From Mindfulness to Heartfulness: Creating & Dreaming Our Future

Dreaming Our Future: New Directions

In the wake of the mindfulness movement, the advent of the broader academic field of Contemplative Studies, and the maturing of contemplative pedagogy, one wonders, “what’s next?”. Mindfulness research has demonstrated the corollary increase in both self-compassion and compassion for others. Mindfulness helps people become more aware of suffering and cultivate a more accepting and kind response to it, making compassion a natural extension of present-moment awareness. Mindfulness cultivates non-judgment and the ability to connect with the shared humanity with others, recognizing shared human needs and experiences, and fostering a sense of connection and care for others. Could our next focus as an educational movement be centered in “heartfulness”?

Compassion research and training programs have begun to sprout up on landmark college campuses, especially at Stanford, Emory, Boston College, University of Wisconsin, and University of Texas Austin. Learning the lessons of mindfulness programs, they are refining research methods and communicating with other research programs on definitions and reporting, building confidence in their findings. Training programs are drawing on methods such a lovingkindness practice and tonglen that have stood the test of time in Buddhist traditions as well as in the research labs of Europe and America. More campuses are turning toward compassion training as part of building on the strength of mindfulness to create stronger communities.

The definition of compassion has been refined in this research to mean the natural resonance to the suffering of others coupled with an active desire to help alleviate that suffering. It is not merely a feeling empathy that feels the pain of others. It is distinguished by the willingness to engage suffering, stepping out of the role of observer, and aspiring to actually find a way to alleviate that suffering in some way, becoming an active factor motivated to be of benefit. Such engagement has a two-fold effect of encouraging and energizing the subject while communicating concern and care to those who are suffering, bringing comfort and relief.

Compassion has been shown to boost well-being by reducing personal anxiety, burnout and self-criticism but also to dissolve self-centeredness and isolation by the realization that we are not alone in the experience of suffering. It is a method for connecting with suffering — our own as well as others’ — and for awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us. Compassion meditation also enhances social connection through both neural and behavioral changes. Given the concerns about societal fragmentation, partisanship, alienation, and the alarming rise in rage and violence in the public square, could not compassion training serve as a beneficial force for change as well as an empowering education for our students?

Naropa compassion researcher Jordan Quaglia, who is a Varela researcher funded also by the Templeton Foundation, has extended the impact of compassion training beyond the subject. Drawing on traditional Buddhist sources, on secular compassion research, and on new methods of reporting, Quaglia has shown that comprehensive compassion training also affects and changes the relationships and networks of the subject in compassion interventions, with powerful implications for building healthy communities and social harmony. He has also critiqued the prevailing trends in compassion research to focus only on the individual self-benefits of compassion training as far too individualistic to recognize the power of compassion for prosociality and for the benefits of community and networks.

Starting in 2016, the Center for the Advancement of Contemplative Education at Naropa University developed the Compassion Initiative, joining research into compassion with a structured compassion training program. CACE Director, Charlotte Rotterdam, along with Carla Burns, Jordan Quaglia, and myself developed an 8-week mindful compassion training program called WELCOME designed to integrate self-compassion with compassion for others as a seamless journey of overcoming personal isolation and to cultivate the genuine desire to help relieve suffering for others as well as ourselves. It is based on the Buddhist practice of lovingkindness (metta, champa) adapted to secular settings. The WELCOME program itself is now in its eighth year. Research on the program has reflected the results of compassion studies elsewhere: shifting the focus from negative self-rumination to a more positive, other-centered perspective increases positive emotions, strengthens social connections, and can enhance caring actions. The impacts of these results have extended beyond the eight weeks of training.

An additional benefit of compassion training for college students in this cultural moment is the way that it addresses current concerns about university mindfulness practice as a potential exit from engagement with social justice concerns. Contemporary social activists ask whether contemplatives engage in “spiritual bypassing”, what psychologist John Wellwood has called “a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks”? The label “spiritual bypassing” is also applied to the avoidance of social, economic, environmental, and political concerns of the day. On the other hand, critics also ask whether social activists pursue ideological approaches that further polarize and perpetuate the very problems they are attempting to address. Our students are deeply affected by the divisions and demonization that infect the public square and yearn for methods to bring about social change. On the other hand, without effective methods or mentors it is difficult for them to find a solution. Could compassion be a secret gate to effective social change and empowerment of our students as change-makers?

Compassion researchers are asking the same questions. Spanish psychologist Gonzalo Brito observes, if compassion training is geared only to “the generation of positive mental and emotional states and traits” it is underestimating compassion’s potential to develop prosocial behaviors. As Brito suggests, further research in this new field is needed to assess the real-world impact of compassion trainings “to determine if these methodologies can bring effective social transformation”. Can compassion bridge the seeming divide between interiority and skillful engagement with social change? What does compassionate action look like and how can compassion training effectively address the forces of division, animosity and violence in our fractured world? Could a contemplative college education prepare students to begin healing these divisions?

These are the questions already being discussed on our campuses—in our classrooms, in our offices and over coffee in the cafeteria—at least at Naropa. Might compassion training provide the new directions we seek in finding our wholeness beyond the self into society? Can we see beyond rampant demonization into the genuine humanity of others, even when we mightily disagree with them? Can we find a way for respectful discourse about our differences, embracing our mutual desire for happiness and harmony in our communities? Can we collaborate on a future that embraces shared flourishing, building on those mutual connections?

Mindfulness has given us fresh tools for improving symptoms of burnout, depression, anxiety, stress and beginning to develop prosocial attitudes and behaviors such as empathy for the suffering of others. Parker Palmer expressed doubt about our ability to change academic culture, but his remarks were made decades ago. He also spoke about the hidden wholeness we all have, our students have, waiting to be discovered. Mindfulness has helped us begin that process of uncovering our hidden wholeness. Perhaps the next step in dreaming our future is to cultivate heartfulness that can continue that discovery, compassionately engaging our fractured world with real care combined with the skills for healing and connection, bringing wholeness for all.