“Wise Selfish”: Cultivating Compassion

Some years ago, my wife and I had an unexpected bit of downtime with the Dalai Lama while he waited for an event to start in Mon­treal. He told us he had just come from Austria, where he had spent some time shopping.

That was startling—the Dalai Lama rarely shops. My wife asked him, what did he get?

“A toy for my cat.”

It was a long wire with a small mouse-like object on the end, which he could use to play with his cat—and he glowed at the thought as he told her.

“Someone brought me a tiny, wobbly stray kitten,” he explained. “If they had just left it on the street, it would have died. So I took care of it. Now it loves most the person who feeds it—me.”

Positive emotions like love, joy, and playfulness are beneficial to health in many ways, from boosting immune strength to lowering risks of the same range of diseases. “The very constitution of our body guides us toward positive emotions.”

In contrast, as the Dalai Lama puts it, “Constant fear, anger, hate, actually eat at our system.” A wealth of scientific findings show that a steady diet of such negative emotions undermines the effectiveness of the immune system and contributes to diseases ranging from dia­betes to heart problems; chronic hostility tends to shorten life.

People who live in poverty, for instance, have higher rates of heart disease than normal—and the emotional distress about the difficulties of their lives seems to erode both cardiovascular health and the capacity to recover from stress. On the other hand, feeling happy and upbeat in general speeds the body’s recovery from the biological arousal caused by negative emotions. And so helping peo­ple to drop anxiety and distress and to feel happier, research finds, improves their biological health, including lowering the risk of heart disease.

As social animals, we have a biologically based need for the warmth of contact, the Dalai Lama notes, adding that loneliness can become a source of stress. Even more than mere physical together­ness, it’s the affection, compassion, and sense of concern that we find so deeply reassuring—a sense of belonging to a group that cares about one another’s well-being.

Then there’s the commonsense argument. We’ve all seen, he told me, how a family that doesn’t have much money but has lots of af­fection for one another will be happy. Even someone who just visits them will feel more relaxed there, sensing the affection.

By contrast, a family lacking such affection not only will be un­happy but will also send off signals of tension, so someone visiting will feel uncomfortable. No matter how elaborately decorated the surroundings, a lack of emotional connection leaves us cold.

“Oh, the visitor feels, I’d better be careful here,” as the Dalai Lama puts it. “But with the affectionate family, as soon as you enter, you feel completely relaxed.”

Being what the Dalai Lama calls “foolish selfish” means pursu­ing our narrow self-interest in ways that will work in the short term but might later bring animosity toward us.

The signs that such self-focus has become excessive, shading over into the destructive zone, include being more easily frustrated, clinging to wants, and being oblivious to others’ needs. There’s a narrowing of vision, limiting our ability to see things in the broadest context; rather, we see everything only in terms of self-interest, self-image—or the image we project for others, our social self.

“Wise selfish” means seeing that our own well-being lies in ev­erybody’s welfare—in being compassionate. Compassion is good for you, the Dalai Lama points out, not just for those who are its object. And that’s his third point: The first person to benefit from compas­sion is the one who feels it.

The warmth we receive depends to a great extent on the warmth we give, but beyond that simple emotional equation, compassion also breeds an inner happiness independent of receiving kindness. That’s why, he says, “Loving is of even greater importance than being loved.”

There seems to be what some call a “helper’s high,” where brain circuits for pleasure—as when looking forward to dessert—activate while we mentally focus on helping someone else. Along with this inner reward, the circuitry that buzzes when we focus on ourselves and our problems quiets.

In Japan, responding to a tragic wave of suicide among young people there, the Dalai Lama suggested that Japanese youth would do well to volunteer to help the needy in Third World countries. Serving the needy brings a greater sense of purpose to our lives—a fact recognized by psychologists as a key to personal well-being.

By refocusing us away from the usual mental diet of worries, frustrations, hopes, and fears, compassion puts our attention on something bigger than our petty concerns. This larger goal ener­gizes us. We are free from our inner troubles, which in itself makes us happier.

“Compassion reduces our fear, boosts our confidence, and opens us to inner strength,” the Dalai Lama adds. “By reducing distrust, it opens us to others and brings us a sense of connection with them and a sense of purpose and meaning in life.”

In the Dalai Lama’s sense of the concept, compassion does not just imply sympathy or charity for someone else. It includes our­selves. “You need a word in English,” he told a group of psycholo­gists long ago, “ ‘Self-compassion.’ ” To cultivate genuine compassion, we need to take responsibility for our own care and have concern for everyone’s suffering—including our own.

Excepted from the book A FORCE FOR GOOD by Daniel Goleman. Copyright © 2015 by Daniel Goleman. Reprinted by arrangement with Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.