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Even when we’re alone, compassion can connect us to loved ones, friends, colleagues, strangers, and even people we disagree with. Compassion reminds us that suffering is part of our shared human experience, and that healing and growth depend deeply on connection, whether or not anyone else is in the room.

Our guest today is Aproteem Choudhury, program director of health at The Compassion Institute. In this second episode in our series on compassion, we talk about meeting suffering without trying to fix it, bringing care to communities affected by trauma, and how compassion can help us feel more connected to ourselves and one another.

Introduction to Aproteem Choudhury

Scott Snibbe: Apuro, it’s a pleasure to have you on How to Train a Happy Mind. Thanks for taking some time out of your busy schedule with the Compassion Institute to talk to us about compassion.

Aproteem Choudhury: Oh, it’s my pleasure, Scott. Thanks for having me.

Scott Snibbe: I want to start out more personally: how has compassion impacted your own life? Why did you go into this line of business?

Aproteem Choudhury: I’ll give you a little bit of background about me. I grew up in Texas, in a Bangladeshi immigrant family that has a history of war and migration. There was a very kind of devotional, spiritual household experience, and I feel like I learned early on that suffering and compassion are like next-door neighbors. And the process of healing and growing and growing up, it’s not an individual act. It requires a sense of community and connection.

I learned early on that suffering and compassion are like next-door neighbors.

And before I ever even really knew what compassion as a concept was, in many ways it was infused in my life. It was part of my daily life. And along that journey, I knew in both my conceptual mind and in my heart that it was important for me to be there for others and help others. It was kind of so deep down that I never even questioned it.

Kind of from my family and culturally, I had this inheritance of, “Oh, you should be a doctor. That’s the right thing to do.” And I never questioned that because within me, I knew I had to be there for other people. That was kind of the script that I was running.

And being down here in Houston, we get hit by hurricanes every few years. Back in 2017, Hurricane Harvey devastated our community. And at that time, I still was on this script, this idea that I should be a doctor. So I signed up for this, what was billed as a psychosocial disaster response, a way for community members to show up for other community members.

And to be honest, I thought, “Okay, I’ll sign up for this training, and it’ll look really good on my med school application.” What I experienced in that space was that we can be with people without diagnosing them or trying to fix them, and showing up with wisdom practices, care, attention, listening without trying to fix, and simply coming together as human beings.

I saw what was possible and what’s right under our nose all the time. And that’s when I felt that this part of me that was always there in my heart, and then this idea of compassion and contemplative care, all linked together. That experience, in a way, an awakening experience, became my North Star.

The relationship between suffering and compassion

Scott Snibbe: Talk a little bit more about the relationship between suffering and compassion.

Aproteem Choudhury: Much of the work that I’ve done has focused on addressing trauma, behavioral health challenges, public health-related initiatives where it’s obvious that something is missing or lacking, or something needs to change. And oftentimes that doorway for us to begin to relate to and exercise and practice compassion for ourselves and others is the suffering.

And oftentimes that doorway for us to begin to relate to and exercise and practice compassion for ourselves and others is the suffering.

As I think about the relationship between compassion and suffering, I see that as something that’s inextricably connected. It’s right there. One is right beside the other. And what really saddens my heart is that oftentimes folks get stuck in the suffering and develop an identity around the suffering and beliefs around the suffering, and that can become limiting and constrain their possibility.

What really saddens my heart is that oftentimes folks get stuck in the suffering and develop an identity around the suffering.

But when we start this dynamic process of working with the suffering and developing our capacity to face and learn from the suffering, and open ourselves up to learning the lessons of what the suffering has to tell about us and what we might become, that is where compassion becomes so important.

Working with traumatized populations

Scott Snibbe: Let’s talk about trauma. It’s sort of the hottest topic in self-healing and so on. Tell me a little bit about the traumatized populations that you work with and how compassion is helping.

Aproteem Choudhury: It is a hot topic, and just a few years ago, it was published that trauma was the word of the year. This is something that is kind of at the top of the collective consciousness. People are really thinking about it. People are really examining trauma at a societal level, at an individual level.

When folks often think about trauma, they think about a situation that happened to them. That might be what you call big-T trauma. There’s also trauma that can take shape and form and affect us as it relates to what should have happened but didn’t. A form of care that was never received, or a kind of connection or containment that was never received. And these can go back into our early childhood.

There’s also trauma that can take shape and form and affect us as it relates to what should have happened but didn’t.

Then there’s another level of trauma which is more systemic and collective. Some examples of those are natural disaster and war. We also have trauma that is systemic in the form of structural oppression and racism.

There are many different kinds of trauma, and the kind of trauma that I’ve worked with looks at what happens when a community is traumatized. I’ll give you an example. The first community that I worked with that was traumatized was the one that I mentioned here at home in Houston after the hurricane.

The hurricane came, it parked itself over Houston and poured rain for four days, and many, many thousands of people lost their homes. That was about ten years ago. Still to this day, when there’s a heavy rainstorm, you hear anecdotally the feelings of fear, the way in which the trauma is still kind of stored in our body, in our mind, and it affects us.

The way we dealt with that trauma was to bring people together. It’s a beautiful model of connection and care where folks come together. They begin to slowly work on this mind-body connection, which the wisdom traditions are well versed in and familiar with. But in our modern Western psychological approaches, we’re kind of beginning to catch on and catch up.

What we do is bring people together in small groups. These are called mind-body skills groups, and we let people talk about what they need to talk about. We create a container, a safe container, where there is no agenda.

As a faculty leader of a mind-body skills group, you and I and others may be sitting around in the wake of this natural disaster, but you might be talking about your brother or your sister or a family member. And my job is to listen, and to listen with awareness for your experience. What’s going on with Scott? Also listen to and feel into what’s happening with the group. How’s the group responding?

And finally, there’s this approach that democratizes my position within the group: What’s also happening with me? As a group leader, I’m also a participant, and I’m able to model, through awareness of my own experience, what it’s like to express what’s going on with me at a somatic level, at a mind-body level, and through that, invite others to deepen their awareness into their deeper kind of core experience.

Scott Snibbe: And how does a group like this emerge? I mean, you’re working with the Compassion Institute, right?

Aproteem Choudhury: Yeah, that was kind of the early part of my career in this contemplative care work. At Compassion Institute, our work is adjacent, and our focus is really working with professional communities, namely healthcare, law enforcement, education leaders who recognize that within their workforce, within the sector that they’re leading in or working in, there’s something fundamentally wrong.

Why is the healthcare system “broken”?

Scott Snibbe: I mean, we hear that notion that healthcare is broken. Ostensibly, in healthcare and hospitals, all they’re doing is taking care of people. So where is that going off the rails? Where is it not working? How is it not compassionate? And then how do you help steer it that way?

Aproteem Choudhury: Well, this is a big question. And of course, with any kind of function in society, there is an economic dimension. And at times, those economic dimensions affect the way in which the organization is run.

And I think this is an important time to make a critical distinction between this notion that compassion training, or any kind of well-being initiative, should give us the endurance or resilience to continue on within a context where there are structural measures that perpetuate avoidable harm.

We really come from this perspective that individual transformation through compassion, mediated by compassion, should eventually lead into systemic transformation. We’re not in the business of teaching frogs how to tolerate boiling water, right?

We really come from this perspective that individual transformation through compassion, mediated by compassion, should eventually lead into systemic transformation.

So we work oftentimes with organizations from a bottom-up, workforce, and top-down approach, where compassion training or communities and containers for care and connection are not an afterthought.

Working with communities who’ve experienced gun violence

Scott Snibbe: Tell me a little bit about how you worked with other populations. You’ve talked about communities who’ve experienced gun violence, police, which sounds very interesting to hear about. Tell me how these trainings work in those situations.

Aproteem Choudhury: When something tragic and horrific like gun violence happens, of course there’s, coming back to trauma, the trauma of the loss, the victims. But there’s also a kind of trauma that maybe those who are more distant to those situations may not appreciate, which is there’s a loss of trust in the community.

It’s like everything we thought we knew about our community kind of goes up in the air, and it’s very destabilizing. Trauma can fracture trust. And if we think about contemplative care and psychological care as an intervention, the first stage of that intervention is not the mind-body technique or the compassion training or the therapy session. It’s the trustworthy relationship.

Trauma can fracture trust.

When I worked in the community in Uvalde, Texas—a small community, sixteen thousand people, horrific school shooting at an elementary school—when I think about those two years that I worked with that community, what first comes to mind is how that work actually began. It really started first with a question.

At the time, I was working at Texas Children’s Hospital, developing a mind-body medicine program in psychiatry, and we were deployed to Uvalde to serve as members of the statewide behavioral health response. At the time, there were very few psychologists and social workers working in Uvalde, and certainly not enough to deal with the community’s emergent needs following the shooting.

We went down, and in Uvalde, there’s a federally qualified health center that essentially is providing primary care to most of the county. I remember clearly meeting with the leader of that entire federally qualified health clinic.

After that meeting ended and people filed out of the room, I just sat there, and it was just her and me. I asked her, “Well, how are you doing?” What she said was, “Apro, it’s not about how I’m feeling. What I’m worried about is how my staff is feeling, because overnight, all of them, regardless of their role, have become behavioral health providers.”

We decided in that moment, let’s do something about that. Let’s care for the caregivers. Let’s bring some tools. Let’s bring some opportunities for them to come together and say what they need to say, express what they need to express, figure out ways that they can take care of themselves, and then, on the basis of that experience, maybe offer something different to how they’re showing up for the community.

Let’s care for the caregivers.

Cultivating self-compassion

Scott Snibbe: Yeah, and how did they show up? It seems like they need a lot of compassion for themselves. It’s such a difficult position to be in. My uncle had that job. He was the head of emergency psychological services in LA, so it was his job to go and be the first one to tell people about awful things that just happened to their relatives and how others could deal with it.

But where is that compassion? Does it start with yourself? And then how does it ripple out?

Aproteem Choudhury: Especially here in the West, we carry the burden of modernity and individualism. But I think we all have heard that critical voice within ourselves or have thought those thoughts: “Why did I do that?” It’s there.

And recognizing that, and recognizing also the way in which a tragedy like a school shooting can affect a community, can make it very difficult to be kind to yourself when the burden of caring for others—or maybe you could say the privilege of caring for others—becomes so monumental.

Our approach then, and at Compassion Institute, isn’t necessarily to say, “Okay, your engagement with this training didn’t work if you didn’t become more self-compassionate,” but instead to create a context, a container where we can listen to each other, we can build relationships, and we move at the pace of guidance.

We’re not just ramming through things and trying to get to the finish line, but staying with it, whatever that thing is, and doing it within this interconnected web of relationship so that I don’t have to carry that burden all alone on my shoulders.

Scott Snibbe: It sounds like the practices are grounded in listening, care, compassion. Do people get burnt out from this? We hear about compassion fatigue. Is there such a thing?

Aproteem Choudhury: Yeah, compassion fatigue has become quite vogue. I think it’s important to make the distinction that exhaustion is real, burnout is real. As we spoke about earlier, there are structural barriers that perpetuate harm.

Going back to economic factors, private equity is buying up hospital systems, and they’re interested in margins. I just heard about something that kind of horrifies me, honestly. There’s a hospital out in North Carolina where they have implemented a bid system for open shifts for nurses, and the shift goes to the nurse with the lowest wage.

Engaging with the system keeps a roof over your head. Engaging with the system also harms the entire workforce and devalues the care you’re contributing to your community. That’s quite the paradox.

What if compassion was widespread?

Scott Snibbe: Efficiency is sort of a demon of modernity, right? Because who wants an efficient doctor? Do you want to have an efficient meal that lasts 30 seconds? I mean, what really nourishes us as human beings is the inefficiency, isn’t it?

Tell me a little bit about what the world would look like if your work was wildly successful. What would change in the populations you’re working with in healthcare, with traumatized people, with the police officers?

Aproteem Choudhury: One of the things that we are contending with as humans now is we feel like there’s us and there’s them. And I think at a fundamental level, we would no longer have that false illusion of separateness. That might begin to dissolve, and we would see others as us.

We would live in a kinder world where we can show up for ourselves and each other. The ways we connect to each other would likely transform and change. The ways that we care for each other certainly would transform and change.

My hope is that as this work ripples out into the world, the folks that are left behind and forgotten and marginalized and not supported would get included in the abundance of resources that are available for few.

My hope is that as this work ripples out into the world, the folks that are left behind and forgotten and marginalized and not supported would get included in the abundance of resources that are available for few.

Scott Snibbe: Is there a path to get there at scale?

Aproteem Choudhury: The scale question is a tricky one because, as we spoke about earlier, the transformation of the heart, whether it be mediated by compassion or another force, happens heart to heart. It happens one conversation at a time. It moves at its own pace.

And for things to happen at scale, for this to become more real at scale, it depends on our willingness as individuals to engage with that transformational and developmental journey to the best of our ability, in a way that’s responsible.

Scott Snibbe: I’m running an organization that’s trying to help people understand their minds, be more compassionate, be happy within a complex, imperfect world, and I get these questions. Even funders, people are like, “Okay, you’re reaching X hundred thousand people. How could you reach a million? How could you reach 10 million? How could you reach 100 million?”

And I’m also really torn because when I look at it, the groups that work, somehow there’s a natural scale. Things in the universe have a natural scale, and the natural scale for a lot of the activities we do that aren’t broadcast is like 30 people.

That’s a group that can really grow together and really learn. So then when you think about scale, is it like fractal, where it’s always in groups of this size or smaller, but we just have a lot of them? Have you heard or thought of that?

Because, of course, you must have the mission to transform the whole world, if you can, through compassionate ways of being.

Aproteem Choudhury: There’s a lot of interesting research around this. And if we look at human development and social connection, we, for most of our history on this planet, existed within bands.

The more modern research indicates that we can at max have about 150 meaningful relationships. So I do think there is a limit. And that doesn’t mean that transformation can’t happen at scale.

The more modern research indicates that we can at max have about 150 meaningful relationships.

I think it means that we have to be intentional about how we facilitate and support that transformation within individuals, how we facilitate and support communities of connection and care, and how we empower individuals and communities to express themselves and their hearts into their networks.

The importance of ethics

Scott Snibbe: You’ve talked a lot about practices that can be helpful, practices that can be harmful. This boils down in English to the word ethics. And Thupten Jinpa—I’ve been very inspired by how he talks about this, because he gave a talk about 10 years ago about how Western civilization is extraordinary in its innovations in democracy, the rule of law, private property, human rights, all of the amazing things that not even Tibetan culture had.

And yet the thing that’s glaringly missing is an ethical foundation. Can you talk a little bit about that? It’s a big question, but what is ethics? How do you think about it in the context of your work with compassion in these communities?

Aproteem Choudhury: It is a big question. And I think we touched on it just a bit in saying that we don’t want compassion to be an avenue through which we can bypass structural harm.

We understand ethics as something that is deeply connected and intertwined with interdependence, and it translates into commitments. Do not dehumanize, do not exploit vulnerability. We have to examine power and how power affects relationships and how it affects how we feel about each other. And we have to commit ourselves to reduce avoidable harm.

We understand ethics as something that is deeply connected and intertwined with interdependence, and it translates into commitments. Do not dehumanize, do not exploit vulnerability.

Maybe this approach isn’t right for everybody. Should we force people in? Obviously not. And then there’s, of course, this thing that’s often left out, which is accountability, right? How are people affected by our actions? We may be well-intentioned, but we may still harm.

You could say that ethics keep compassion from becoming what I need it to be. It brings all of us into the context in which we’re operating and relating and living.

When you see ethics not centralized in how we express or structure care, it can often feel like or look like paternalism. There are power dynamics. We feel like we need to save the person, and this is what they need. So their voice, their reality, is not necessarily included in how we show up as the helpers or the doers.

When you see ethics not centralized in how we express or structure care, it can often feel like or look like paternalism.

The relationship between loneliness and compassion

Scott Snibbe: You and I talked before this interview about a relationship between loneliness and compassion. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Aproteem Choudhury: What we spoke about stems from an experience that I had in Dharamshala, India, earlier this year. We at Compassion Institute facilitated a leadership retreat. We facilitated this experience where our group could engage respectfully, and with honor and integrity, a living culture of compassion, which is strong and alive in Dharamshala, obviously with the presence of His Holiness and the communities that are connected to him.

Part of that journey was a very rare kind of engagement with a retreatant, somebody who has really committed their life to the practice of meditation along the edge of a mountain where there are other retreatants who have lived there in their meditation huts for 10, 20, 30 years.

This retreatant very graciously allowed our group to connect with him and meet with him and hear his story, and learn from him about what it’s like to spend 30 years meditating on compassion every single day for hours.

I recall clearly one of our group members asked him—he’s in a solitary retreat, so he’s not engaging the world as you and I are, and he’s not engaging the world as even a monastic within a monastery is. He’s by himself. And she asked him, “Well, you’re here and you’re alone. Don’t you get lonely?”

I was brought to tears by his sharp, grounded, clear response: “Half the day I’m meditating on compassion. How could I ever be lonely? I’ve never met you all, but you all are always with me.”

Half the day I’m meditating on compassion. How could I ever be lonely?

And it just felt like, in that moment, something shifted for the entire group. We all had this idea of what compassion was, and suddenly it became something more than an idea, something we could all feel and realize—that this notion that compassion connects us through interdependence is not just a hope or a dream or an aspiration. It’s something that can be alive.

Scott Snibbe: A lot of people probably don’t realize that. I see this in my teachers and great practitioners, that you can feel extraordinary compassion all by yourself for years on end, right? Because we have this power of imagination. I think you have to draw on your experience of having seen people and read about them in the news and everything like that.

But I think it’s something a lot of people don’t know about this practice, is that it can be practiced entirely alone and actually makes you feel quite full and open and warm all by yourself.

Aproteem Choudhury: For myself personally, I wouldn’t say my compassion practice has made me incapable of feeling loneliness. I would say it has made loneliness less convincing.

I wouldn’t say my compassion practice has made me incapable of feeling loneliness. I would say it has made loneliness less convincing.

How to incorporate compassion into your daily life

Scott Snibbe: What’s a way of thinking in everyday life that a person listening to this could incorporate into their own day to cultivate compassion and to just feel better?

Aproteem Choudhury: The way in which many of us, including me, have struggled with self-compassion actually does express itself, or can evolve, into a feeling of isolation or loneliness. It’s a very natural thing for that to happen, and it can also lead to a feeling of, “I’m stuck, and I’m also alone.” It’s like quicksand. It’s pulling me in.

And all of a sudden, the whole world, all my relations, all my sources of support, all the therapy I’ve ever done, everything that is there and good and also part of me, disappears.

First of all, can we recognize that, okay, I’m falling into the quicksand? Can we catch ourselves, or at least glimpse that this is a process that’s happening?

And then we shift our position a bit. We might tell ourselves, as we recognize it’s happening, and if we can remember that we have agency moment to moment, that this is a moment. This is a human moment. And somewhere, someone else knows this feeling too. They’re experiencing it too. May we both be met with care.

Scott Snibbe: Yeah, that’s the essence of these practices, isn’t it? To realize you’re not alone, and then to wish for it to be okay. I mean, there’s a wishing aspect, which I think is confusing to people because wishing for big problems in the world, like illness and school shootings and things like that, obviously won’t make them disappear.

But there’s something that that wish does to your mind, right? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Aproteem Choudhury: The wish is so important. If I have a wish to meet myself with care, if I have a wish that others are met with care, there’s a reorientation. There’s a restructuring of how we actually then show up, how our thoughts, our feelings, our aspirations then begin to affect our behavior, our action.

Mind-body connection

Scott Snibbe: Yeah. And then in the context of medicine, the mind does actually affect the body, right? The wish actually does affect—I think you mentioned something about pediatric communities and mind-body medicine.

Aproteem Choudhury: Yeah. A few years ago, I had the privilege of working with the chief of psychiatry at Texas Children’s Hospital here in Houston. She knew of my work with the trauma healing initiatives, and the way in which we leveraged the mind-body connection—as you stated, the way in which our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, our beliefs are affecting our physiology, our actions, our speech, and the reverse is true.

What’s going on in our body is affecting our mind, the quality of our mind, our thoughts. Are we feeling good about ourselves? Are we feeling down? And so this is kind of bidirectional. Unfortunately, in the West, there’s a split here. In other cultures and traditions, the split is more integrated.

As a means to integrate that split and create more integrative solutions and methods for the children at Texas Children’s to deal with their behavioral health challenges, I was brought on to create this program. And eventually, I learned very quickly that we could teach the kids all these skills, and they could engage all these processes in the clinic, but they spend most of their lives with their caregiver.

So that evolved into bringing the caregivers into the equation and involving the caregivers in this process too, and, being a pediatric population, infusing a dimension of play and open-heartedness into this process.

Because these behavioral health challenges often come with more than the challenge itself. There’s often a sense of shame. The challenge is often felt by all within the family dynamic or the care dynamic.

And so how can we come together and learn how to be in touch with ourselves and each other and do something that might shift how we’re feeling, gain some agency in how we’re feeling, gain some deeper relationship with the plasticity of our mind, and do things that make us happier?

Meditating on compassion

Scott Snibbe: Meditation’s integral to all these practices. You’ve kindly agreed to lead a meditation that will air the week after your episode. Could you just talk a little bit about what that meditation is?

Aproteem Choudhury: I’m happy to talk about it. And in a way, we have talked about it, which is this idea that we can be curious about and have an aspiration to meet ourselves moment to moment with a sense of intention around care.

What does it look like? What does it feel like? How can I invite and draw in that feeling of care, whether it’s care for me as a form or expression of self-compassion, or care for the world, care for a family member, care for someone I know who’s going through something difficult?

And how do I attend to these challenges that maybe I feel like there’s nothing I can do about it, there’s nothing we could do about it? These areas of our lives where things might feel stuck or static, but still we might have that aspiration, that wish, and shift something and be open to that possibility that things can shift.

Scott Snibbe: Great. Well, I’m looking forward to doing that meditation, and I want to thank you, Apro, for taking the time to speak with me and also for all the good you do in the world. From knowing people like the Dalai Lama, Thupten Jinpa, I think there’s one thing we can know, which is that there’s really no limit to what an individual can do in this world.

So the more and more that each of us has that aspiration and just tries in our immediate spheres, the more this is going to happen. We’ll get a more compassionate world, more care, more satisfaction, more happiness.

Aproteem Choudhury: Exactly, Scott. Yeah, thank you for the time, for the conversation, for the care that you bring to this work and having these conversations. We need more of these in the world.

Thanks for joining us for this conversation with Aproteem Choudhury. The idea I keep coming back to is his insight that compassion makes loneliness less convincing. When we remember that others know the same pain, suffering becomes less isolating, even connecting.

Next week, Apro will lead us in a meditation on meeting difficulty with care and remembering that we’re not alone. You can learn more about Apro and The Compassion Institute at compassioninstitute.com. You can also find this episode’s resources and learn more about our Sunday morning community that meets live to meditate together at trainahappymind.org.

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