Gelong Thubten's early meditation chased internal highs and made him unhappier. His teachers, including Akon Rinpoche, redirected him toward compassion-based practice: meditating with the intention to benefit others. Compassion, unlike empathy, activates the brain's action centers and leads to helping.
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I was desperate to be happy. I was incredibly unhappy. So then what did I do? I started to meditate in quite a kind of addictive way. I started to meditate to try and get happiness. Very understandable thing. I mean, here we go. I'm looking at happiness now as a state of mind. I'm trying to give up this idea that it should come from outside, it should come from within, so that I'm going to meditate to get happiness. Same problem arises. The more I'm sitting there searching for happiness in my meditation, the more depressed I become, the more I start to feel it's not happening. I'm not there yet. When am I going to get the buzz? So I realized that I was meditating a little bit like somebody taking drugs, always looking for a high. Because I was programmed, as I think many people are, I was programmed to believe something's only working if you feel good as a result of it. And that feel good has to be like a ramped up excitement in the body and mind. Oh, then it's working because I felt something. So then I'm sitting down, meditating. And when I first became a monk in my first year, I. I was quite ambitious about the whole thing. And I used to do a lot of meditation throughout the day. I was living in the monastery and I was living this very kind of quiet life, not like now, where I'm traveling all the time. And I was doing lots and lots of meditation during the day, thinking I was kind of really into it. I was quite ambitious about it. I thought, yeah, I'm doing it. I'm in the fast track. I'm like, Mr. Hardcore Monk, here I go. Just you watch me. That kind of feeling, like ego, basically. But the meditation, the more I did, the more unhappy I felt. And because of that wanting to feel something. So what it means is that I'm sitting down to meditate and I'm waiting to get high, waiting to get some kind of buzz from it. So it means I'm telling myself I lack happiness. I'm coming from a place of deficiency. And I'm creating that deficiency again and again within my body and mind. So I started to get more miserable. The game changer for me was when my teachers, I've been so fortunate to study with some of these incredible Tibetan masters. So my teacher, Akon Rinpoche told me, you must meditate on compassion. And that was the game changer, is when I started to think, oh, okay, I'm not going to do this. For me to get a feeling out of It I'm going to widen out this energy of meditation into something to do with helping people, compassion, kindness. And then it starts to change because compassion. Okay, let's talk about what compassion is in a minute. But compassion takes the meditation journey from a self centered, graspy, addictive kind of reality into something that is of service to the world. And then you can let go and you just do your best. And day after day you try to be kind to people. And your meditation is giving you the fuel and energy to do that. It just changes the whole picture from a kind of desperate search for internal happiness into a feeling that happiness is a shared experience because the world is a shared experience. We all live together on this planet. So surely the happiness thing has to be connected to that, that interdependence, that community, the community aspect. Okay, but what is compassion? I think when we think of compassion, we have all kinds of ideas about it, but again, we tend to think of it in terms of a feeling, a sensation. Maybe like feeling sad when others are suffering, feeling pain when others feel pain. That's the kind of compassion, but it's more related to empathy. And I think there's a difference between empathy and compassion. Empathy is of course a good thing. It's good to have empathy. But empathy can be very draining. Because what happens when you experience empathy in terms of brain activity? There's a sense of. It's like a mirror mirroring occurs in the brain. What I mean by that is you know how when you see somebody in physical pain, supposing you see somebody break their leg, you kind of feel it in your own body. That is empathy. Somebody's in pain, the brain, the areas of the brain connected to pain also start to activate. It's like a mirror. We feel what they feel, whether it's physical pain, emotional pain, whatever it is, somebody is suffering. And now I'm suffering too. It's a little bit like somebody's drowning and I jump in to save them. And now I'm drowning too. We're both drowning. So I don't know how much benefit that really has. Now two people are suffering. Really interesting thing. They've done a lot of brain scans, a lot of brain research on people who meditate. And they've shown that people who practice compassion based mindfulness have a very particular brain activity that starts to change. The motor cortex in the brain starts to activate. The motor cortex is the brain region connected with intention. To act. Like any action you're going to have, you have to intend it first. Even in a very simple Way I want to cook dinner, I have to have the intention and then I go and do it. The motor cortex is the region which is all about intentions and actions. So when you're practicing compassion based mindfulness, which I'll define in a moment, you're activating those intention areas of the brain which will lead to action. So this will lead us to do things that benefit not just ourselves and others. So our life starts to transform. We start to want to help people. We also, through our mindfulness practice, start to develop the wisdom and the skills through which we can help people. Because just wanting to help them. Yeah, but then what? How? In what way? How? What do you do? So we're activating the wisdom and skills through which we can genuinely help others. So it's a situation that has benefit. So what is compassion based mindfulness? What does it mean to practice compassion in the mindfulness? And how does that relate to happiness? How do these seemingly separate subjects weave together? Okay, so I think there are a couple of things. For me, one of the key points, key elements is whenever I sit down to practice mindfulness, which we're going to do in a minute, by the way, we are going to get practical. This is not all theory, and we're going to do some in a moment. Whenever I sit down to practice mindfulness, even if it's five or ten minutes of say, focused breathing or whatever technique I'm doing, I will always start and end the session by creating a moment of compassion as an intention. So I'll sit and I'll remind myself, I am doing this practice for the benefit of all sentient beings. All beings. So not just humans, but animals, all beings. I am doing this for their benefit. Through this practice, may I help others. It's like an affirmation, a prayer, a wish, a commitment. There's many ways of doing this. For some people, they really resonate with prayer. So they use prayer. Some people don't. That's also fine. You can just sit there and make a kind of decision. I'm going to do this for the benefit of the world. It's just a decision that you make, like planting a seed at the start of your session. Then I do the session. You just let go of that and do the session, say 10 minutes or whatever of whatever technique you're practicing, any meditation, any mindfulness or meditation, or any spiritual exercise of any kind. There's no limits to the range of exercises that are available. But the key point is why you're doing it. So you do the motivation, you do the session. And then at the end of the session, I always take a moment to reenergize that compassion by taking a moment to just recommit. I'm dedicating the fruits of this practice to the benefit of the world, to the benefit of others.
