The Compassion Renaissance

Richard J. Davidson, “How mindfulness changes the emotional life of our brains,” TEDx San Francisco, Dec 12, 2019, 17:52 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CBfCW67xT8&t=4s *** I'm a psychologist and a neuroscientist by training. When I first began my career, I began with a question: Why is it that some people are more vulnerable to life's slings and arrows and others more resilient? And that question is still central to all the work that we do. And we're particularly interested   in how we can nudge people along this continuum to nourish and nurture the qualities that promote human flourishing. In the early part of my career, I focused almost exclusively on the negative side of the equation, on adversity, on the brain circuits that were important for understanding why some people are more vulnerable to stress, why others may be more likely to develop a depression or anxiety. And then something very significant happened in my life. In 1992, I first met His Holiness

  The excerpt found here offers -- along with the story of the beginnings, in 1986, of the Mind & Life Dialogs -- a description of the crucial and definitive 1992 events which initiated the Compassion Renaissance . *** Richard J. Davidson & Sharon Begley, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live -- and How You Can Change Them , 2012, Section "Meditation Meets Science," pages 183-190. ~ Meditation Meets Science ~ Back at Harvard, in what was now the beginning of my third year in graduate school, I therefore began to do a little research on meditation, in one experiment, Dan Goleman and I studied fifty-eight people who had varying degrees of experience of experience with meditation, from none at all to more than two years' worth. We administered some standard psychological questionnaires to them and found -- drum roll, please -- that more experience meditating was associated with less anxiety and greater att