Compassion improves our Health
Excerpt from "The Book of Joy", His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu with Douglas Abrams.
Two spiritual giants, seven days, one timeless question.
Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have survived more than fifty years of exile and the soul-crushing violence of oppression. Despite their hardships - or, as they would say, because of them - they are two of the most joyful people on the planet.
In April 2015, Archbishop Tutu travelled to the Dalai Lama's home in Dharamsala, India, to celebrate His Holiness's eightieth birthday and to create this book as a gift for others. They looked back on their long lives to answer a single burning question: how do we find joy in the face of life's inevitable suffering?
When we help others, we often experience what is called "the helper's high". as endorphins are released in our brain, leading to a euphoric state. The same reward centers of the brain seem to light up when we are doing something compassionate, as when we think of chocolate.
The warm feeling we get from helping others comes from the release of oxytocin, the same hormone that is released by lactating mothers. This hormone seems to have health benefits, including the reduction of inflammation in the cardiovascular system. Compassion literally makes our hearth healthy and happy.
Compassion also seems to be contagious. When we see others being compassionate, we are more likely to be compassionate ourselves. This results in a feeling called "moral elevation", and recent research by social scientists suggests that this ripple effect can extend out to two and three degrees of separation. In other words, experiments with large numbers of people show that, if you are kind and compassionate, your friends, your friends' friends, and even your friends' friends' friends are more likely to become kind and compassionate.
We fear compassion because we're afraid of experiencing the suffering, the vulnerability, and the helplessness that can come with having an open heart. Many people are afraid that if they are compassionate, they will be taken advantage of, that others will become dependent on them, and that they won't be able to handle others' distress.
One of the differences between empathy and compassion is that while empathy is simply experiencing another's emotions, compassion is a more empowered state where we want that his best for the other person. As the Dalai Lama has described it, if we see a person who is being crushed by a rock, the goal is not to get under the rock and feel what they are feeling; it is to help to remove the rock.
Many people are also afraid of receiving compassion from others because they are afraid that others will want something in return or that they will at least feel indebted. Finally, many people are even afraid of being self-compassionate because they are afraid they will become weak, that they will not work as hard, or that they will be overcome with sadness or grief.
Compassion can flow naturally when we understand and work to remove our fears, our blocks, and our resistances to it. Compassion is one of the most difficult and courageous of all our motivations, but is also the most healing and elevating.
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