2ND PRINCIPLE: JUSTICE, EQUITY AND COMPASSION IN HUMAN RELATIONS

As I thought about these grand concepts—justice, equity, compassion—I could not avoid thinking about the degree to which we are living in what seems to be an increasingly unfair, unjust and toxic world.

Perhaps we don’t have those three principles in the right order. It occurs to me that compassion must come first before there can be real fairness in the way people treat each other.

Well, not exactly first.

First comes empathy—the capacity to take the perspective of others, to share another’s feelings, to place oneself in another's shoes. It is through empathy that we share the joys of others, and that we suffer their sorrows with them.

When empathic people were shown movies of people suffering, the same areas of their brains were activated as were activated in the ones undergoing suffering. So empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.

Because of this, we are sometimes driven to protect ourselves from feeling the pain of others. We may learn to block our emotional responses, we may blind ourselves to suffering around us or we may find any of a myriad of other ways of defending ourselves.

I believe that the best path out of this empathy conundrum is through cultivating compassion.

We often use the terms “empathy” and “compassion” as if they meant the same thing, but as I recently discovered, they don’t.

Compassion grows out of empathy. It is a warm and caring emotion that doesn’t require that you suffer with the one who suffers. You learn how not not hold the other’s pain, fear, sadness or grief as you orient to thoughts of aiding them. Even when you cannot render any physical assistance, you might send them your blessings and well-wishes. The point is that when you experience compassion, you move beyond simply feeling what the sufferer feels to focus on thoughts of healing and providing help.

Researchers compared people trained in compassion-based meditation to a group who did not meditate.

When the trained meditators watched videos of other people suffering, scans of their brains showed heightened activity in areas related to care, nurturing and well-wishing. In non-meditators, the videos were more likely to trigger the brain areas associated with unpleasant feelings of sadness and pain.

I think there can be little real justice, or at least little that is tempered by mercy and untainted by self-interested biases, until we restore empathy and compassion to the world. There is no chance of equity in our relations without understanding the perspectives of others. Our compassion needs to embrace all of us—victim, offender, and society at large.

Fortunately, compassion is not a painful habit to acquire; in fact, it literally contains its own reward. The most compassionate people are the ones who experience the highest levels of happiness in their own daily lives.

You’ve heard of vicious cycles. There is a virtuous cycle between compassion and happiness; each strengthens the other. I think it’s worth a try.