Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

I’m planning to do an entire series on improving interpersonal skills, based on Daniel Goleman’s book Social Intelligence, but I’ll have to find time to finish reading it first. In the meantime, to round out my Health Behaviors series, I’ll do a couple of posts on simple techniques for improving your ability to get on with others.

photo credit: Joyseph

Why is that part of a healthy lifestyle? Well, one of the factors often found when investigating longevity and good health is social support. People who have good, supportive relationships, on average, have healthier as well as happier lives. Even having a pet is associated with better health in many studies.

Now, cause and effect aren’t established. It may be that healthy, long-lived people also have other characteristics which cause them to enter good relationships. But I can think of plenty of reasons why getting on well with others would be good for you – starting with improving your stress levels – and so here’s the first of two suggestions for exercises to improve your relationships.

Like many of the techniques that are achieving wider currency these days, this is a Buddhist practice. It’s known as compassion meditation.

photo credit: alicesoup

Here’s one simple form of the exercise. Close your eyes, and start out by imagining a person that you already have positive regard towards. As you think of them, set your mind to wish them well. Not through a series of verbal thoughts (although that can work, it has its limitations), but simply having an attitude of desiring that they be free of suffering and enjoy a positive state. Love them, in other words, but do so consciously and deliberately.

When you have done this successfully for a while, it’s time to move to step 2. This time, choose a person towards whom your feelings are neutral: not strongly positive, not strongly negative, they’re just someone you’re aware of without any particular feeling pro or anti. Now generate towards them the same attitude of love, compassion and positive regard that you did for the person towards whom you already have some positive feelings.

When you feel you have mastered this phase of the exercise – and not before – you can move to step 3. Step 3 is, you probably have guessed, to pick a person whom you don’t like and generate the same positive feelings towards them. If you’re taking these steps over several sessions, begin each session with the easy person, the person who you already like, then move to the neutral person, and finally to the person you dislike.

The final step, for adepts, is “pure compassion” meditation, in which you focus unlimited compassion and loving-kindness towards all living beings without specificity or distinction – sometimes called nonreferential compassion.

Some scientists wired up compassion meditators to various brain scanning machines, and this is what they found, as reported in Sharon Begley’s Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (previously reviewed here).

photo credit: Tschäff

Brain areas concerned with maternal love, empathy, and a desire to act (presumably, to relieve the sufferings of others) are among those which increase in activation. Brain areas which are active in sadness and anxiety are damped down.

And the effects increase the longer you meditate. Experienced compassion meditators have highly integrated brains, with strong connections from their prefrontal lobes (which are involved with thinking things through and deciding) to the amygdala (which activates fear and anger reactions). This means that they have greater control over their emotions. Their brain activity also shifts in the direction of the left prefrontal cortex (associated with happiness), away from the right prefrontal cortex (associated with unhappiness, discontentment and extreme vigilance).

If you met someone who was cheerful, warm, able to deal well with their negative emotions, empathetic and caring, wouldn’t you want to be around them more? So would I.

photo credit: moonjazz

For Further Reading
A news report on a recent study into compassion meditation (by some of the scientists featured in the Begley book), and the study it refers to.

And Healing With Awareness has more and different exercises for cultivating compassion.

Technorati Tags: compassion, meditation, self-improvement, interpersonal, skills, technique, improve relationships, empathy, emotion, emotional control

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