Effortless Mindfulness by Lisa Dale Miller

Author:Lisa Dale Miller [Lisa Dale Miller]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136193088
Publisher: Routledge

Compassion: Responsiveness to Human Suffering (P & S: karunā T: snying rje)

Compassion is the very essence of all the Dharmas. (Lama Shabkar quoted in Ricard, 2013)

Most religions and philosophies consider compassion—often equated with empathy or sympathy—necessary for human survival and co-existence. Research literature describes compassion as a prosocial emotion that is (1) a mix of love and sadness or (2) a feeling that arises when witnessing another’s suffering, sometimes linked with a motivation to help.22 Charles Darwin conjectured that compassion (he used ‘sympathy’) evolved to motivate humans to note, care for and reduce harm and suffering in their vulnerable offspring. We are not alone. Similar caregiving impulses and behaviors have been observed in dolphins and primates.23 The development of human compassion has also been attributed to sexual selection or a need for successful non-kin transactions.24

Social research shows that feelings of compassion are elicited in self-relevant or self-distinctive contexts. Perceived self-similarity and relational closeness foster feelings of equality, directly impacting levels of felt compassion and active cooperation.25 It seems humans are primed to seek mitigation of suffering for those whose well-being we depend on or whose suffering is dissimilar from our own.26 Deservingness also plays an important role in deciding who is worthy of compassion.27 Those who are at fault or cause their own suffering receive less compassionate concern and pity or provoke anger instead.28

Self-report studies show that respondents link feelings of compassion with a motivation to end suffering and do distinguish these feelings from sadness or distress. Several studies were conducted where participants received an appeal for help and were then offered an easy escape. Those with higher levels of self-reported compassion helped more, while those with greater self-reported distress were less helpful.29 So although empathic distress can occur alongside feelings of compassion, it clearly impedes compassionate action.

Until recent years, compassion research was primarily conducted on individuals with no access to contemplative compassion training and as such accurately reflected normative, conditional state (momentary feelings) and trait (tendencies toward) compassion. In the presence of unbearable suffering, who among us might not succumb to helplessness and empathic distress? Buddhist psychology views this conditionality—referred to as referential compassion—as a deficit in mental training rather than an insoluble insufficiency of the human mind-heart.

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