>> Voiceover: Stanford University.

[ Crowd noises ]

[ Speaker coming to podium ]

[ Inaudible ]

>> Dr. Zajonc: Allow me to welcome you all back.

I hope you had a leisurely and congenial lunch.

In our third session today we're going to be making a shift.

We'll continue with the theme of research and experiment.

But we'll be focusing in particular on the cultivation,

the practices which cultivate compassion in us.

And then examining whether or not those practices

as we have them designed by Thupten Jinpa

and his team whether they are effective.

We have in addition

to His Holiness the Dalai Lama for this session.

We have Erika Rosenberg.

You want to say hello, Erika?

Who's a Consulting Scientist, Center for Mind and Brain

at the University of California, Davis.

And is also a meditation teacher at the Nyingma Institute

of Tibetan Studies in Berkeley.

In her work she aims to bring together the tools

of both science and practice to help people find happiness

and freedom from suffering, in her own words.

Thank you.

Second we have Phillipe Goldin who's the head of the Clinical.

[ Applause ]

Who's a Senior Research Scientist and head

of the Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience Lab.

And then finally Jeanne Tsai who is an Associate Director.

Who is Associate Professor in the Psychology Department

at Stanford, and Director of the Stanford Culture

and Emotion Laboratory,

which examines how people's cultural ideas

and practices shape their emotions.

So we have a distinguished group together with us today.

And we're going to start with Erika.

Please.

>> Dr. Rosenberg: Thank you.

First let me thank you for your inspiration to all of us.

And for your inspiration for the project

that I'm going to tell you about.

You spoke yesterday so eloquently about the importance

of compassion training.

Of making this available to as many people as possible.

And for having something that's not wedded

to any particular religious point of view or world view.

And at CCARE that's been part of our mission.

It's the Center for Compassion

and Altruism Research and Education.

Linda talked earlier about some of the work that's being done

in schools, bringing emotional learning together

with mindfulness.

And what I'm going to present today is an eight-week training

program that we've developed here under the leadership

of my esteemed colleague, Thupten Jinpa.

We're really working from this question.

Can compassion be cultivated?

And we think the answer to this is yes.

But the idea here is that we want to connect

into that very inherent nature that we all have.

I think there's been a lot of research presented today to say

that we're really wired for compassion.

As mammals we have a strong nurturing instinct.

But for some reason, in this culture in particular,

we've gotten separated from that.

And so the idea with any kind of training program is to reconnect

with that basic good nature.

Reconnect with that basic inclination

to care for one another.

And importantly, and I think we've touched on this

with a couple speakers, the importance of taking care

of ourselves and remembering to be kind to ourselves,

so that all fits into our view.

So we had a few key aims in the development of this program.

One, as I said, that it be secular.

We want to reach as many people as possible

so that you do not have to be Buddhist in background,

or have any particular religious orientation.

That it should be widely accessible

to a wide range of people.

Going along with that is the idea of simplicity.

That you, anybody from a wide range of education levels

or socioeconomic status would be able to learn this if they come,

if they show up to the class

with the proper motivation to develop this.

That the tools should be accessible to many, many people.

What goes along, I think follows from these two goals of secular

and secularity, I don't know if that's a word, and simplicity is

that it be standardized.

And standardized.

[ Jinpa translating ]

Yes. So what we mean by that is that it's laid out,

if we prepare a manual, which we have, that it's laid out in

such a way that any qualified teacher would be teaching the

same skills in the same way.

And this is of utmost important for dissemination.

We want to disseminate it widely so we have to know

that it would be taught in the same way by different people.

[ Jinpa translating ]

But this is...

the standardization is also really important for research.

This is as much a research tool as an education tool.

So if we want at first to see

if we can effectively train compassion, or if we also want

to ask questions like does compassion training benefit

caregivers of people with Alzheimer's Disease?

People who are going through an extreme amount of stress

in their giving relationship?

We need to know that if we administer training to more

than one group of people

that they're getting it in the same way.

So that's why standardization was a key concern.

So over the course of eight weeks,

and we meet once a week for two hours.

And there are home practices.

People have home exercises they do every day.

We are building a progression of skills.

This, we start with settling the mind.

We are making no assumptions that people coming

in to this class will have any experience with meditation.

Some of them might, and we've have students

from a wide range of skill levels.

But it is of the utmost importance that people be able

to calm the body, calm the mind,

learn how to sustain attention and stabilize it.

And be able to return to an object of focus

in spite of distraction.

So this is, as you know, foundational for doing any kind

of inner contemplative work.

But especially for, we build on that by bringing them more

in tune with the changes in their bodies

that they experience when they're feeling emotions,

when they're connecting to other people's emotions.

So we always have a strong foundation of settling the mind.

And that is sort of like preparing the ground

for reconnecting with the heart.

Again, this is an intrinsic nature,

so they've created the spaciousness.

Maybe they can notice that quality

within themselves more readily.

And we work explicitly with practices for opening the heart.

Starting with, as is traditional, those people

with whom it's easiest to think, to extend compassion,

so we start working with a loved one.

And having the students work with connecting their, you know,

really conjuring up their feelings of concern

when a loved one was suffering,

and extending loving kindness to a loved one.

Once we've moistened the heart,

if you will to use Jinpa's words, and made that more...

[ Jinpa translating ]

Yeah. Prepared them, it's easier now.

We actually encourage them to kind of look

within toward themselves, and reconnect with that sense

of caring for one's self.

As we've discussed, and I think you've discussed

in other forums, for Westerners in particular it's difficult

to direct love or compassion toward one's self.

But we, you know, we try to make it plain, you know.

You take care of your basic hygiene.

You take care of your food and clothing.

You take care of yourself emotionally,

and self-soothing is a very basic thing.

So contextualizing that is self-care.

Once we've worked with that,

we kind of pave the way for moving out.

Broadening that circle of inclusiveness, and really trying

to cultivate an empathic connection with other beings.

Reminding them

of the fundamental similarities, sameness.

You talked about this yesterday as well, that in spite

of all our superficial dissimilarities,

we all want the same thing.

We all want happiness and its causes.

We all want to be free from suffering and its causes.

And that's just, it's so simple.

But, you know, we get into that it's almost a revelation

for people to connect with that

in an experiential way and remember that.

So we do a lot of work with cultivating connection,

and recognizing interdependence.

And that sort of sets the stage for starting

to move out even more.

Broadening the circle of inclusiveness not just

to loved ones, but to strangers and people

with whom their relationships are different.

And beginning to work to generate active compassion.

So this is what we work with over eight weeks.

And we rely on a variety of techniques to do this,

so I thought the best way to illustrate this would be

to show you an example class.

This is sort of the setup for week four when we work

on cultivating connection.

We begin as always with settling the mind.

Every class begins with this.

[ Jinpa translating ]

So we start each class with settling the mind just to kind

of create a foundation, create a space.

And everybody's coming from different places

after work just to bring it all home.

Then we move out into a discussion

of what the theme of the week is.

And in this case it's Connection and Interdependence.

Here we really ask our instructors to draw

on a wide variety of areas.

So we might from Buddhist psychology talk

about interdependence, you know.

And just simply the idea of how our actions affect others,

and others' actions affect us.

And developing an appreciation for how everybody

around us really wants the same thing,

this fundamental wish for happiness.

And we also might draw on some ideas or concepts or findings

from Western psychology or neuroscience.

Talking about empathy research or maybe, you know,

neural neurons in this case.

That would be relevant.

Really broadening it out.

Then we'll do a Western exercise,

a more Western-derived exercise plus guided meditations.

And in this class the Western exercise is done in pairs.

We break people up into pairs, and it's a talking

and listening exercise and.

[ Jinpa translating ]

So in this case the speaker is told to talk

about something that's happened recently

where they had great disappointment or suffering,

and to share that with the listener.

And the listener's job is

to actively listen silently, not to offer advice.

But more importantly to try to imagine what it might have felt

like to be in this person's shoes.

What, and really conjure up in their body this feeling.

So we're really working on the empathic shared feeling.

And as we know from several theories

of compassion this resonance, this sharing

of the feeling is crucial in the development of reaching

out land wishing to help.

Then we'll have a 30-minute guided meditation practice

in terms of.

In this class we work on extending the circle

of compassion, recognizing importantly the shared

aspirations of all beings.

And there's a nice little imagery exercise we go

through of recognizing

for example how many people are responsible