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id="dg_story"> <div class="dark-link perm_post"> font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">Exactly. Exactly.</p></div><h3 id="burnout" style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 21px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.3; color: #006b6b; margin: 2rem 0 1.1rem;">"Compassion fatigue" is really empathy fatigue</h3><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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 <strong>empathy burnout.</strong> 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.</p></div><div style="background: #f0ede8; border-left: 3px solid #006B6B; padding: 1rem 1.4rem; margin: 1.5rem 0;"><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;"><strong>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.</strong></p></div><h3 id="motor-cortex" style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 21px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.3; color: #006b6b; margin: 2rem 0 1.1rem;">The motor cortex: compassion as action preparation</h3><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Cort</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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.</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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 — <strong>their motor cortex is firing away.</strong></p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Cort</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">For those who don't know — what is the motor cortex?</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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.</p></div><div style="background: #f0ede8; border-left: 3px solid #006B6B; padding: 1rem 1.4rem; margin: 1.5rem 0;"><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;"><strong>"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."</strong></p><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #888; margin: 0.5rem 0 0;">— Mingyur Rinpoche, on the motor cortex findings</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Cort</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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.</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0 0 0 2rem;">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.</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">Absolutely.</p></div></div><div id="toddlers" style="margin-bottom: 3.5rem;"><h2 style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.16em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #006b6b; font-weight: bold; border-bottom: 1px solid #d4e4e4; padding-bottom: 0.4rem; margin: 3rem 0 2rem;">The Toddler Study: Empathy and Compassion at Three Years Old</h2><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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.</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Cort</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">Yeah — clip it! Yeah.</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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.</p></div><div style="background: #f0ede8; border-left: 3px solid #006B6B; padding: 1rem 1.4rem; margin: 1.5rem 0;"><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;"><strong>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.</strong> By 36 months of age, shaped by what their caregivers modeled in their early experience, children were already on completely different developmental paths.</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Cort</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">Oh my God. That's — that's a perfect demonstration. Right there, in three-year-olds.</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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.</p></div><h3 id="prerequisite" style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 21px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.3; color: #006b6b; margin: 2rem 0 1.1rem;">Is empathy a prerequisite for compassion?</h3><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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?</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Cort</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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.</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0 0 0 2rem;">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.</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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.</p></div></div><div id="born-kind" style="margin-bottom: 3.5rem;"><h2 style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.16em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #006b6b; font-weight: bold; border-bottom: 1px solid #d4e4e4; padding-bottom: 0.4rem; margin: 3rem 0 2rem;">Are We Born to Be Kind?</h2><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Cort</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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?</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">Here, I interpret the research as providing a very strong and unambiguous answer: <strong>humans are born to be kind and born to be compassionate.</strong> 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.</p></div><div style="background: #edf2f7; border-left: 3px solid #006B6B; padding: 1rem 1.4rem; margin: 1.5rem 0;"><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;"><strong>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.</strong></p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0 0 0 2rem;">From these data, I strongly conclude that we come into the world with this propensity. When we do practices to cultivate kindness and compassion, <strong>we are not creating these qualities de novo — we're recognizing the true nature of our mind.</strong> 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.</p></div></div><div id="two-models" style="margin-bottom: 3.5rem;"><h2 style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.16em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #006b6b; font-weight: bold; border-bottom: 1px solid #d4e4e4; padding-bottom: 0.4rem; margin: 3rem 0 2rem;">Two Models of Practice</h2><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Cort</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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.</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0 0 0 2rem;">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.</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0 0 0 2rem;">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.</p></div><h3 id="anxiety" style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 21px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.3; color: #006b6b; margin: 2rem 0 1.1rem;">Finding kindness inside anxiety</h3><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Cort</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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?</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0 0 0 2rem;">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. <strong>It's not self-improvement. It's self-discovery.</strong> You're not changing anything. You're just learning to tune into these frequencies of experience that are always there.</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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.</p></div></div><div id="training" style="margin-bottom: 3.5rem;"><h2 style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.16em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #006b6b; font-weight: bold; border-bottom: 1px solid #d4e4e4; padding-bottom: 0.4rem; margin: 3rem 0 2rem;">Training the Mind: The Research</h2><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Cort</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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?</p></div><h3 id="two-weeks" style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 21px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.3; color: #006b6b; margin: 2rem 0 1.1rem;">Brain changes after two weeks of practice</h3><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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.</p></div><div style="background: #edf2f7; border-left: 3px solid #006B6B; padding: 1rem 1.4rem; margin: 1.5rem 0;"><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;"><strong>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.</strong></p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0 0 0 2rem;">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.</p></div><h3 id="schools" style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 21px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.3; color: #006b6b; margin: 2rem 0 1.1rem;">Reducing unconscious bias in teachers</h3><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Cort</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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?</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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 <strong>reductions in measures of unconscious bias</strong> 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.</p></div><h3 id="ripple" style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 21px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.3; color: #006b6b; margin: 2rem 0 1.1rem;">System-level ripple effects</h3><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Cort</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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?</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Richie</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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.</p></div></div><div id="daily-life" style="margin-bottom: 3.5rem;"><h2 style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.16em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #006b6b; font-weight: bold; border-bottom: 1px solid #d4e4e4; padding-bottom: 0.4rem; margin: 3rem 0 2rem;">Applying Kindness in Daily Life: A One-Minute Practice</h2><div style="margin-bottom: 1.1rem;"><p style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; text-transform: uppercase; color: #888; margin: 0 0 0.25rem;">Cort</p><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0;">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.</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.8; color: #1a1a1a; margin: 0 0 0 2rem;">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?</p></div><div style="margin-bottom: 1.6rem;"><p </div> </div> <div class="inline-share-icons"> <div class="d-flex align-items-center flex-wrap gap-2"> <span class="me-2 fw-semibold">Inspired? 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