Listen or subscribe in your favorite player:

The people who care for us often carry suffering we never see. Compassion can help them meet that suffering with courage and steadiness. But one challenge of compassion training is that right now it’s mostly targeted at individual resilience. Today’s new frontier of compassion training is stretching to create cultures where no one has to carry the burden of their suffering alone.

My guest today is Stephen Butler, executive director of The Compassion Institute, a longtime friend and collaborator. He and I founded this podcast six years ago. In this new episode, the first in a series on compassion, we talk about how compassion can be trained, how it supports people working in intensely stressful situations, and how it can spread from individuals into entire organizations.

Introduction

Scott Snibbe: Stephen, it is a pleasure to have you on How to Train a Happy Mind. You and I founded this podcast and organization six years ago, and you were the one who encouraged me to start moving from lectures to interviews.

Stephen: Scott, it’s so great to be with you again. What a journey, and it’s been fantastic to just see how the podcast and the ecosystem has evolved over these last few years. So glad to be here.

Scott Snibbe: No, it’s great. And we’re reaching more and more people. I think it’s close to half a million people a year now we’re reaching.

Stephen: Amazing.

How has compassion impacted your life?

Scott Snibbe: Making people happier one mind at a time. All right. So we’re here to talk about compassion. Your job is compassion, which is a nice job to have. I want to just start out personally with you.

How has compassion impacted your life? When did this idea blossom in you, and how did it become your job?

Stephen: It was there from the very beginning, and I think for all of us, compassion is there from the very beginning. The moment—not to be too high-minded and pie in the sky—but really for me, compassion began at home where there was a space, a culture within my family where that was nurtured as a possibility, as a base for which to engage with the world.

And then, of course, I’ve been on this journey where I’ve been stewarded by teachers who’ve really encouraged me, because I think that’s a key component, but really also taught me how to tap into what we call at Compassion Institute, and what science calls, the compassionate muscle.

And then eventually in my professional and personal life, because quite often when this has surfaced as a lived value in yourself, you begin to find yourselves around people who also share that value, and that kind of community is very supportive of a compassionate sort of culture. I’ve definitely benefited from that as well.

But back to how it’s nourished me, I take a lot of inspiration from that concept. To be traditional, Chandrakirti, the great Indian philosopher, begins his great exposition on the path and the view of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism with a praise to compassion and praises it as the seed, as the water that nourishes the seed, and also the fruit.

Moving into Compassion Institute, that’s what we try to share with others, that not only contemplative traditions going back millennia have stewarded this, but science has recognized the same thing. This is an essential human capacity. When we live from that and we recognize it, we can train it, first of all, that we can develop it, and we can be more poised to deal with the more difficult things in the world and show up more for the togetherhood of humanity.

Scott Snibbe: Yeah. And that people aren’t just born this way, right? That’s the key, that it’s a muscle you can train, compassion.

Stephen: Well, in a sense, you’re born with compassion.

Scott Snibbe: So we are born that way.

Stephen: You are born wired. We’re pro-social beings. We know this. Science is showing it, but we also see it in very simple examples in our life. We feel relief when we’re connected. We have a phrase called the helper’s high. That’s indicative of this kind of internal compassion.

Now, what happens, though, is we have to cultivate it, and when we cultivate it and we can live from it in a more meaningful way and in a more engaged way, you bring about greater resiliency and greater opportunity to be there for humanity and for ourselves.

Because as His Holiness will always talk about, if you’re gonna be selfish, be wisely selfish, because in the end, serving others and relieving their suffering and attending to their suffering actually brings about greater happiness, greater relief from suffering in ourselves.

Scott Snibbe: So that’s a good distinction. The seed of compassion’s innate in everybody, but it won’t blossom into a flower unless you do the work to make it so.

The seed of compassion’s innate in everybody, but it won’t blossom into a flower unless you do the work to make it so.

Stephen: Right. And that it can be stretched. Back to the path that the Buddha shared, there’s nothing that does not become easier through familiarization. So compassion is like that. We have the capacity, but if we train it and if we live more meaningfully and more directly from that, we can actually go into some really difficult situations: loss, big intense change, illness, things that humanity faces.

We can actually attend to them for ourselves and others in a more present and engaged way and, quite frankly, bring about better results of relieving that suffering. A misunderstanding around compassion practice is that we have to relieve the suffering. We can’t relieve all suffering around us, but what we do when we move from empathy, which is the emotional commiseration of experienced suffering when we see it, we move to a poised mind. It’s a very active movement.

A misunderstanding around compassion practice is that we have to relieve the suffering.

It’s momentum-based. It’s focused on wanting to relieve that suffering. Even that motion brings about tremendous results, even if we can’t remove the specific thing that’s causing suffering for others.

Working with police officers to cultivate compassion

Scott Snibbe: I’m very interested in a particular community you work with, which is police officers, because it’s a community for which many people don’t have that much compassion, and also it’s a community which many people label as lacking sufficient compassion. Now, how do you work with those communities? Can you talk a little bit about that? I’m very, very interested in this.

Stephen: Every community has its own ecosystem, its lexicon of suffering, its pressure points. One of the key things that we do at Compassion Institute is we recognized early on that we need to be creating solutions that are focused on a specific community. We need to do that in tandem with members of the community that can guide us responsibly into the lexicon of suffering and the pressure points that are meaningful for that community.

Our approach when we work with law enforcement is we work with law enforcement. We work with people who know the lexicon, know the community, are of the community, but also are well-versed in the principles of compassion training, the basic tools, the basic concepts. How do you apply this?

So I’ll say something that was deeply transformative for me, and maybe we can do this as a kind of practice. I had the great privilege to present with one of our certified teachers, who’s a member of the law enforcement community, who’s in leadership in law enforcement, and presented at a wellbeing conference.

I’m not a member of the community. It’s very important for me to acknowledge that at the outset. But I remember the person I was presenting with said, “I wanna begin by asking how many of you got seven hours of sleep last night?” And I think out of 60 people in the room, maybe one, two hands went up. We got to two and three hours, 50% of the hands were going up.

Scott Snibbe: Oh my God.

Stephen: So imagine the ecosystem that they, families, their nervous systems, all of that is existing within a container where 40 to 50% of them are getting two to three hours of sleep because of the unique nature of their job. So again, right there, I think you can feel just in our interaction, we’re reframing law enforcement.

So that’s how we work with unique communities, whether it’s law enforcement, public health, K through 12 educators, is we begin to understand what does it feel like, and we have to be navigated in by members of that community.

Like in law enforcement, and a lot of the caring professionals that we work with, those communities are fraught with systemic problems, systemic barriers. Most of the people show up with a mindset that wants to execute their job and actually bring about best results of their job.

And that’s the challenge in situations, looking at what are the systemic things that are happening that are creating certain outcomes for communities that could be harmful, that could be harmful for the people on the inside of the community, on the outside.

A lot of the work that we’ve done, and again, this is not people from outside, it’s people within the community, are bringing about the results and honoring the best of the best wanting to show up to protect others and serve others. And what you find when you get into these communities is quite often that’s what people want. There’s systemic things that they’re having to work within that don’t always support those outcomes. They don’t always support getting the right amount of sleep so that your life is not cut short by 20 years simply because of sleep.

So when we work with some of these communities, quite often we begin not by talking about compassion as a concept. We talk about where is the suffering? Where is the pressure point? And how do we work to reengage with that so that we begin to tap into the compassion muscle?

But we do it by not coming in and saying, “This is empathy. This is compassion. These are the tools. This is how you breathe.” We come in it in a way that’s meaningful for them. Then there’s a better chance for people to bond with it, and it can be bonded with the culture and begin to shift.

Compassion training

Scott Snibbe: Yeah, my uncle worked as a psychologist with LAPD for more than a decade, so I’ve heard a lot about that. It really took a long time to earn their trust to help because a lot of law enforcement feel like people don’t understand their lives.

But how does this even happen, though? Who approaches you and says, “We need compassion training on our police force?” How does this start? What do they ask for? What do they need?

Stephen: Compassion Institute several years ago made a very distinct move that the theory of change, I think, was always implied. And again, this goes back to His Holiness, the Dalai Lama’s going to Stanford and saying again and again at Stanford and beyond.

But a unique thing happened at Stanford that Thupten Jinpa and CI eventually became connected with, and amazing work done at CCARE at Stanford. All of that came from His Holiness saying, “We have to study this seriously.”

So that kind of notion of looking at it seriously and creating—the implied mission was that we have to not only train individuals, because individuals are part of a system. Eventually we have to begin looking at the systems itself.

So back to your question, quite often when organizations reach out to us, it’s because they’re feeling that systemic and that collective pressure. Whether it’s a low morale in the workforce, it could be not retaining a workforce. It could be moral injury, the sense of heroic individuals in public service showing up and, because of systemic barriers, not being able to execute what they signed up for, what they trained for, in the best possible way.

That creates a very interesting systemic problem and a very painful one. So quite often we’re outreached by organizations that say, “Help us solve this.”

Compassion is showing that when it’s brought in, and I think this is where the work of the institute’s been focused on and where we’re really interested, is we can transform individuals, but unless the culture is touched, you can still end up in aberrated systems where individuals have exposure to training, but the system does not nurture training actually leading to the flourishing outcomes that are implied.

So you get people cycling through organizations and workforces because the system isn’t being touched by that. So often it’s those systemic problems that cause people to outreach.

I think there’s a deeper embracing of the possibility of wellbeing as—I mean, we’ve known that. Go back to when you and I were young. I don’t know what it was like for you, but certainly in Phoenix, Arizona, sushi in the late ’70s and ’80s was like, “Are you kidding me? That’s food?”

We’ve had a similar journey with wellbeing where now, then wellbeing was like, “What? Who has time for that?

Scott Snibbe: Yeah. For me it was more like being punched in the face, you know? That was like a normal greeting when I was a boy in Massachusetts. And now people seem much more civilized in grade school, so…

Stephen: Yeah. Well, and I think they’re exposed. We’ve had this great thing happen in the last 40 years. These words that were really not part of life in many ways, although I would argue that we were experiencing them very clearly, and there was a call to action. The tools of it are now generally available in some way, and certainly the awareness of it, whether it’s meditation, mindfulness, yoga, massage, quiet walks, are things that are now integrated and more associated with healthy outcomes than they were 50 years ago.

This is great, but now the call to action is to really have these become systemically part of the culture. And I think that’s really where we’re at, is how do we move from them just being available and it being available to certain populations? Because that’s a key thing. They’re not available to everybody.

Bringing compassion into leadership roles

Scott Snibbe: Yeah. I want to talk about the systemic aspect because I saw it. I’ve worked in a couple big companies here and there, and I often saw these type of interventions being very effective at the leaves of the organization with individuals, but then hitting a wall at management where those values didn’t penetrate into leadership, into the systems, into the rules.

Do you face that with your work, and how do you deal with it?

Stephen: Oh yeah, that’s really, I think, the key piece of the work. There’s been a movement of how do we begin to look systemically to bring these things in?

You bring about the meaningful outcomes that are implied, and I think the call to action is that when we bring in a wellbeing training, we expect to see the culture shifted. That’s really what people want. They don’t want just to have a Coachella of the mind repeated again and again for a bunch of individuals.

That won’t change the system. Quite often, I think we’ve seen this go sideways in organizations where there’s two things: protected time. The time to be able to engage meaningfully with inner development can’t be done in a 60-minute webinar. It can’t be done at this lunch and learn.

That’s how you spark the idea. That’s how you invite people in. But that will never shift the culture and shift the systemic issues that may be preventing wellbeing actually lasting in a collective, in an organization.

So we’ve been looking at impact. We’ve been working with very pathbreaking partners who also see this as the key for their individual and collective outcomes. How do we bring it in in a way where leadership, middle management, where HR, where the economics, where the bottom line is integrated into this so that wellbeing can last and outlast its initial exposure within an organization?

Scott Snibbe: And do you have a specific example, say, of one institution where it worked top to bottom, from the rules and the leaders to the employees, individuals?

Stephen: I would say it hasn’t been done yet. One of our great partners that I mentioned as a case study before is Rio Health in Tucson, Arizona. They serve a significant part—this is basically a community health system, a path-breaking community health system, one that recognizes very deeply that they’re part of the community health movement.

They’re there as a safety net for those people who don’t have access to healthcare. They had the scaffolding of values to be able to bring this in. So we’ve done increasingly deeper and deeper trainings with them. Leadership’s been involved, and you’ve begun to see the possibilities of what it could look like systemically.

It requires capital, too. That’s a key thing. For wellbeing to eventually be the deliverable that we really purport in some ways it is when we talk about it: “Oh, we have access to this within our organization.” But is it a real deliverable? Do people have time to be able to do it? Is it available to everybody? Is it then, after it’s taught, nurtured and woven into the culture? Is there a community that’s brought together to support that culture?

Those things have yet to be done completely. CI is really poised to do that with some of our partners right now, and that’s one of the most exciting things that our team are focused on.

And I think ultimately the big thing we have to reconcile with is time and capital. Because if these things are gonna bring about meaningful outcomes, we have to give them the time, and we have to give them the capital to grow and to be there. They can’t just be sprinkled in, and I think we’ve seen that with some organizations.

In tech we saw very clearly a proliferation, certainly in the Bay Area, of access to yoga, to all these wellbeing mechanisms, but the system was one that was still demanding you work till 2:00 a.m.

In tech we saw very clearly a proliferation, certainly in the Bay Area, of access to yoga, to all these wellbeing mechanisms, but the system was one that was still demanding you work till 2:00 a.m.

Scott Snibbe: Yeah. And what I found too in that environment is that they give you unlimited mental health care for problems they themselves caused in you.

Stephen: Correct. And wellbeing is now basically being taught, packaged in a way it’s only ever gonna triage acute problems or problems that aren’t really deep-seated. So basically now a lot of these wellbeing trainings, they’re being adapted to this hyperactivity we have in our culture, this lack of deep time, this lack of time in general.

And now basically the tools themselves are being shifted, the delivery of the tools is being shifted to this thin slice that people have available, yet they can’t actually bring about the results.

And the worst-case scenario is when wellbeing becomes weaponized. And we’ve seen this a lot in our work, and I think it really has to be surfaced culturally when we start to talk about this. I think the elephant in every room is time.

And the worst-case scenario is when wellbeing becomes weaponized.

I’ll give you some examples where you have access to wellbeing programs, but then you have a highly productive worker, a highly skilled, determined, passionate contributor to the mission and the work of an organization saying, “I’m still human and I’m still suffering.”

Quite often wellbeing can be weaponized by saying, “Well, we gave you access to yoga. You had access to all of this, so maybe it’s just you.”

Quite often wellbeing can be weaponized by saying, “Well, we gave you access to yoga. You had access to all of this, so maybe it’s just you.”

Scott Snibbe: Blame the victim, yeah.

Stephen: Believe it or not, this happens a lot, and this is what happens when you don’t touch the system and you don’t touch the culture. It’s used as a shortcut for increased productivity.

Instilling compassion into big tech

Scott Snibbe: Let me ask you a question. Say you had carte blanche at one of these companies—OpenAI, Facebook, Google, Apple—what would you do if they said, “Come on in, we’re all willing to do whatever you say from top to bottom of the organization.” What would you do?

Stephen: I think you brought up a great comment about this. It does begin with leadership. What we’ve also heard within our work is that quite often leaders thirsting to bring change, and they want to bring relief to the organizations that they’re serving and leading, they don’t know what to do. They don’t have the capacity within the system to take it outside of that 90-minute webinar.

So you begin by bringing leadership along the way that you really surface collectively. And this is a key thing in facilitating the change of well-being within an organization, is you facilitate it within the leadership. You work with the emergent capacity, you begin to bring that capacity out.

And this is a key thing in facilitating the change of well-being within an organization, is you facilitate it within the leadership.

Because quite often it’s there. It’s the system that’s blocking it. So bring leadership in. Begin by illuminating the culture. I think you begin by saying, “What are the pressure points? What are the outcomes?” Quite often they all want the right outcome. They wanna execute the mission. They wanna bring in money.

Everybody wants to hit the bottom line, but they want to be recipients of working in a culture with good people. How do we balance that within this organization as is? And then what do we need to do organizationally to adjust it so you retain staff, so you bring about well-being in a meaningful way so that it is part of the culture?

Everybody wants to hit the bottom line, but they want to be recipients of working in a culture with good people.

Now, that’s part of it, but we need deep impact models that show collectively the possibility, and that’s what CI’s been working on right now, is creating collective narratives that say, “Okay, we can train this amount of people, but let’s start looking at what’s touched culturally. What’s retention like? What’s frustration with the organization looking like?” These are collective narratives.

We need now to have research move into translational research at a collective level, and we need implementation models so that when you activate, going back to the question, that leadership, that organization, they can say, “You know what? There is a different way. We can rethink this, and here’s the data.”

That’s a key part. Having those two things link up, I think, is the next thing.

It’s possible, though.

The impacts of AI

Scott Snibbe: It’s definitely possible. Let’s emphasize that, of course. Given all the things humanity has done, like go to the moon and invent smartphones, yes, we could have a little more time and space for inner development.

But I met recently with a friend who is quite senior at one of these companies, impacted by AI, these big tech companies where AI is everything now.

And I said to him, “Oh, it’s such a shame because AI has increased the productivity, especially of a software engineer, by like four X. But then it seems like such an awful curse that that has raised the expectation of their productivity to six X.”

So these people who should be able to work now a four-hour day are now working a 12-hour day.

And I said, “What’s up with this? Why is this?” And he said, “Well, we’re all really worried that if we just miss one leap…” Because they’re all kind of moving in lockstep. There isn’t a winner right now. There’s actually many different companies moving in lockstep advancing AI.

But he said that, “We’re all worried that if we just miss one stone, one generation, then we’re gonna get cut out and there’s gonna be one winner.”

So this is competition. You can say capitalism, but I think capitalism can be flexible and adapt. But what do you say to that? This is speed, this is competition. I mean, it’s easy for us to talk about this, but what do you say to a company that says, “Sure, okay, I could slow everybody down, but then we’re just gonna lose this race and we’ll have to shut the company down or shut down the division”?

Stephen: Yeah, this requires a really deep dialogue with the people involved. Again, back to communities involved in that system to say, “Where are the footholds to begin to build the infrastructure of something that moves in the direction of retaining people, making them feel connected so they can do that work?”

Again, back to the compassion capacity. When people who are tapping into their compassion muscle are tapping into that, now you don’t want to abuse that, but they have tremendous capacity to do their best and show up, but they need the culture of support.

I think this is a big thing, especially when you’re talking about that specific scenario of falling behind. There’s certain projects even within CI where we have to move quickly, and we say, “We need this done really quickly,” and it means that we have to stretch our boundaries. But hopefully in those organizations where compassion has surfaced as part of a meaningful culture, we’re acknowledging it in other ways where, “Okay, we’re gonna do this now so that this can happen and buy us time later.”

It’s when it’s grinding, when it’s used as the excuse to grind and cycle people in and out, I think is a big problem. We have to meaningfully engage with technology at this time. There’s a wonderful moment where we can get a little bit righter in terms of how we deal with wellbeing societally at this moment, where we can bring in technology in a really meaningful way so we just don’t create a long division problem.

There’s a wonderful moment where we can get a little bit righter in terms of how we deal with wellbeing societally at this moment, where we can bring in technology in a really meaningful way so we just don’t create a long division problem.

Well, great, we didn’t regulate ourselves, and now we’ve got technology, and it’s kind of exponentially not regulating ourselves, but we’ve got it.

So I’ll give two examples. One is coming from our health partners in public health and the AI transcription of notes when you’re meeting with a physician, a clinician, and they say, “Do you mind if I use AI note-taking?”

And they’re able to capture all of that data. That allows them to practice the art of medicine. They can be more present with the patient, the person. So that’s where technology’s buying them time, but it’s also buying them who they are and what they signed up to do, like what they’ve trained for. It’s also keeping them in the game.

They’re not feeling like, “I’m just burning myself down here, not doing what I really trained in medical school for.” So that’s coming straight from some of our partners.

And I bring this up all the time. We live in the Bay Area. We have Waymo cars and self-driving cars. I have received beautiful compassion on 19th Avenue because the Waymo is the only vehicle that allows me to merge. And so that shows that we can build a system of deference. If we do it, we can actually utilize technology in the right way to, I think, hit those leapfrogs but preserve—

I have received beautiful compassion on 19th Avenue because the Waymo is the only vehicle that allows me to merge.

Scott Snibbe: I really like that example. The Waymo is the most compassionate car. That’s nice. But we also see it with AI, though, even LLMs. People do complain a lot about LLMs, ChatGPT and Gemini.

But it is one of the few places you can type in something like, “Why do people vote for Donald Trump?” And you’ll get a very reasonable answer that makes you actually increase your compassion. So very good point about AI’s capacity to expand our compassion.

Stephen: And they’re emotionally regulated.

Imagine if it was built even more in a way where that emotional regulation was tenured by a very deeply instilled compassionate lens, one that honors humanity, honors justice, and prevents outrage.

Scott Snibbe: A good point. These AI chatbots, they don’t freak out, and that will have an impact on you, right? Like, if you are chatting for hours a day with a conversational interface that doesn’t freak out, that doesn’t get triggered, that will gradually have an impact on you.

I wonder if that isn’t an interesting impact to look at for Compassion Institute. Because the tiniest steering of how these LLMs are trained in the next generation to just infuse them with even more compassion, your organization knowing quite expertly what that is. I wonder if there’s an opportunity there, or maybe you’ve already thought of that.

Stephen: Yeah, it’s a conversation we’re having. Again, there’s a possibility of preserving humanity. When I joined Compassion Institute, I set up a bunch of Google alerts. The most oft-repeated, on a weekly basis, use of compassion that I see come in my inbox is in obituaries.

And we all want to be inheritors and recipients of a compassionate legacy. His Holiness has said again and again, compassion is survival. The fact that we’re surviving, it may not always be glorious, it may feel fraught with suffering, and it may feel like we’re actually backsliding, but compassion is survival.

The fact that we’re surviving is because we’re tapping into enough compassion to keep it going, and we attend to things. Imagine what it would be if we increased that ability by 5%, where we were now intentionally drawing upon compassion. We were cultivating in a way so we were actually increasing our ability to show up for the most difficult problems in ourselves and around us.

That’s really what we’re interested in. I think that’s the call to action. And again, when His Holiness talks about compassion is survival, it’s really as infrastructure building for reality. Suffering is around us all the time. We can negotiate with it, but a much better way is to reframe it.

Compassion is courageous

Scott Snibbe: And let me ask you about how this manifests. I mean, will we find police officers and doctors meditating in the middle of their workday, or is it manifesting in another way that the compassion shows up?

Stephen: So what you just described, one of our partners in law enforcement, one of our leaders, was able to bring that into weekly gatherings. And it’s regulating. And we’ve developed an entire adaptation of our evidence-based Compassion Cultivation Training that Thupten Jinpa and others developed while at Stanford University.

We have an entire set of derivative programs for each of these applications. The one for law enforcement is Courageous Heart. It’s in the 37 Practices of the Bodhisattva. To get to the altruistic mind, you need compassion. Obviously, that’s the seed. But there’s this wonderful exchange with a Tibetan master from, I think, the 10th century, where he says, “Wow, that takes a lot of courage.”

So it’s recognizing something that’s already in compassion, is it brings about the courage to go for it, to live meaningfully from the altruistic, heroic mindset. And that’s what, when law enforcement is exposed to that, they’re tapping into that because that’s part of the firmament of their culture, showing up in some of the most difficult situations.

And one thing I want to mention about community as well: every community has very unique things. One of our teachers, who’s a certified CCT teacher, I was sharing with that teacher what it’s like, what we hear from our dispatchers in law enforcement.

So these are people in 911. They are hearing the most traumatic part of a call, and then they have to get somebody on it. They’re not actually hearing the outcome of the call. They only hear the trauma. House is burning. Somebody’s bleeding. Somebody’s dying. I’m on the side of the road.

And they move it to the team that needs to go into action to attend it. But they actually go home with all of these stories that don’t have a resolve. Was that person saved? Did they make it? So what a unique thing, very heavy thing they have to carry in their nervous system.

I was telling this to one of our teachers, and the teacher said, “Well, you know, we carry the suffering of our students for a year at a time. Their worries, the hopes they have for that student, the struggles.” Going to bed with 30 or 40, or depending how many students they’re teaching, narratives for a year, wanting to attend to their suffering.

So this is when you get into the lexicons of the culture, but it’s like that. If we look deeply enough, everybody around us is part of the togetherhood of suffering.

“This is not backdoor Buddhism”

Scott Snibbe: The ideas from Buddhism and the Dalai Lama came up a lot in our conversation today, and Thupten Jinpa is the founder, the chairman of the board there at Compassion Institute. Does that get in the way in any way? Because, of course, we’re with communities that have many different religious backgrounds and so on.

Stephen: No, in many ways it doesn’t. Again, I think one of the great capacities of Jinpa and people who steward this work and know what it’s like. Remember, Jinpa’s had one of the most interesting roles and vantage points as well, being on the center, the interpreter, the translator of these discussions between His Holiness, contemplative practitioners, and scientists, and people in society, people doing work.

Jinpa’s seen that, and I think he’s recognized that you don’t always have to be there. So His Holiness, the inspiration of the work, doesn’t show up in the work itself. His Holiness said to Jinpa when he asked him to create and begin this journey of creating Compassion Cultivation Training, “This is not backdoor Buddhism.”

So already His Holiness was emptying himself of His Holiness and the need to make people Buddhist, and Jinpa’s the inheritor of that, and that’s the work of CI. So when we’re in a community where it’s meaningful to bring that in, we bring that in and acknowledge that lineage, but it’s not part of the core curriculum.

Integrating compassion into organizations

Scott Snibbe: I bet some people are really hungry to get this into their organizations. How do they start? Do they take a course themselves? Do they try to get their organization to bring these programs in more systematically?

Stephen: I think that’s always the best place. I know that the work of the podcast is beginning with the individual. When we work with organizations, we always recognize that the individual has to be brought in. So if it’s a leader or somebody who wants to bring it into their work, whether it’s an organization or, say, it’s an activist who wants to bring these tools and frames into the work that they’re holding, getting conversancy and comfort with it and feeling it is key.

Going through an initial training is really important. Part of the genius of Compassion Cultivation Training is that you get in there very quickly through practices and start stretching the muscle and feeling it. And so having that experience will allow a leader to tap into that and say, “Okay, I know that feeling. I know what it’s like to deeply listen to somebody share with me something that’s really challenging for them. Now that I’ve had that experience, how do I become a champion to uphold that potential culture around me as I look to bring it in?”

So having the individual transformation is key.

Scott Snibbe: Well, it was humbling to hear you say in this interview that you haven’t done it yet top to bottom with an organization. So I hope to have you back once you have and hear that story and how it keeps scaling.

Odd how compassion is a frontier pioneering activity in our culture, and I really applaud you for leading this organization and creating these extraordinary programs and the benefit for all the humans that incorporate them in their lives.

Stephen: It’s a team. It’s a collective. Over 350 certified teachers around the world in 39 different countries, teaching in 37 different languages. We have a tremendous staff, past and present staff, tremendous champions around us. So it takes a village, and we’re very much, for us collectively, in an all-boats-rise moment where we can all come together.

I think, as you and I have spoken about too, the podcast and work of so many great organizations like Mind & Life Institute, Tibet House, so many, are scaling this work. And I think scale is an interesting word because scale can lead to a lot of omissions in wanting to achieve a goal.

I think growth, meaningful growth, when we talk scale, we really mean meaningful growth. I think it’s a wonderful moment for all of us to come together in that all-boats-rise kind of mentality to bring this forward in a meaningful way, and also one that’s fully accessible to everybody, because that’s also something that we have to overcome.

It’s not accessible to everybody right now.

Scott Snibbe: Well, thanks for your fantastic work.

Thanks for talking to me, and we’ll have you back in a year or two to hear how much progress you’ve made. Thanks for joining me, Stephen.

Stephen: Oh, Scott, it’s just always a pleasure. I just am so overjoyed with what you’re doing and what your community’s doing, and all the interviews and all the things that you’re sharing as well through the book, through the podcast, through the in-person events in the community. That’s a really important contribution, so thank you.

Scott Snibbe: Thanks for joining us for this conversation with Stephen Butler of the Compassion Institute. I hope this episode encourages us to see compassion not just simply as a transient mood like any other, but as an innate human capacity we can all strengthen, especially when life gets difficult.

One of the ideas I most appreciated in our conversation is that compassion isn’t just a practice for individuals. If we want people to remain caring and present in intensely stressful situations, we also need to create organizations and communities that support them.

You can learn more about Steven and the Compassion Institute’s training programs at compassioninstitute.com.

Please consider supporting our nonprofit mission, we rely entirely on the generosity of our donors to keep our podcast and videos ad-free. To contribute, click here!

We accept cash, credit, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies, and your donations are tax-deductible in the US.

Credits