Neuroscience and Psychology of Meditation in Everyday Life by Dusana Dorjee

Author:Dusana Dorjee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Compassion, self-regulation and existential well-being

We will now examine the contribution of compassion and related states to our well-being from the broader perspective of the mechanisms of meditation involving metacognitive self-regulation and existential awareness introduced in the first chapter. Compassion, loving kindness, rejoicing and equanimity are typically developed alongside calm abiding training (Shamatha). This is because they can counter difficulties associated with self-judgment and reactivity which can arise in meditation training which primarily cultivates concentration, attention control and meta-awareness. As such, training in the four immeasurables contributes to the development of processes underlying the metacognitive self-regulatory capacity (MSRC) of the mind.

However, aside from supporting the development of attention skills, compassion and related practices also selectively cultivate emotional qualities and emotion regulation strategies which enhance the MSRC further. For example, the practice of the four immeasurables develops the qualities of compassion and loving kindness that have been shown to increase positive emotions and approach-oriented unconditional pro-social behaviour (Leiberg, Klimecki and Singer, 2011). With long-term practice, this may to translate into a trait-like response to others’ suffering even outside of formal meditation. In addition, practices like Tonglen and working with the four immeasurables as antidotes to afflictions develop specific emotion regulation strategies that can be applied in everyday life to cope with emotions as they arise.

The practices of the four immeasurables likely also modify the conceptual systems, even though no studies so far investigated such changes. Modulations in conceptual processing with these practices could involve shifts in thinking schemas about how we perceive our own suffering and others’ suffering and how we relate to it. With more advanced practices of compassion, the changes could also include shifts towards more holistic, non-conceptual meanings and less engagement of the construed propositional meanings and schemas (Dorjee, 2016). This is because more advanced compassion practice encourages experiential connection with the felt sense of compassion rather than basic compassion, which arises from contemplations and reasoning about suffering. In this way the practice of compassion and related qualities further enable progression towards more advanced shifts in MEA.

Indeed, one of the core distinctions between advanced shifts in existential awareness is the experience of a compassionate state as a separate or inherent quality of existential awareness. Specifically, the non-conceptual experience of substrate consciousness from which all mental activity arises is often accompanied by the experience of compassion, but this quality is experienced as separable from, rather than intrinsic to, substrate consciousness. In contrast, pristine awareness (rigpa), which is the most advanced mode of existential awareness recognizing the nature of self, mind and reality, includes unconditional non-conceptual compassion as its inseparable and integral dimension. This type of compassion naturally radiates without effort when a practitioner abides at this most advanced level of existential awareness. However, even at basic levels of compassion training, these practices prepare the foundations for experience of non-dual pristine awareness by diminishing the boundaries between near and far, and the self and the other.

Compassion and related practices have a particularly strong potential to enhance our well-being given that they

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