Edited Summary

The Route Through Others

Why orienting toward service — rather than toward ourselves — may be one of the most reliable paths to our own flourishing

Most of us approach our own wellbeing the way we approach most things: we look for it. We manage stress, attend to our needs, try to build the conditions for a life that feels good. The assumption, quite natural, is that flourishing comes from tending to ourselves. What this conversation explores — through neuroscience, Buddhist psychology, and the lived experience of two people who have researched and practiced this for decades — is that one of the most reliable routes to our own flourishing runs not through ourselves, but through others.

The Dalai Lama has offered this as a simple refrain for decades: the best route to happiness is to be kind to others. Both the research and the contemplative traditions point in the same direction: the motivation to be of service, to orient toward something larger than ourselves, is not a sacrifice of our own wellbeing. It may be one of its key sources.

What the Research Shows

Brain imaging studies offer one suggestive window. When people in MRI scanners chose to donate money to a charitable cause — at a personal cost to themselves — the brain's reward network showed greater activation than when they simply kept money for themselves. The same circuitry that responds to food and pleasure appears to register generosity as rewarding too. It is one thread in a larger picture, but a telling one.

Purpose and longevity research adds another dimension. Having a strong sense of purpose — a life oriented beyond oneself — is, in Richie's view, "probably the most empirically well-verified characteristic associated with longevity." Its effects extend even into recovery from surgery. Purpose, it seems, reaches the body.

The volunteering research is where the evidence becomes most concrete. The Experience Corps program at Johns Hopkins — led by neuroscientist Michelle Carlson — placed grandmothers in Baltimore as volunteers in local public schools: helping children read, supervising recess, assisting in cafeterias. The intervention was complex, involving not just service but increased physical activity (the schools had no elevators), social structure, and a sense of regular purpose. Richie is careful not to attribute the effects to altruism alone. But the findings were significant: improvements in cognitive functions associated with the central executive network in the prefrontal cortex — the network governing planning, attention, and memory — suggesting the intervention was neuroprotective. Brain imaging confirmed the changes. How long those effects persist beyond active volunteering remains an open question.

A separate study by psychologist Paul Condon found that people who had completed a meditation program were significantly more likely to give up their seat in a waiting room to a stranger on crutches. The inner orientation translated directly into action when the opportunity arrived.

Across these different lines of evidence, the direction is consistent. Being of service is not something we do despite caring about our own wellbeing. It appears to be one of the things we can do most directly in support of it.

Deeper Than Action: The Motivation

The Buddhist psychological approach, as Cort describes it, places enormous emphasis on the motivational state — not as a substitute for action, but as its root. The question isn't only whether you help, but what is driving it. And can you make that conscious?

Cort traces this to a specific turning point in his own practice. He was living in Colorado, deep in his studies of Buddhist psychology, when something crystallized. He saw, with unusual clarity, that everything he had been doing — his study, his meditation, his practice — had been organized around himself.

It isn't unique to Cort. Richie describes his own gradual shift — a long arc, with pivotal moments of inspiration. The most significant was his sustained exposure to the Dalai Lama: not through a single teaching, but through the lived presence of someone for whom service is simply what he is. One Shantideva quote returned again and again, shared with Richie as the core of everything: as long as suffering exists, I remain to dispel the suffering of others. "It's indelibly in my heart and my mind," Richie says.

What both men point to is a practice that anyone can take up, in any moment. Even now, in your own sitting, or while listening to something like this — you might be here from curiosity, or habit, or some automatic pull. Or you might consciously bring the intention of service to it: may something from this allow me to be a benefit to others. Not knowing how. Maybe directly, maybe indirectly, maybe in ways not yet visible. Making the motivation conscious, and returning to it — that, in itself, is the practice.

Bodhi Chitta: The Aspiration and the Roadmap

The Buddhist tradition has a term for this orientation: Bodhi Chitta — literally, the "heart of awakening." Cort describes it as having two components that together constitute the motivational shift.

The first is a vast aspiration — not merely "how can I help someone today?" but consciously orienting toward the most expansive possible aim: to relieve the suffering of all beings. Everywhere, completely. "Kind of a crazy aspiration, right?" Cort says. "None of us are actually gonna do that. But that is the practice." The vastness isn't there to make you feel heroic. It's there to dissolve the self-referential quality entirely — to shift the orientation so completely outward that whatever you do from that place is genuinely, not performatively, in service of others.

The second component is the practical roadmap. In Buddhist tradition, this takes the form of the six Paramitas — six modes of practice, beginning with generosity, and including the commitment to non-violence, ethical conduct, patience, and more — that translate aspiration into the texture of daily life. The aspiration opens the direction. The Paramitas are the actual path.

Richie notes that there is, as yet, almost no scientific research specifically on the motivational shift — on what it means for outcomes when the same action is taken with a different inner orientation. It resonates deeply with his own experience and sits at the heart of his practice, but the empirical investigation of it is largely still ahead. Both men see it as a rich area for future work.

Living It in Small Moments

This is where the conversation becomes most alive — in the specific, ordinary ways both men have woven this orientation into their days.

Cort describes his morning meditation. Before beginning, he gives himself what he calls an inner pep talk — consciously releasing any expectation about what the session should be. If it's better that his mind is a distracted mess today, may it be a distracted mess. If some difficulty serves his capacity to be of service, may that happen. This complete surrender of agenda clears something. Then he shifts into what he calls "aspiration mode" — letting his mind free-associate around the thought of his life, his day, whatever unfolds, sending ripples out into the world, helping people recognize their own potential. He doesn't direct it tightly. He just opens in that direction. "If somebody watched me doing this," he says, "they would just be like, what? — I probably have like this stupid grin on my face." He can't help it. At the end of it, he feels a surge of positive emotion, an uplift. And when he gets up, he notices: he is primed. Whatever the day holds, he meets it differently.

Richie does something similar before his working days — scanning his calendar person by person, reflecting on how he can be most beneficial to each one. He also does it before riding his bike, not for long: not more than thirty seconds, but very intentionally. "May my health be of benefit to others." Not just for himself, but so that being healthier means more vitality to serve. Once set, the intention tends to come back during the ride on its own — a kind of refrain that returns without effort.

He carries a live hypothesis about this: might the service intention actually change the biology of the exercise itself — not just its meaning, but what the body does with it? He has coined the phrase "contemplative aerobics" for the idea. It hasn't been studied. But the intuition is there, and both men think it is ripe for exploration.

Before this conversation began, they paused. Just for a minute — to reflect on their motivation, to set what Cort calls the compassionate intention together. It is their ritual before every Dharma Lab recording. What you are hearing grew out of that pause.

The invitation in all of this is not to a different life. The practices Cort and Richie describe are woven into what they already do — the morning sit, the bike ride, the calendar, the first moments before a recording. The shift is not in the activity. It is in what the activity is for. And that, it turns out, changes everything about how it is lived.