traditions, and compassionate meditation has been used in Mahayana Buddhism for almost a thousand years. But in recent decades, scientists have been investigating the relationship between compassion and health; several interventions such as Compassion Focused Therapy have demonstrated the importance of kindness towards others in our thoughts and feelings. The group will be using self-other compassion training to think positively about oneself and the wider community, bringing benefits to the meditator and a sense of interconnectivity with the people around us.
‘The goals of this self-other compassion meditation are health, happiness and wellbeing. I use a well known Buddhist form of compassion training, Tonglen, as the basis for this method. But while the original psychological elements have been retained, the imagery and context are adapted for a modern secular audience. In my experience, this is a form of meditation that can bring long-lasting benefits to practitioners, and it’s suitable for beginners and more experienced meditators
Stephen Gene Morris
Compassion meditation classes take place every Thursday at 5 pm in room CNWsr5 on the University of Kent Campus in Canterbury. The meditation is followed by a brief social when people can ask questions and share experiences. Soft drinks and snacks are provided. A second session is held two hours later online using the Zoom platform (7 pm) for those who wish to participate remotely. For more details or to register for the online session, email Stephen at sgm34@kent.ac.uk. To keep in touch with the group’s activities, follow the @KentCompassion Twitter account.
To access the immense benefits of compassion meditation, you will need to understand the concept as a prerequisite of creating a compassionate mind.
Over the past 80 years, science has been investigating the health benefits of belief-based meditation methods. Mindfulness is perhaps the best-known family of practices that have been medicalised. Since Gary Deatherage used mindfulness as therapy in the mid-1970s, scientists and health practitioners have been looking to harness its curative benefits. However, when a spiritual meditation practice is translated into scientific terms, changes are inevitably made to the method. One of the most frequent omissions in the adaptation of meditation is the role of compassion. I’m not talking about compassion as a tool of faith or belief, but rather its function as meditation’s conceptual engine. The connection between Buddhism and compassion is well known throughout the world; Buddhist teaching and practice are synonymous with care for self and others.
The psychological understanding of compassion is preliminary; we still lack reliable psychometric instruments to measure and test human insights and experience of compassion. In his attempts to define compassion, the scientist and researcher Paul Gilbert found that “different languages and cultures do not always have exactly the same meaning for the words they use, and heated debates can arise because people are actually talking at cross purposes. Hence, striving for precision and clarity are important, but we also recognize different definitions for different functions.” The point is that we meditation scientists have not yet understood Western concepts of compassion, and we have almost no tools to evaluate what compassion means in ancient belief-based practices. Gilbert is one of the few Western clinicians who delves into traditional understandings of compassion and tries to make sense of them.
The precise use and meaning of meditation concepts are crucially important. Meditation is a systematic way of changing your brain function and structures (yes, quite literally). So before you undertake any regular meditation practice, you need to think about how you are reshaping your mind. In traditional meditation, mainly in the Mahayana Buddhist schools, thousands of scholarly texts and commentaries define and explain all concepts present in meditation practice. One such foundational idea is compassion; The Nalanda philosophical tradition holds that the Buddha is the embodiment of compassion for all beings; thus, it is central to all meditation. So, a clear definition is essential for practitioners.
Although you will find several ways of describing compassion in different Buddhist schools, many find resonance in the wish that “may all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering”. While this explanation is regarded as a reliable definition based on centuries of meditation research and practice, the point for meditators is not to obey it but rather to understand it. The goal of traditional compassion meditation is to generate the mental states linked to the practice. So without a clear understanding of the concept and your engagement with it, meditation progress is abstract because you have not developed a point of departure or arrival. The potential of compassion meditation is still emerging in the West, in part because of known incongruence between belief-based and scientific worldviews. However, in traditional meditation systems, compassion is a quality that has long been associated with happiness, health and sustainable relationships. Once science develops a clear understanding of compassion, we can begin the much more complex task of defining the dual, nondual and integrated forms, concepts still abstract to psychology
Tonglen meditation is a compassion mind-training practice., but the method and purpose are frequently misunderstood in the West.
Learn about tonglen on the podcast
Tonglen brings happiness and health anywhere and everywhere
Tonglen is a meditation practice where you exchange suffering for happiness, both literally and as a metaphor. It highlights the unlimited nature of human compassion. That we can at any moment, make our experience of the world more joyful by altering our cognitive understanding of self and others. By transforming ourselves into the solution of suffering for others, we also become the catalyst for positive self-development. In any meaningful way, tonglen cannot simply be used to benefit one’s health without reference to others. This truth is self-evident to people seeking holistic solutions to health problems. The idea that only I matter doesn’t seem to be positively correlated with good physical and mental health.
Through tonglen meditation, we transform ourselves, but not necessarily in any mystical way, we reorganize our understanding of the interdependence between people. In doing so, we gain the confidence to challenge the self-centred dualistic thoughts that are the source of many of our day-to-day problems. Tonglen is a compassionate practice; traditionally, you breathe in others’ suffering and breathe out the solution to solve their problems. It is this selfless act that also brings benefits to the practitioner. Depending on the knowledge of teacher and student, the nondual foundations of the practice might also be taught as part of the preliminaries, but this is becoming quite rare.
As a simple example of how to apply this meditation consider when you have a difficult day at work, you can practice tonglen, taking on the problems of workers who have also had a challenging day. You mentally exchange their problems with compassionate wishes and solutions. If you can generate a strong sense of relative compassion, then your ability to overcome your own problems can be greatly increased. Tonglen meditation also develops your own real world compassion. This same approach can be used to address almost any aspect of suffering. But be advised; you can’t trick your own mind; the curative potential rests in the compassion for others.
Where does tonglen come from?
Tonglen (giving and taking) has a documented history of at least 1,000 years in Buddhism. The theoretical framework of this practice can be found in the slogans used to illustrate the Seven Points of Training the Mind (lojong). Tonglen has been popularized in the West by a range of meditation teachers, and modifications to the original practice appear from time to time. New meditators often undertake compassionate meditation as an essential preliminary to tonglen. It is also possible to encounter Westernised forms of Tonglen more accessible to non-Buddhists. However, it is essential that modified versions of the meditation are consistent with the original elements of the training. I tend to base my tonglen teaching on the Jamgon Kongtrul commentary translated by Ken McLeod. This is generally regarded as one of the most reliable expositions. As I’ve already suggested, because of ontological conflicts, there are no secularised equivalents of tonglen.
What do you have to do?
No text can fully explain what tonglen is and how to practice it. I highly recommend you receive training from a qualified and experienced meditation master if you wish to practice. In its essence, tonglen meditation is the breathing in of suffering and problems followed by the exhalation of happiness, virtue and solutions. The breath is the device, the method by which the meditator exchanges suffering for happiness as a psychological and physiological training. A key point to remember is that you begin the practice with your own conditions; you (the meditator) are always included in the transformation of suffering into happiness and joy. The object of the meditation can be as narrow or as wide as you wish, for example you can exschange with someone in particular, such as a sick relative or perhaps everyone in a hospital or even all living beings.
You should not think of yourself as a filter that absorbs suffering but rather as a catalyst to solve problems and transform negativity. This is a crucial point and one an experienced teacher can help you with. The tonglen meditation should not be seen as a passive, passionless exercise, but the meditator should attempt to generate a sense that they are transforming suffering. You visualize all suffering, limitations and obstacles as thick black smoke; you imagine it entering your nostrils on the in-breath. On the out-breath the black smoke is transformed into white smoke or’ rays of moonlight’ bringing happiness, surplus and solutions to the object of your meditation. Consider that in one breath you have taken in many difficulties and instantly transformed them into joyful solutions. You can’t trick your own mind; if you don’t generate compassion, the practice will be limited and may even make things worse for you. If you naturally struggle to feel compassion for others, tonglen should be seen as progressive training, starting with some simple objects of compassion and extending your reach as you become more experienced.
Tonglen is a spiritual practice that should be taught by someone of relevant experience and practiced within the appropriate context. This is a meditation method to persevere with, if you put your heart into tonglen and practice diligently, it can offer significant benefits to both experienced and novice meditators alike.
How does tonglen work?
From the neuropsychological perspective, we don’t have a complete understanding of the brain networks and cognitive processes linked to compassionate behaviour. For example, the scientific understanding of absolute compassion is in its infancy. However, there is preliminary evidence that compassion for others might be associated with increased health and wellbeing through mirror neurones and network correlations. The Buddhist theoretical framework of tonglen considers that selfishness and lack of compassion are causes of mental and physical suffering. By training ourselves in compassion, we rebalance the brain networks to restore our ‘natural state’. It is the return to this condition that improves our health and wellbeing.
As always, email us if you have any concerns. And please post your thoughts and experiences below.
Despite eighty years of meditation research, science is still trying to understand what nondual meditation is.
It’s a wrong view to consider nondual compassion merely a method; it is really an entire approach to lived experience. Thus from the outset, we need to define what we mean by nondual. You will find many different ways of thinking about the ‘nondual’ in Western academic literature, but traditional forms of meditation use the term to describe one of three primary states of human consciousness. As the name implies, ‘nondual’ consciousness exists in relation to the ‘dual’, and as every new generation of nondual practitioners ‘discovers’ this means nonduality is part of a binary system. This binary system of dual and nondual describes human consciousness. Most humans spend their entire waking (and sleeping) experience fluctuating between the dual and nondual without ever realising. All Buddhist (spiritual?) meditation challenges the belief that the most common configuration of consciousness, the dual, is the only or most important way to experience life.
A happy mind in a healthy body
Several Buddhist schools have developed meditation (mind-training) methods that explicitly reduce our dependency on dualistic consciousness. Many of these nondual approaches are linked to permanent and enduring states of happiness which also have profound health benefits. What’s more, there is clear but preliminary evidence from neuroscience that the dominance of the brain network responsible for dualistic experience is linked to poor health. Unfortunately, because neuropsychology and neuroscience see the world from a dualistic perspective, only a handful of scientific studies demonstrate the importance of nondual meditation.
Many people find this subject challenging, but altering consciousness is actually the point of meditating. The way we see the world, reduce stress, increase happiness, create less damaging psychological habits are all linked to the dual-nondual relationship. There is almost nothing you can do to explain what nondual consciousness is to someone rooted in dualistic thinking (most of us). Several crucial Buddhist texts describe this problem through abstract teachings and metaphors. But as helpful as these guides are, they can take a considerable time (years) to master. However, one naturally occurring human mental state that we use every day can help us resolve the dual-nondual dichotomy; it is compassion.
Most Buddhist practices cultivate compassion, not just because it leads directly to a reduction in suffering but also for its potential as a nondual teaching aid. From both Buddhist and scientific perspectives, we know that compassion has the potential to be active in the dual and nondual brain networks. Over time this can increase the nondual experience of life. This state offers a wide range of mental and physical health benefits but can also lead to rapid spiritual development. Unfortunately practising the method alone will not necessarily develop nondual compassion, you can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Similarly, meditation is mainly in the mind, so the method alone won’t guarantee positive results without the correct approach and motivation. This is one of the main reasons why a reliable teacher is essential. When we begin these practices, we can easily mistake the experience of dualistic compassion as our goal, and by concentrating on this form, we create new barriers to nondual consciousness. The danger of getting stuck in dualistic meditation is why many experienced practitioners recommend finding a reliable teacher before committing to a specific meditation practice.
Meditation for Health 