• Mindfulness as foundation, not the house

• How science began studying these qualities
• Kindness vs. compassion: a precise distinction

• The motor cortex: compassion as action preparation
• "Compassion fatigue" is really empathy fatigue

• Is empathy a prerequisite for compassion?

• Finding kindness inside anxiety

• Brain changes after two weeks of practice
• Reducing unconscious bias in teachers
• System-level ripple effects

• The needs mindset vs. the service mindset

Cort

Welcome, everyone, to the first ever Dharma Lab podcast. I'm here with my longtime friend, mentor, and dear dharma brother, Richie Davidson. Many of you tuning in will be well aware of Richie and his work. This is the first time we're having a deep conversation on science and meditation and wellbeing under the banner of Dharma Lab, which we've been thinking about for quite some time. We're delighted to have you with us.

We were thinking about what conversation to use to kick off this new initiative, and we both agreed we wanted to do something around altruism, kindness, and compassion. This is the motivating force in our lives — it's what motivated us to do this in the first place. And we both immediately thought about His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who has been a great inspiration. He's famous for having said "kindness is my religion" — a quote you see everywhere that really sums up his whole approach.

Richie

Well, thank you, Court, and it's great to be here for the inaugural session of Dharma Lab. I also want to alert viewers: tomorrow, July 6th, is His Holiness's 90th birthday. So this is a very auspicious time for us to be talking about kindness.

Cort

Richie, you know His Holiness so well. You've been a close confidant of his — you've had countless hours, days, and months with him in deep dialogue. Does that quote ring true? What do you think he would say if you asked him: what is the most important thing about the spiritual path, and perhaps life more generally?

Richie

The quote — "kindness is my religion" — is one that I think most people feel when we're in the presence of His Holiness. It is something he truly embodies, and it's so deep and powerful that virtually everyone who has had the opportunity to be with him one-on-one or in a small group can feel it palpably.

Part of it is simply the quality of his presence. When he's with you, he is just completely with you, totally connected. And you have this uncanny experience that he recognizes what may be going on in you and he's doing something to help. It can be very ordinary — for example, he might notice that you're not comfortable in a chair and help adjust the cushion. Just little things like that. But he does them all the time, with everybody. I've seen it directed not just toward me, but toward so many others. It's really unique and inspiring to see what is possible.

Cort

It's a beautiful thing. When I moved to Asia and spent almost a decade there, I had been meditating for about eight or nine years and thought of meditation primarily as mindfulness — training attention, learning to be present, noticing how distracted you are and coming back. I was genuinely surprised when I started meeting remarkable meditators. I didn't meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama until many years later, thanks to you. But I met great teachers like Mingyur Rinpoche and other luminaries of these traditions. And what I kept hearing was not primarily about mindfulness. You hear much more about kindness. You hear much more about being of service — this attitude of: wherever you are, whatever you're doing, try to do good in the world, try to be of benefit to others.

That was shocking to me. I thought: why didn't somebody tell me? I've been paying attention to my breath for eight years, and this is apparently the most important thing. I was really surprised by that.

Richie

And this has affected me deeply — both personally, in my own practice, but also as a scientist. For example, there's a researcher I won't name at this point — maybe later in Dharma Lab we can take up some of his work — who studies advanced concentration practices, advanced mindfulness practices. I asked him at one point: does this make you any kinder?

"If it's not having an impact on one's kindness toward others, what's the point? That's, for me, the real acid test."

— Richie Davidson

That's something the Dalai Lama would say, and it has really influenced me from being around him.

Cort

And that's exactly how it's viewed in Buddhist psychology — mindfulness and the training of attention are a critically important foundational piece, but like the foundation of a house. If you just stop there, you've built the foundation and not built the house. Wisdom and compassion are the core components, but you need some stability of attention to do that effectively. You need to be mindful, to be present, to be aware. Let's maybe dive into this topic, because when we hear terms like kindness and compassion, we know intuitively what they mean — we can recognize them when we see them. But in Buddhist psychology, and likewise in science, we really have to define these terms precisely, because you want to tune into the right frequency and nurture and cultivate these qualities.

Cort

As a scientist, when you first started encountering this whole area as a topic of research — there was a time when it really wasn't even on the map — how did you go about thinking about it? How did you even get clear in your own mind what is meant by a term like kindness?

Richie

It's a huge and important question. I remember the first time I met the Dalai Lama, in 1992. I was doing neuroscientific research on depression, anxiety, and stress. I was a closet meditator — I didn't tell many people, and I wasn't doing research on meditation. And he asked me: why couldn't we use the same tools of neuroscience we were using to study depression and anxiety, and use those tools to study kindness and compassion?

One thing important to recognize is that in 1992, if you go back to neuroscience textbooks from that era, I guarantee there is not a single textbook that would have the word kindness or compassion in the index. Today it's very different.

Cort

And that's super significant. When we think about how important these things are to the human experience — that's a pretty big blind spot for the entire research community. It's kind of stunning when you think about it.

Richie

Absolutely. And it's also stunning to recognize how quickly things have changed in a very positive way. One of the things we were sharing before we started recording is that I don't think there is a single study in the scientific literature that actually distinguishes the brain mechanisms — the neural correlates — of kindness and compassion in the same participants. There have been studies on kindness and studies on compassion, but no study has directly compared them.

Richie

Getting closer toward a rigorous definition: compassion is a quality associated with a disposition to relieve another person's suffering. Those are the causes and conditions that allow compassion to arise when it's been primed, when it's ready to be expressed.

Kindness is something that doesn't require suffering. You can be kind to someone who's happy. You can be kind to someone who is free from suffering — just to be kind. Kindness is associated with acts of generosity, acts of caring. There's no prerequisite of suffering. They're very closely related, but we don't yet know to what extent they actually overlap in terms of brain mechanisms.

Cort

That maps really well onto the understanding of these qualities in Buddhist psychology. Kindness and compassion are defined very simply as: the motivation toward happiness — the motivation to promote happiness — and then the motivation to relieve suffering.

Kindness is just the impulse or motivation to promote happiness. That could be for yourself, for another person, for a pet, for somebody on the other side of the planet, for any and all living creatures. There are practices in the Buddhist tradition for which you do just that. Compassion is the same thing, but oriented to relieving suffering.

Cort

This raises an interesting question — one I remember having hours-long conversations about with our friend and colleague Antoine Lutz, who loves these deep philosophical discussions. From a scientific point of view: would you view kindness and compassion as feelings, or more as a motivational state? Is the feeling inherently part of it, or is it more of a motivation that may or may not come along with a feeling?

Richie

There's a well-known paper published about 15 years ago by Dacher Keltner and one of his colleagues at UC Berkeley. Dacher is a well-known social psychologist — founder of the Greater Good Science Center — and in this review paper on compassion, he concludes that compassion is an emotion. That doesn't mean, from his perspective, that it doesn't also include a motivational component. But I would say, from my experience as a practitioner and from the scientific evidence, that kindness and compassion are different from other emotions we normally think of — like happiness or sadness. The motivational component is absolutely central to the state. You cannot have compassion or kindness without the accompanying motivational stance — in the case of kindness, the disposition to make another person or yourself happy; in the case of compassion, the disposition to relieve suffering. Those are essential features. That's just not true of other emotions in the same way.

Cort

That's such an important point when it comes to practicing these things. If you over-orient to the feeling, strangely, you become a little self-absorbed. For example, right now — I'm looking at you, Richie, and if I'm thinking: I love this guy, this has been one of the most meaningful relationships in my life, I want to do whatever I can to help Richie — as I'm saying that, I'm having feelings. But the important thing is that I'm oriented toward you. Whereas if I become fixated on: what am I feeling right now? — it starts in that feeling of connection, but then my attention comes back in and I'm asking: am I feeling the right thing? And I'm out of that relational space.

I've seen this a lot when people are learning to meditate on kindness and compassion. They can get stuck in a loop — not that there's no feeling, of course feelings come and go — but if that's what you're oriented to, you lose the motivational piece. And that strangely short-circuits it. So these definitions might sound dry and technical, but they help us orient to the right frequency when it comes to actually recognizing and practicing these things.

Cort

There's another subtle distinction I wanted to bring up — one that's really important and relates to this feeling versus motivation question. That's the difference between empathy and compassion. These are words we often use interchangeably, but there's a crucial distinction, and some really important science that has been formative in this field.

Richie

Here the science is very clear and really important. One aspect of empathy is feeling the emotions of another. When we're empathizing with someone who's in pain, we're feeling their pain. When we're empathizing with someone who's sad, we're feeling their sadness. And research shows that the empathizer has a brain state that resembles the brain state of the person they're empathizing with — showing activation of pain networks.

Cort

So if you stub your toe and I'm observing that — I know what that feels like, it triggers a little inner cascade — my pain network activates just from watching you?

Richie

Exactly. Exactly.

Richie

This is so important — because there are people in the helping professions, in healthcare for example, who talk about compassion burnout. What we think is actually going on is empathy burnout. They haven't really learned to cultivate compassion. They're empathizing with patients who are typically in pain and suffering. The healthcare provider is also suffering when they empathize. That actually activates stress networks in the brain, affects the body, and will erode wellbeing over time.

If you have compassion for a person in pain, you are not activating any of the pain matrix whatsoever. It's a completely different network — one that actually involves activating networks important for positive emotion, and networks important for action.

Cort

Go into that — because that was one of the most fascinating things when I was looking at the neuroscience of this. The motor cortex firing — why? There's something important there that connects back to this motivational state point.

Richie

Exactly. And this is one of the reasons why it's difficult to think of compassion simply as an emotion — because it has this action piece to it. When we first observed activation in the motor cortex when expert, long-term meditators were generating compassion in the lab — they're in the scanner, completely still, not moving anything — their motor cortex is firing away.

Cort

For those who don't know — what is the motor cortex?

Richie

The motor cortex is a part of our cerebral cortex involved in the control of action — literally moving our hands, taking physical action. You do see motor cortex activation when imagining action as well, so it doesn't require the physical expression of the action, but its origins are in physical movement.

"Of course — when you're generating compassion, you're preparing yourself to act. So that the moment you encounter suffering in the world, you will spontaneously act."

— Mingyur Rinpoche, on the motor cortex findings

Cort

This is hugely important. The key point is that we're training, priming ourselves to help if and when we can. Going back to the stubbed toe — both pathways might start with that resonance. I feel a little of the ouch, I remember stubbing my own toe. But from there it can go in completely different directions.

One direction: I start paying attention to regulating my own emotion. I'm suddenly hurting or remembering being hurt, oriented toward what's going on inside myself. As Richie said — if you're caring for someone with catastrophic suffering day after day, you're triggering that empathic response and getting overwhelmed by it. That pathway takes you out of the relational space and into your own inner processing. But a very different path: I see the pain, have that empathic moment, feel the ouch — but instead I lean forward. Whether I do something physical or not, I stay oriented to the caring impulse. Maybe I can help, maybe I can't, maybe I just need to be there and let you know I care. But my orientation stays on you. That's the crucial distinction between compassion fatigue and empathy fatigue.

Richie

Absolutely.

Richie

One thing really striking to appreciate is that this difference can emerge relatively early in life, based on a child's experiences with caregivers. In research we did a long time ago, we studied a group of more than 350 toddlers — around three years old — in a scenario where the experimenter faked getting their fingers stuck in one of those old clipboards with the clip at the top.

Cort

Yeah — clip it! Yeah.

Richie

We had videotaped data for more than 350 three-year-olds watching this. Some of them, when the experimenter said "Ouch" and had that pain expression, just burst out crying.

Some three-year-olds burst out crying. Others walked over to the experimenter and kissed their finger. A perfect demonstration of empathy versus compassion — right there in toddlers. By 36 months of age, shaped by what their caregivers modeled in their early experience, children were already on completely different developmental paths.

Cort

Oh my God. That's — that's a perfect demonstration. Right there, in three-year-olds.

Richie

Exactly. And what I would hypothesize is that their caregivers — the significant adults in their life — were probably modeling these differences in their early experience. And by 36 months of age, the children were already showing them.

Richie

And here's the question I had for you, Court — I haven't gotten a clear answer from contemplative practitioners on this. Is empathy actually a necessary prerequisite for compassion, in the course of developing compassion?

Cort

I'll put a firm stake in the ground: I think empathy is a very helpful and often common precursor, but I don't think it's 100% necessary. Here's why. There are situations where we can care for somebody whose experience is utterly incomprehensible to us — things we can't even imagine someone going through, much less feel what they're feeling. It's so beyond our experience. And yet we can still care for them, still want them not to suffer. In some cases, that simulation that empathy requires simply isn't possible.

I think we can often have a caring response that is instantaneous — even for something we don't really understand — because we just understand that somebody is suffering. We don't understand how, or the circumstances they're grappling with, but we know they're suffering. So empathy is certainly one of the easiest ways into compassion — maybe the main pathway — but not the only one.

Richie

I've seen situations with the Dalai Lama where someone described a really tragic situation with Tibetans being tortured, and he was visibly crying. I think that would be thought of as an empathic response, at least initially. But it doesn't last long — it very quickly transitions. There's an element of emotional fluidity that is part of this. That's a topic for another Dharma Lab conversation.

Cort

There's a centuries-old debate in the meditative traditions about whether things like kindness and compassion are innate, or whether they are things we need to build up and cultivate over time. What does the research point toward?

Richie

Here, I interpret the research as providing a very strong and unambiguous answer: humans are born to be kind and born to be compassionate. This is really part of who we are as human beings. To some viewers, in the extraordinary chaos we're living in now — with all the hatred we see, which is real — this may sound strange. But the data show that in early infancy, prior to a lot of conditioning — for example, in six-month-old infants — if you expose them to scenarios where kindness is expressed versus scenarios where the interaction is selfish and aggressive, infants six months of age show a very clear and strong preference for the kind, pro-social interaction. It's non-ambiguous. It's totally clear.

Six-month-old infants — before significant social conditioning — show a clear, unambiguous preference for kind and pro-social interactions over selfish ones. Kindness is not something we learn. It is something we begin with.

From these data, I strongly conclude that we come into the world with this propensity. When we do practices to cultivate kindness and compassion, we are not creating these qualities de novo — we're recognizing the true nature of our mind. This is the way we are. We can learn to do all kinds of negative things — there's no doubt about that. But we begin with this innate bias. And that has huge implications. It also suggests that it doesn't take that much to get these networks going. Little acts of kindness actually happen all the time. When we become more aware and more intentional about them, we see that everyday life can be filled with these — and they have real consequences.

Cort

That matches a lot of what we find in the meditative traditions. There are two general approaches when it comes to practicing kindness and compassion.

One view treats the human mind as a mix of wholesome and unwholesome qualities. In meditation, you're learning to dial up the wholesome and dial down the unwholesome — with the result that you suffer less and flourish more. For example, kindness is the antidote to anger. If you have kindness, by definition you won't have anger. It's the language of poisons and antidotes.

The other view is completely different. Qualities like kindness and compassion are innate — and not only innate, but actually present in any moment of experience. When we meditate on kindness, we're not choosing between competing mental states. It's more like we're bringing something into focus that is often quite subtle. Sometimes, in a moment of great affection, it's not subtle at all. But most of the time it's quite subtle.

Cort

Take something that might seem very counterintuitive — like anxiety. I used to experience a lot of anxiety. I used to be completely phobic of public speaking, so something like this would have thrown me into an anxious emotional tailspin. Where is kindness or compassion in that kind of experience?

But if you look closely: although anxiety can manifest in toxic and unhealthy ways, within all of that there's actually a lot of care. There's a lot of self-preservation. There's a basic impulse to not want to suffer — to want to be free from circumstances you perceive as threatening. It's a protective mechanism. At the core, we're just trying to be safe, to protect ourselves. It's manifesting dysfunctionally, but at its core it has these very wholesome impulses. So even in the most toxic state of mind, you can find wholesome elements. From this point of view, the whole practice isn't about getting better at something. It's not self-improvement. It's self-discovery. You're not changing anything. You're just learning to tune into these frequencies of experience that are always there.

Richie

Yes, absolutely. I use the metaphor of a perceptual illusion — some of you may remember the famous vase-and-faces illusion, where one moment you see two profiles and another moment you see the vase. It's the same physical object. When we recognize the innate kindness within something like anxiety, it's just shifting the perspective. Like a perceptual illusion, just a shift in perspective can bring an entirely different way of seeing the world. The research really does show that kindness is something we see in virtually a hundred percent of very young infants. There's a lot of merit to this approach.

Cort

And that brings us to the practice side of this — because thinking of kindness and compassion as skills shifts things. We may have a predisposition — it might be easier or harder for some people — but everybody can learn these things. And it's hugely important not just for our relationships, but for mental health and wellbeing. More and more, our attention is shifting beyond mindfulness to see that there are many important forms of meditation, many ways to practice these skills. The science is quite exciting. Can you say a bit about the research on training?

Richie

One of the important taglines in the recent scientific evidence is that it's easier than you think. And it may be easier than you think because it is innate. When we cultivate the skills of kindness, we actually can see changes in the brain in just a couple of weeks of practice — in people who've never meditated before. It's kind of remarkable.

The changes in the brain we see after just two weeks of kindness training actually predict a person's propensity to behave altruistically — in rigorous behavioral tasks, and in people who have never meditated before.

It doesn't take that much to get these circuits going. And I really believe that, given the kind of poly-crisis we're facing today, we have a moral obligation to bring this into the world in as many sectors as we can. Education is one of them. Imagine what the world would look like if all our children went through this kind of training early on.

Cort

And we have really exciting data — some of it not yet published. Our colleague Matt Hirschberg is doing amazing work in school systems. Could you give us a little sneak peek?

Richie

One piece that is published: among school teachers given the Healthy Minds program — which includes a significant section on kindness and compassion training — they actually show reductions in measures of unconscious bias toward members of ethnic and racial outgroups. Unconscious bias is below the level of conscious experience — measured behaviorally. If you gave these teachers a questionnaire asking if they're biased, probably 99% would say they're not. But the more sensitive measure shows that even though people don't want to be biased, they are — because of their upbringing, the things they've been exposed to. Training in these qualities actually reduces that bias. This is huge, because this kind of unconscious bias is really at the root of a lot of academic differences — what we call the achievement gap in academic performance between Black and white students in America. The implications are enormous.

Cort

It's also exciting to see systemic changes — systemic effects on the school system itself. For those watching who aren't familiar: the Healthy Minds program is a completely free mobile app that Richie and I, with a great team at the Center for Healthy Minds and Healthy Minds Innovations, created. More than a million people have downloaded it. We've done all sorts of rigorous research on it, and it's showing pretty remarkable impacts at the individual level — on the order of 20 to 30% improvements in things like depression and anxiety from a very modest amount of practice. Just a month, five minutes a day, along those lines. But the really remarkable thing is we're seeing changes to systems. From just a few minutes a day, something that wasn't even designed to be a system changer. Could you comment on that?

Richie

The finding I think you're referring to — this hasn't been published yet but will be soon — is Matt Hirschberg's work in our center. We see changes in the teacher's perception of trust in the school administration as a function of their wellbeing training. Teachers randomly assigned to go through the wellbeing training end up trusting their school administrators significantly more than teachers in the control group. And that is kind of amazing, because it suggests there is more of a system-level change occurring — with ripple effects throughout the entire school system.

Cort

This comes back to practice, and to a shift in perspective that I think comes along with doing these practices — where we start viewing not only our meditation practice, but whatever we're doing for our mental health, as part of something much bigger. It's not just about me and my life. We're thinking about that ripple effect, motivated to send ripples of care and kindness and compassion out into the world. And we are starting to see that ripple effect — benefiting students, benefiting the school system.

I wanted to show one simple way to practice this — something I know we both do all the time, and actually did before this very episode. That's simply reflecting on one's motivation. It's the simplest thing, but we rarely do it, and it's a total game changer. Before we started recording, we both paused for about a minute. I was doing a traditional meditative practice where I was just imagining: whatever good comes of this — launching Dharma Lab, recording this first episode — I hope whoever hears this is benefited in some way, and I hope that they might spread that out so the people they interact with will benefit, and so on. It just creates a wave of wellbeing and flourishing that spreads out infinitely in all directions. It's amazing what a space that puts me in. Richie, what did you do in that moment?

Richie

I do that a lot during the day, with various activities. When we were doing it together, I was imagining that this project will help people discover the true nature of their minds, connect them to their own innate kindness and compassion, and benefit their lives and spread outward. Both of us have the same aspiration — to make this world a better place — and that's the aspiration with which we're engaging with Dharma Lab. But you can do this with anything. I went out for a bike ride yesterday and before I rode, I spent about a minute reflecting on how getting physically healthier is not just beneficial for me, but will give me more vitality to do work that can benefit others, and it'll benefit my family, and all the people I interact with. It takes literally one minute — and as I was riding, I came back to it a few times. It gives me motivation. And you can do this with virtually anything.

I change the litter in our house every night, scoop the litter —

Cort

I'm a dog person.

Richie

Sorry! And I do a little reflection: this is not just for me and the kitty, but for everyone who walks into the room and won't have to smell it. It's good for the family. These are such easy things to do — they really don't take any extra time. You can do them as you're doing the activity.

Cort

It's so simple and it is completely life-changing. You can do it literally anytime, anywhere. Almost everything we do in our lives, we do out of habit — we hit play, we do things, and we don't really think about why. But this is just a shift in perspective. As you're listening to this right now, may this not only benefit you — may that ripple out and help others. May it make you a kinder person, so your next interaction primes you to do something helpful for whoever you meet. Everything becomes meaningful, as Richie said. Even the most mundane things — you shift the perspective and suddenly it's meaningful and you're primed to be of service.

Cort

The thing I've noticed about this shift — when you move into kindness mode, service mode — is that a lot of our lives we're basically trying to get our needs met. The sense of: I need something from the world, from this interaction, from my job. We're constantly trying to get our needs met. That mindset is a mindset of inner impoverishment. When we feel that, we feel as though we don't have enough.

If you are in the mindset of service, you're overflowing. You can't be in a mindset of kindness or compassion without feeling that not only do you have enough — you have more than enough, because you can give some away.

And this gets back to the innate thing — there's this innate sense of richness: the more you give, the richer you feel. You don't feel impoverished by that. You feel enriched by it. It becomes a positive loop. But our society is so oriented to needs — are you getting your needs met, what are your needs — and we just feel empty, left with that hunger.

Richie

Yeah. So important. So important.

Richie

In my own personal life, when I'm really able to embody these qualities and come from a place of abundance — and really want to give it away — it's precisely the opposite of draining. There's just a limitless quality that seems to emerge, and you can feel the benefits it's having on those around you.

Its opposite — or rather, an obstacle that has been written about a lot — is loneliness and social disconnection, which can really eat away at our wellbeing and physical health. And it just doesn't take that much to reorient — to be of service to others. Just little things: expressing appreciation, complimenting someone, saying thank you. We have opportunities for this every day, many times a day. Just reminding ourselves to harness these opportunities can make an enormous difference.

Cort

So true. Richie, you are a great inspiration to all of us who know you — a great living exemplar of what we're talking about. We are in an era that is so desperate for kindness and compassion and just basic civility, especially toward people we disagree with. Where sometimes it feels like things are coming apart at the seams. It really feels like we can't afford not to do this anymore. We need to find a way to nurture the best of ourselves as humans — because we can. We're living through an era where we're seeing what happens when we don't.

And the research is showing that this is possible — not only possible for all of us, but, as you made the point earlier, so much easier than you think. Literally a couple of minutes a day can make a huge difference. Imagine a lifetime of just these small moments. This is not just changing our lives — it's changing the world. And the world needs this. It's a privilege and an honor to share this journey with you, Mingyur Rinpoche. And yes —

Richie

Thank you so much, Court. I really appreciate it and I love doing this with you.

Cort

Likewise. And for all of you who've joined us for this discussion — hopefully the first of many. Stay tuned, and we look forward to continuing the conversation with you all soon. Take care.

Richie

Thank you. Bye.