How Compassion Works: A Step-By-Step Guide to Cultivating Well-Being, Love, and Wisdom

Uncover your innate capacity for love, presence, and wisdom with compassion training adapted from Tibetan Buddhism and contemporary psychology.

Everything we care about--our mental and physical well-being, our relationships, our spiritual life, our ability to be useful to others--depends on our ability to access love and compassion within ourselves first. This clear, step-by-step guide offers a way to cultivate this power through an evidence-based meditation method called Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT).

With practices drawn from Tibetan traditions, attachment theory, and cognitive science, How Compassion Works uses a progressive series of meditations to gradually build our capacity for mindfulness and presence--and to help us avoid empathic distress, compassion fatigue, or burnout. Organized into three categories--receptive mode, deepening mode, and inclusive mode--these practices help us cultivate unconditional care and discernment from within.

With a flexible framework that allows practitioners to integrate their own religious or spiritual beliefs, this book offers practices suitable for people of all faiths and those seeking a purely secular path.

​​JOHN MAKRANSKY​ ​is associate professor of Buddhism and Comparative Theology at Boston College, senior academic advisor for Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche’s Centre of Buddhist Studies at Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Nepal, former president of the Society of Buddhist-Christian studies, a contemplative fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, and cofounder of the Foundation for Active Compassion and Courage of Care Coalition. He is an ordained lama in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. ​

​PAUL CONDON​ ​is assistant professor of Psychology at Southern Oregon University, a research fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, and a meditation teacher with the Foundation for Active Compassion.