Vishen Lakhiani explains compassion as a practice that improves your health and how you show up. He walks through six phases of compassion training, starting close and expanding outward, then shows how reframing judgment instead of blame turned a cold coffee and missing avocado into a 50% tip.
Questions this video answers
January 12, 2023
50% of the bill
Chapters
Compassion is not something you do for other people. That's a great side effect. Compassion is something you do for yourself. It changes the way you function and show up in the world. So there's a lot of science right now on compassion practices that derive from Zen Roshi Buddhism or even from the Heart Med Institute. For example, the Heart Med Institute found that if you just close your eyes and you see the face of someone you love, you see their eyes, you see their nose, you feel that love for them. You feel it in your heart area. It changes your heart resonance. And your heart resonance is a biomarker of health. In short, giving love to someone else instantly physiologically changes the heartbeat that you're having and puts it in a better state. That shows that your body is in a healthy mode. Heart resonance correlates with health. And I found this fascinating. That is how we start the six phase. Then we move to a more advanced compassion practice where we extend love across the world. Not we start with our family, our neighborhood, our city, our country, and then globally. Now, why is this important? Compassion is like a muscle. You can train it, and when you train it, you become more loving. If you think about all the great saints and sages and mystic compassion and love was a key part of who they are, whether it's Yogananda or Jesus, they. It was compassion and love. But this is how it shows up in your world, right? So I remember after the pandemic, I went for breakfast with a friend. All the restaurants had been closed for three months. And finally that weekend, everything opens. And so we are waiting in line for around 20, 40 minutes to get in. Finally, we get in. It's really busy, so they can only see this at the bar. And all I'm craving is coffee, eggs and some. And a side of avocado. So I order my coffee and. And 20 minutes later, the waitress hasn't brought the coffee. The waitress is scurrying around. There's a lot of people over there. She's wearing a mask. And she left the coffee on the bar. And I can see it. And it's 20 minutes. I can't get her attention. Finally, she brings me the coffee, just puts it down, doesn't even say anything, and it's gone cold. So I have to order another coffee. That other coffee comes 10 minutes later. Then my omelette comes 40 minutes later. They forgot the avocado. And all of this chaos. Now, at the end of that, as I was tipping the waitress, I still had a smile on my face, and I gave a tip worth 50% of the entire bill. So my friend looked at me and goes, what are you doing? Like, the service here was horrible. She doesn't deserve 50%. And I said, really? Well, I thought she did. And I explained it to my friend yesterday. I said, look, it's all how we see it. To me, I'm just happy to be here, to be able to eat outdoors again. It doesn't matter. We had to wait 20 minutes in line. It was just nice being able to step into a restaurant after three months. That waitress, she's been running around with a mask on herself for, gosh, maybe 12 hours. Look at the line. She's not even getting a break. And probably for the last three months, she didn't have a job. She was probably worried about how to put food on the table. And that's why I gave her a 50% tip. I don't care if my coffee was cold or my avocado came late. That didn't even register for me. Rather, I was in a state of appreciation, of love, of awe at the humanity around me, even if it was a little bit messy. Compassion had put me in that zone. When you see someone else, even if it seems like what they did is wrong to you, you look at them with a sense of empathy, with a sense of understanding. And it is that understanding that changes and reframes your definition of the world. So I'm not saying do compassion so you become a better tipper. I'm saying do compassion because the world becomes a more beautiful, alive, connected place, and your life becomes more peaceful. Now, the side effect is everyone you come in contact with, you bring happiness into their lives, and the world needs that today.
