Charter for Compassion

Compassion Behind Bars

Thu, 23 May 2013 22:28:17 +00:00

Written by Emma Seppala, Ph.D. and Maaheem Akhtar

A few weeks ago, an unprecedented letter arrived at our office at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University.

The purpose of the inmate's letter was to request reading materials pertaining to research on meditation and the brain. His goal upon his release is to get a Ph.D. in psychology or neuroscience. Through that, he hopes to help others who, like himself, find themselves behind bars because of criminal impulses. In his four years of jail time he has obviously been dedicating himself to his passion: His letter demonstrates an extensive knowledge of the top academic organizations for research on neuroscience and meditation.

Our staff at CCARE was moved by this letter and gathered reading material to mail to him immediately. In particular, we were touched that, rather than playing the victim card or being angry at his fate, he instead aspired to education and wisdom out of a desire to help others. Whereas anger or victimhood would have weakened him, his compassionate stance has empowered him. In fact, he displayed more enthusiasm behind bars than many a free man. Why? An altruistic vision and goal is not only empowering but also leads to well-being. As we have explored in our last posts, research is showing that not only are compassion and altruism beneficial to others, these qualities also improve our physical and psychological health.

Compassion is the ability to move past judgments and to see others as human beings similar to us, and to then act to alleviate their suffering. Research by Northeastern University Professor David DeSteno suggests that, if we see a commonality between ourselves and someone else, we are more likely to act with compassion toward them. The stereotypes we often hear about prisoners is that they are "hardened." Some people believe that criminals are "born bad" and that they cannot change. If they commit a crime because they were not able to see the humanity in someone else, then who is to say they will ever see it again? Science.

Developments in neuroscience have shown us that the brain is plastic and malleable, a phenomenon called neuroplasticity. What neuroplasticity teaches us is that change, growth, and understanding is always possible. A criminal is often a person who has experienced hardships and violence that led to a life of crime. Similarly, just as experience may have turned them into criminals, in the same way experience can help them turn around. This touching tale of Arno Michaels, a former skinhead turned passionate humanitarian, is just one of many examples. "It was getting more and more difficult to deny the humanity of the people I was supposed to hate," said Michaels.

So what does it take to turn criminals around? A number of non-profits offer programs they hope will facilitate compassion through recognition of common humanity. How does such a program work? Gabriella Savelli, director of Prison Smart, a non-profit that provides secular yoga-based breathing and meditation practices to prisoners, explains that even some of the toughest inmates can turn around. Many hardened criminals grew up in inner city environments ripe with violence and bloodshed. Raised in warzones, many suffer from the trauma of accumulated stress and anxiety. Unable to move past the trauma, they remain stuck in a cycle of violence, crime, and substance abuse. Teaching methods that help reduce trauma and increase peace of mind can lead to life-changing shifts for men and women behind bars. Savelli shared the following story with us in which peace of mind led to a recognition of common humanity:

"One instance that comes to mind is in New York City. The course was an absolute zoo at the beginning. On the first day the 25 participants were very rowdy and noisy. Many couldn't close their eyes during the processes or stop bothering people around them. By the end of the week, the same group sat perfectly still in their chairs while they did the breathing and meditation exercises for a very long, quiet, peaceful time. When they finally opened their eyes, one man stated, 'Now, when I look around the room in these other guys' eyes, all I see is me!'"

Another form of rehabilitative treatment for prisoners is the victim empathy intervention. This process focuses on helping prisoners develop empathy for the victims of the offenses committed for future situations. Although prisoners who have completed this program say that it has helped them, further research is needed to ensure that these interventions truly work.

If someone who has committed a crime so severe as to warrant jail time can develop compassion, wisdom, and a spirit of service, there is little doubt that we who walk free can do so too.

For more information on prison programs or to volunteer:

- Prison Smart: http://www.prisonsmart.org/

- Pen Pal a Prisoner: http://www.writeaprisoner.com/

- Human Kindness Foundation:http://www.humankindness.org/prisonashramproject.html

- Freeing the Human Spirit: http://www.freeingspirit.com/index.cfm

- The Prison Phoenix Trust, UK: http://www.theppt.org.uk/

Emma Seppala, Ph.D is a Psychologist and Associate Director at Stanford University'sCenter for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. She received her B.A from Yale, and completed her graduate studies at Columbia and Stanford Universities. In addition to her work at Stanford, she is an Honorary Fellow with the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Investigating Healthy Minds where she conductS research with Dr. Richard Davidson. Her research focuses on health, well-being, and mind-body interventions. She has examined the impact of meditation on happiness, social connection, and compassion. She has also investigated the effects of yoga-based interventions for combat veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. In addition to her articles in The Huffington Post, she is a regular contributor to a number of magazines including Scientific American Mind, Psychology Today, and Spirituality & Health. You can follow on Psychology Today,Blogger, and Twitter.

Maaheem Akhtar is a Research and Outreach Associate at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. She graduated with Honors from San Jose State University where she studied Psychology and Neuroscience. Before joining CCARE, she served as an Honorary Research Fellow at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and as a Research Fellow for the Mind and Life Summer Research Institute.

For more by Project Compassion Stanford, click here.

For more on emotional wellness, click here.

Compassion by Robert William Service

Thu, 23 May 2013 21:59:13 +00:00

Compassion

A beggar in the street I saw,
Who held a hand like withered claw,
As cold as clay;
But as I had no silver groat
To give, I buttoned up my coat
And turned away.

And then I watched a working wife
Who bore the bitter load of life
With lagging limb;
A penny from her purse she took,
And with sweet pity in her look
Gave it to him.

Anon I spied a shabby dame
Who fed six sparrows as they came
In famished flight;
She was so poor and frail and old,
Yet crumbs of her last crust she doled
With pure delight.

Then sudden in my heart was born
For my sleek self a savage scorn,--
Urge to atone;
So when a starving cur I saw
I bandaged up its bleeding paw
And bought a bone.

For God knows it is good to give;
We may not have so long to live,
So if we can,
Let's do each day a kindly deed,
And stretch a hand to those in need,
Bird, beast or man.

Robert William Service was a poet and writer who has often been called "the Bard of the Yukon."

20 Ways Gratitude Improves Productivity

Thu, 23 May 2013 21:40:43 +00:00

Gratitude is a word that is thrown around a lot. But what does it really mean?

We are told to be grateful but often it seems as if gratitude is more an obligation than anything else. Another item on our already overburdened to-do list. We may end up feeling resentful when we are expected to feel grateful particularly under difficult circumstances.

The key is to understand what gratitude really is and the impact it has on your life and the lives of those around you. In fact, gratitude has some hidden benefits that can improve your productivity and your life.

Why We Want To Cultivate Gratitude

Gratitude is not a feeling. It is really a way of life and a way of meeting life and all of its challenges.

Gratitude is a frame for reality, which enables us to align with the good in the world as well as the evolutionary progress of the human race. It is the opposite of resentful entitlement. Gratitude allows us to accept things as they are even as we try to improve them. It enables us to see ourselves as participants in creating the good in life.

Gratitude puts us in more positive relationship to life and others around us. It separates our attitude from our circumstances so that our current reality does not drag us down. Gratitude is a way of being that lets us participate fully in life without concern for rewards and status. It gets our ego out of the way.

Gratitude lets us give what we can, knowing that we are one of many so that we do not have to carry the burdens of the world on our shoulders.

Gratitude comes from valuing the opportunity to be here on the planet. Everything else is up for grabs.

How Gratitude Helps Us Live Productive Lives

When gratitude is the cornerstone of your life, a number of things happen:

You can let go of controlling outcomes by simply working toward the best possible outcome and letting the chips fall where they may.
You can be a work in progress and let the rest of the world be a work in progress as well – we are all learning. Mistakes do not make you or another person “bad.”
You can give your all to anything you do and trust in the best possible outcome whatever that is. Gratitude lets you throw yourself into what you are doing. Happy to be able to participate, you can give your all and generally do better work as a result.
You are free to completely immerse yourself in your life without reservations about comparisons and status. You can be yourself.
You are free to love since loving is what makes life good for you and everyone else. There is no need to hold back.
You are free to create since you are aligned with the positive. This means that even mistakes are positive since they help you get closer to creating something better.
Emotional issues no longer affect you since you are not spending your time comparing yourself to others and fighting for an agenda.
You can more easily accept others and yourself. We are all imperfect people seeking the best possible life. There is no reason not to be friends.
You no longer take anything personally. Life presents difficult challenges for everyone; it’s not just about you.
You let go of the need to immerse yourself in unnecessary adversarial relationships since you seek only the best for everyone. There is no one to harm.
You trust that when something does not work out it is for the best. It fits your view that we are learning.
You can embrace a trial and error mindset without fear. It is OK to experiment.
You can have a positive attitude toward your choices by accepting what matters in the present without rejecting what may work at another time. Anything can be productive or counterproductive depending on the wisdom of its use.
You can be more process oriented which raises the quality of your work. When you do not spend your time forcing outcomes or fighting other people, then you are more focused on the work at hand: the process and the details involved. You are able to do better work.
You get rid of your own agendas so that you have a more accurate perception of what is needed at any given point of time. Each point in time has certain possibilities but not others. You embrace the current possibility, work with it, and let others go.
You can let others make their own mistakes. We all make them as we learn. Letting people make their own mistakes is a way of trusting others to know what is best for them.
You more easily align with what is necessary and what is good because everything else is a waste of time and energy.
You do not need discipline since you are more naturally aligned with positive forces, so you are more comfortable with yourself, your actions and less likely to have regrets.
You do not fight yourself or others since there is no reason to.
You can be very relaxed because you are unfolding along with everyone else. Life works for you.

Gratitude Helps You Enjoy Life

Gratitude is a generous and relaxed quality that lets us be with life and a part of life. It is trusting, a quality that is often lacking in our social space. Because of that relaxed trust, work and love are easier and more enjoyable.

We only live a short period of time. Gratitude helps our time on earth be one of joy.

Source: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/20-ways-gratitude-improves-productivity.html

Could Our Deepest Fears Hold the Key to Ending Violence?

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:22 +00:00

Feelings of fear and powerlessness are driving the cycle of violence that surrounds us. To change that, we need to recognize that we need each other to thrive as individuals.

by Frances Moore Lappé

In his book Violence, psychologist James Gilligan asked a Massachusetts prison inmate, “What do you want so badly that you would sacrifice everything in order to get it?”

The inmate declared, “Pride. Dignity. Self-esteem … And I’ll kill every "MFer" in that cell block if I have to in order to get it.”

Or, as another inmate said, “I’ve got to have my self-respect, and I’ve declared war on the whole world till I get it.”

Pride, dignity, respect, agency—a sense that we matter—these are feelings largely shaped interpersonally. We depend upon the social fabric to get them. But for many, these things are in tatters. Fewer and fewer of us feel a sense of belonging, and we're more and more preoccupied with the desperate scramble for belongings.

We see fear’s face everywhere, whether in a Congress debating assault weapons or in schools introducing lock-down drills. French philosopher Patrick Viveret has called fear the “emotional plague of our planet.”

For most species fear is key to survival. Sensing danger, a healthy animal experiences instantaneous physical changes that enable it to escape; then, once the threat has passed, the impala literally shakes off its fear and runs back to join its group.

But could it be that for human animals fear itself has become a danger? To explore the possibility, a place to start is asking what humans fear most.

It is the loss of standing with others, the fear of being cast out by the tribe. Rather than being hyper-individualists, Homo sapiens are profoundly social creatures—the most social of all species. This sense of standing is inseparable from trust. To thrive, we need to trust that we count in the eyes of others and will, therefore, be treated with respect. In a word, our fear is loss of dignity.

Almost equal is our fear of powerlessness. Human beings need to feel that we make a difference. Social psychologist Erich Fromm argued in The Heart of Man that what characterizes man is that “he is driven to make his imprint on the world.” And later he dismissed Descartes’ axiom about a human essence centered in thought, declaring instead: “I am, because I effect.”

When these essential needs for connection and agency are unmet, we go nuts. We try to get respect by whatever means possible. If peaceful means seem closed off, violence it is.

Inequality has soared to historic levels. In 2010, the top 1 percent garnered 93 percent of all income gains. And in countries and states, “high levels of trust are linked to low levels of inequality,” report British scholars Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level.

Trapped in a giant game of musical chairs, we run faster and faster to edge out the guy ahead. With economic rules that increasingly concentrate wealth, we know we could be the next one kicked out, no matter how quick our pace. So we take on debt, juggle three jobs, cheat in school—whatever it takes to stay “in.”

And our children are most sensitive to this fear of exclusion. Those who’ve felt bullied, unable to fit in, misunderstood, without a voice in those most social of places—schools—are more likely to become psychotic and violent, including against themselves.

In a culture of fear of disconnection, those at the bottom feel most dismissed and discounted. Adam Smith, the supposed (but misunderstood) champion of the market more than two centuries ago grasped the devastating power of exclusion: Poverty, he wrote in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, “places … [a person] out of the sight of mankind … [T]o feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps the most agreeable hope … of human nature.”

In this vein, joblessness isn’t just about money. It’s about loss of “membership.” Martin Luther King once said that “in our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man he has no right to exist.”

And that is exactly how many feel: A rise of 1 percent in joblessness in the United States is accompanied by an increase of roughly 1 percent in the suicide rate.

In our world of increasing inequalities, suicide now claims more lives than homicide and war combined. Americans own more than four in ten of the world’s privately held guns, and two-thirds of U.S. gun deaths are suicides.

And when people feel “dissed,” violence toward the powerless increases, too: The Washington Post reports that each 1 percent increase in unemployment is "associated with at least a 0.50 per 1,000 increase in confirmed child maltreatment reports one year later.” Since the recession began in 2007, the number of U.S. children killed by maltreatment has risen by about 20 percent to more than five children each day. Thus, our culture of fear gets passed down from one generation to another.

So, what can we do to break free from the spiral of fear and worsening violence?

Maybe we begin here: recognizing that our crisis is not that we humans are too individualistic or too selfish. It’s that we’ve lost touch with how deeply social we really are. Easing the fear at the root of so much pain and violence that generates more fear—from suicide to child abuse to school massacres—comes as we embrace the obvious: We are creatures who, in order to thrive individually, depend on inclusive communities in which all can thrive.

Freedom starts there. We build it by standing up for rules on which inclusive, trusting community depends: fair rules, for example, that keep wealth circulating and strictly out of public decision-making, and rules that ensure decent jobs for all.

This pathway out of a violence-soaked culture is no foreign “ism.” It is what’s proven essential to our species’ thriving—communities of trust without which we destroy not just others, but ourselves as well.

Frances Moore Lappé is a contributing editor to YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. This article is adapted from EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want (new in paperback from Nation Books).

Source: Yes Magazine; http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/

Watch TEDxChange Webcast

Wed, 3 Apr 2013 19:05:23 +00:00

You can now watch the inspiring TEDxChange webcast on demand that was shown at events around the world on April 3, 2013. It was convened by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Theme: Positive Disruption

Disruption is usually unwelcome. It represents conflict, chaos, and potential danger. We discourage disruptive behavior in our homes and our societies, often favoring passivity and compliance.

But disruption can be a positive – sometimes vital – catalyst for change. It can challenge old assumptions, ignite conversations, activate authorities and expose new possibilities. Disruption can shed a unique light on difficult issues, giving a fresh urgency and perspective to the challenges of our global community.

To solve the most intractable challenges in health and development, we need positive disruption. It is the path to true progress.

Speakers

Melinda Gates: Host
Melinda Gates is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Along with Bill Gates, she shapes and approves the foundation’s strategies, reviews results, and sets the overall direction of the organization. Melinda will host TEDxChange from the Gates Foundation campus in Seattle, Washington.

Cathleen Kaveny: Religion, tradition, and modernity
Cathleen Kaveny is an American legal scholar and theologian. She is a John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law and Theology at Notre Dame Law School, and is currently a visiting professor at Princeton University.

Halimatou Hima: Investing in girls
Halimatou Hima is a Masters in Public Policy candidate at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Following an internship in the Women & Population Division at the United Nations Foundation, she worked in the Child Protection Division at the United Nations in her home country of Niger (UNICEF).

Roger Thurow: Shifts in agriculture
Roger Thurow joined the Chicago Council in January 2010 after three decades at the Wall Street Journal. For 20 years, he was a foreign correspondent based in Europe and Africa.

Julie Dixon: Social change
Julie Dixon is the Deputy Director of Georgetown University's Center for Social Impact Communication (CSIC), an academic initiative that examines the critical role of communication in fostering engagement in social change.

David Fasanya: Youth poet
David Fasanya is a Nigerian-American performance artist and award-winning youth poet residing in Brooklyn, NY.

Salim Shekh and Sikha Patra: Vaccine advocates
We will show a trailer from the feature film Revolutionary Optimists, about how children are saving lives in the slums of Calcutta. We will then invite Salim and Sikha, two of the children featured prominently in the film, to join onstage for Q&A.

Jean