Neuroscientists are affirming what people have known for centuries: We can train our brain for compassion. Ancient practices include cultivating compassion; in modern parlance, we say we can retrain the brain. These changes can increase our capabilities for love, happiness, and success. Once you learn how easy it is to rewire your brain for compassion, with repetition and practice, you can cultivate more of it in under 30 seconds.
Why Compassion Matters
We have deep needs for love and belonging, but we often go about seeking them in the wrong way. We turn to external sources for validation, like social media, or markers of success, like buying a car we can’t really afford. We wonder why there’s chaos and unruliness in our lives, when, in fact, it is our mental space that needs sweeping and cultivating.For millennia, poets, mystics, philosophers, monks, and compassion cultivators have disseminated wisdom about what they have known to be true about the body and existence. Now, researchers have begun to dig into this mind-body-brain relationship, looking for ways to study and quantify what humans have learned through millennia of direct experience.
