When I was younger, I have to admit I used to disregard a lot of empathy and compassion as meaningless and superficial. I recall watching news stories that seemed designed to tug at my emotions and manipulate me to feel a certain way. It seemed that if I didn’t sympathize or want to help others, I should feel guilty and ashamed of myself. In reality, I just wanted to take care of myself and discover my values on my own.

Over time, I learned to minimize my empathy and compassion for others. They were values that felt forced down my throat, and as a reaction I decided that I wouldn’t practice them. I wasn’t a moral nihilist, I just wanted to discover my own values for myself, like most people want to. I think everyone’s morality needs to be discovered for themselves, and blindly following other people’s values is always a recipe for disaster.

Then as I got older, and perhaps a bit more selfish, I noticed I couldn’t find happiness living this way. I used to harbor really negative feelings towards others. I found many people to be manipulators, liars, idiots, guilt-trippers, haters, and just plain evil. By this point I was already starting to get into personal development and trying to find happiness on my own.

Then things began to change. I had learned a lot of useful personal development techniques already (how to think more effectively, set goals, and so on), but there felt like something at my core was missing. I felt more rational than ever, but emotionally lost. I couldn’t make any sense of it.

Then, upon someone’s recommendation, I picked up Eckhart Tolle’s books Power of Now and New Earth. From that moment I began meditating and getting more attuned to who I was as a person or “self.” I gradually began to read more resources on Buddhism, Taoism, and Sufism, and I felt a wave of wisdom and clarity slowly crashing onto me.

I found that I was not as independent of a self as I thought I was. I was, in fact, quite interconnected to the people around me. I found that when I harbored negative feelings toward others, it was actually a reflection of my own insecurities and personality flaws. I didn’t like other people mainly because I thought they could never like me. The changed the way I treated others, which changed the way they treated me, and it turned into a vicious self-fulfilling prophecy.

The more I understood and experienced the metaphysical notion of “interconnectedness,” the more I realized how important empathy and compassion were. Because when people did things that caused me pain, I knew that was actually a reflection of their own suffering as well. I knew it, because I had been there myself.

With this understanding, I practiced becoming more empathetic and compassionate toward others. Not because someone on the news, or at church, told me that this is what I had to do (or I was evil). I did it because I could see clearly why I should value and contribute to the happiness of others.

In Robert Thurman’s book Infinite Life he describes a great metta meditation designed to expand our circle of compassion. We first start by sending positive intentions to those who are closest to us: friends, families or coworkers. Then we expand those positive intentions to the friends of our friends, families, or coworkers. From there we move on to showing compassion toward random strangers. Then, sometimes the most difficult step, is extending that compassion even to those who we dislike or consider to be enemies. Thurman describes a similar meditation in his TED video below.

Expanding Your Circle of Compassion

The Hitler Test

In light of this expanding circle of compassion, I wonder how many individuals can honestly say they have compassion for notoriously evil figures throughout our history, like Hitler or Osama Bin Laden.

It’s a question that I have pondered about for awhile (long before writing this post). I’ve asked people on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media if they could ever see themselves showing compassion to someone like Hitler and it has led to some really controversial debates.

I think this question is a good test for those who are trying to cultivate universal compassion. It helps to pay particular attention to our enemies, since those are the people who we often find most difficult to direct compassion towards.

To direct compassion toward someone like Hitler means that you sympathize with their suffering. Clearly, it takes a really sick man to do the atrocious things he had done. If only he had found true happiness and love in his own life, I doubt he would have acted so immorally. Perhaps if we can learn to better understand how to love our enemies, we can help reverse the cycle of suffering in this world.

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One of the most effective and scientifically supported techniques to help increase focus is the practice of mindfulness meditation. During mindfulness meditation, an individual tries to fix their attention on an object of focus; for example, their breathing. When their attention drifts off somewhere else (maybe to a sound outside, or the sensation of being hungry), mindfulness requires that we make note of that distraction and then return our focus to the object of our meditation.

(For more details on how to do such a meditation, a good starting point that I often recommend is the 100 Breaths Meditation).

The paradoxical thing about this practice is that mindfulness is not only our ability to remain attentive to our object of meditation, but also to be aware when our attention moves somewhere else. It is ultimately this mindfulness of our non-mindfulness (or mindlessness) that helps us cultivate a truly mindful practice.

Clinical psychologist Elisha Goldstein, who is a co-author of A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, recently wrote about this phenomenon on his blog at PsychCentral:

“There’s a very common misunderstanding in the practice of mindfulness that the practice is to stay focused on whatever we’re paying attention to and deviation from that is “bad” mindfulness. In my personal experience in session with a client or out of session in my own life, it is these moments that I wake up to recognize that I’ve been drifting that seem the most valuable to me. Why? It is this precise moment that I wake up to the fact that I have a choice to intentionally practice cultivating a sense of presence once again and this, in my mind, is the foundation to mindfulness and psychotherapy.”

From my experiences with mindfulness, I definitely agree with Dr. Goldstein. The benefits I have received from practicing mindfulness on a daily basis have just as much to do with maintaining focus as it does with knowing how to re-focus after I’ve already been distracted. The two concepts go hand-in-hand. The more you are aware of your distractions and mindlessness, the better you are at re-focusing on the present.

In my experience, it is unrealistic to expect oneself to hold extreme focus on the present moment during everything one does. Our attention spans, while certainly malleable, are limited. Our brains aren’t wired to do everything consciously, and there are times where our brains seem to take a mind of its own and go off thinking about whatever. It isn’t always bad, some distractions may even be good, because our minds bring something to consciousness that we may have been previously neglecting. Paying attention to where our minds “drift off” can often be insightful. So, in fact, there may be some sanity to our mindlessness.

(If you want to practice a meditation that allows the mind to drift wherever it may go, try learning about Objectless Meditation. Although I don’t recommend this as a beginner’s exercise in mindfulness).

Clinging to both “bad experiences” and “good experiences” can be a source of suffering. Because when we cling to negative feelings, we prolong their power over our thoughts and actions. Instead of letting them take their course and then letting go, we hold onto these feelings and even begin to identify with them. And when we cling to positive feelings, we also attach to them as our only source of happiness, but we simultaneously set ourselves up for suffering once those positive feelings inevitably go away.

If everything is constantly changing, then the key to living a healthy life must be embracing this change as it unfolds, rather than attaching our happiness to a certain set of conditions. When we learn how to ride out these ebbs and flow of life, we paradoxically find contentment in the present moment (because we learn to embrace whatever is as it is).

Full acceptance of the present moment also includes an acceptance of its transient nature. And full acceptance of yourself also includes an acceptance that you too are always changing. From moment-to-moment, it often feels as though we are a static entity. But when you view yourself 10-20 years in the past, or what you will be 10-20 years in the future, you’ll often find that you can change drastically from one phase of your life to the next.

I find these ideas very conducive to personal development and mental health. Actually, the whole notion that “thing’s change” has helped me overcome countless internal battles over the past few years.

But it takes practice. Mainly, daily mindfulness, and actual eye-witness of this change as it takes place in the present moment. Conceptions of our “static self” can only be de-mystified by daily meditation into the nature of our changing selves. Change is not just an esoteric concept, but an observable, empirical truth that can be discovered by anyone who watches their daily experiences on a consistent basis. One of the my favorite meditations in de-mystifying this fixed self is objectless meditation. It is a pure mindfulness practice where the observer doesn’t try to concentrate on any one object, but instead allows their awareness to expand to the full range of their experience. During such a meditation your object of focus will shift between different sensations in your body, as well as different thoughts, emotions, memories, and imaginations. A person who has developed a strong sense of mindfulness will learn how to better engage in this process of change without clinging to any singular aspect of their experience.

And the ultimate goal of your meditation is to take this awareness into your daily activities. That means embracing change in all aspects of your life: your health, your relationships, your career, your personal habits, etc. All aspects of your being are in a dynamic state of flux. And keeping this simple truth in the back of your mind at all times can do wonders.

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One great example of neuroplasticity is sensory substitution. For instance, if a person is born blind, often the visual parts of the brain will be taken over by another sense, such as hearing or touch. This is the brain’s way of re-allocating unused processing power only to what we are actually experiencing. It would be wasteful to leave potential neural networks dormant simply because we aren’t getting any input from that sense. Thus, brains have evolved over time to become more adaptive to these changes in our biology.

Neuroplasticity occurs inside us everyday as we encounter new experiences. Below you’ll see several photographs of neural circuity in the brain. From the left the pictures show us the neural circuity of a newborn, then a 3 month old, 15 month old, and 2 year old. As the child ages, their brain’s wiring becomes increasingly more complex and interconnected. Neuroplasticity is what allows us to take our experiences, then learn from them and form new memories. Huge changes are occurring in the brain during these early stages of cognitive development, but the truth is that our neural networks continue to build on each other until the day we die.

The more often neural pathways fire, the stronger the connections will become. This is called long-term potentiation, and it is the basis of all learning and memory formation. This idea is best encapsulated in Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb’s famous quote, “neurons that fire together wire together.”

The big implication here is that if our brain changes itself based on our experiences, then by changing our experiences we can actively reshape our brains. One way to consciously change our experience is to learn how to apply mindfulness, the ability to be intentionally aware of our experience as it is unfolding. And by being more aware of our present experience as it is happening, we begin to form a secondary ability that UCLA psychiatrist Daniel Siegel calls “response flexibility” – the capacity to pause before we act. He describes it as follows:

“It creates a spaciousness of the mind to notice that an impulse has arisen and to disconnect from the automatic behavior that usually follows when someone is an impulsive person. So mindfulness creates a space between impulse and action that allows us to be more flexible in our responses.”

For more of Siegel’s thoughts on mindfulness and neuroplasticity you can check out the video below (or for even more information check out his book Mindsight):

Because mindfulness allows us this flexibility in our decision-making, it also gives us more flexibility in how we choose our experiences, and a more plastic brain. Earlier this year a study was published that showed just 8 weeks of mindfulness training can create significant changes in regions of the brain associated with attention, memory, stress, and empathy. Two of these regions include the pre-frontal cortex, which allows us control and shift our attention, and the insula, which makes us more self-aware and empathic.

Being mindful is the exact opposite of our “fight, flight, or freeze” part of the brain, the part of our brain that is activated when we feel threatened or in danger. This state of mind isn’t necessarily bad, but unfortunately, due to our busy and very fast-paced world, we have been conditioned to activate “fight, flight, or freeze” as a reaction to novel stimuli that don’t actually pose a threat or danger. However, when we are able to remain mindful, calm, non-impulsive, and feeling safe, we can free up our mental resources and use them more effectively for things like learning and problem-solving.

The takeaway here is that by practicing daily mindfulness we can take advantage of the neuroplasticity of our brains and ultimately improve our lives. For some beginner practices in mindfulness you may want to try:

• 100 Breaths Meditation
• Mindfulness of Sound
• Objectless Meditation (a little more “advanced” but I believe this actually describes the essence of a universal mindfulness practice)

I will certainly be sharing more mindfulness exercises in the future. If you are more interested in the neuroscience behind mindfulness check out this Google lecture on the cognitive neuroscience of mindfulness meditation.

A big theme of this blog is to take awareness that we have cultivated during meditation and apply it to different senses, different experiences, and different actions. In truth, you can take any sense and use it as an object of meditation. And this includes our sense of balance.

I was messing around in my backyard the other day and I discovered a brick and a plank of wood. I laid down the brick on its side and then put the wood on top of it. Then, I stood on top of my new apparatus and tried to maintain my balance.

I became really focused on how difficult it was for me to keep a still posture. And as I became more aware, I noticed the subtleties of my weight shifting across the board. From one side to the other, and back again. I noticed when my feet were closer together it was easier for me to keep my composure, but when they were further apart it became more difficult. I kept experimenting, exploring, and discovering new aspects of my body and muscle control.

It fascinates me how taking our awareness and applying it to something as simple as balance can reveal new complexities about our conscious experience. I usually take my balance for granted. I get up everyday, walk around, and hardly ever think about how my weight is distributed throughout my body or how my body and muscles work together to keep me upright. But this is hugely important for someone who practices yoga, gymnastics, likes to skateboard, or maybe someone who is getting older and more clumsy.

Being more aware of our balance and practicing balance can have health and fitness benefits like:

• Improving muscle control.
• Improving posture.
• Improving blood flow.

It can also strengthen our mind-body connection by:

• Increasing concentration.
• Increasing body awareness.

It’s a really simple and easy thing to practice. It’s not hard to just come up with some kind of “balancing apparatus” and begin playing with it. I personally find it really fun and a good exercise in self-awareness. I recommend giving it a go.

For some reason when I first started thinking about “balancing meditation” I didn’t make the connection that it was in fact a kind of yoga practice. Haha. Either way, this is something I want to keep practicing and integrating into my health routine. Being able to hold my body more still and calmly (and improving my muscle control) seems like a really desirable trait for long-run health and fitness. It also requires an interesting one-pointedness between both mind and body.