[MUSIC PLAYING]
JOAN HALIFAX: So I first want
to express a lot of gratitude
to Google.
Actually, it's a wonderful
honor to be here because I
use your platforms daily.
Although perhaps I should
go on a fast, a Google fast.
But anyway, it enhances
my fastness in the world
because I'm able to access many,
not only facts, but also people
all over the world,
even in the most
remote parts of
the world, the most
remote parts of the Himalayas.
I want to say a few things.
One is I'm not up here to really
talk about end of life care.
What I want to speak
about is an exploration
of compassion,
which is something
that I'm beginning to
understand in an initial way,
but also I begin to see as the
most important human quality
that we are invited
to actualize today.
And why do I say that?
Well, let me first recall
some words of His Holiness,
the Dalai Lama.
His Holiness said,
"compassion is not a luxury.
It is a necessity in order for
the human species to survive."
And I would suggest
that we're speaking
not only about our
species or His Holiness,
we're speaking not
only about our species,
but really all
species on this Earth,
and that from my point of view,
having compassion instantiated
into the view and
values of Google
could be life-changing
for millions of people,
and also many, many species.
But it's important to
understand what compassion is.
And part of my curiosity
about compassion
comes from the work that
Karen was referring to,
this work in end
of life care field,
but also the fact that I've
been involved in human rights
and justice issues
since the 1960s.
I have the great honor of
serving in the Himalayas
in our nomads clinic working
with now thousands of people
in the most remote villages
in the high Himalayas
who have no access
to health care,
and also having worked as a
volunteer in the penitentiary
of New Mexico on death row in
maximum security for six years
and really learning
a lot, learning
a lot about how compassion
operates, and what it is,
and also there's
a kind of deficit
of compassion in
our culture today
that is affecting everyone.
Why?
Well, first, let me just
say, why compassion?
Very interesting research
in neuroscience and social
psychology suggests that
compassion is profoundly
enhancing of our
immune response.
I know that's kind
of a challenge
to integrate that data point,
but it's extremely interesting
how beneficial compassion
is, not only in terms
of our immune response, but
also in terms of our longevity.
And I'm thinking about the
story of Nicholas Winton, who
died at the age of 106,
who was a kind of money
guy, young guy in
the Second World War,
and who ended up in
Czechoslovakia on one mission,
but changed his mission
when he realized
that many children were going
to be taken to the camps.
And he ended up liberating 669
children, saving their lives,
and not making
anything about it.
He did it at great
risk, and it wasn't
until he was an elderly person
that his wife discovered
the records of what he had done
and actually told the BBC, who
secretly assembled
those survivors,
those people who had
grown up in England,
who'd been placed in
homes, who found their life
and livelihood.
And I don't know if you've
seen the video, but you should.
Every time I see it, I
just kind of choke up.
With this old guy sitting there
in a BBC theater, a theater
about the size of this
theater, and the BBC moderator
introduces him to the woman
next to him, and said,
do you recognize her?
And he said, no.
Said, well, you saved her life.
And then he began to choke up.
And then the moderator
said basically,
anyone whose life was
saved by Nicholas Winton,
will you please stand up?
And the whole theater,
everyone in the theater stood.
Very powerful.
Because a person who
does such a selfless act
and seeks no
outside recognition,
but recognizes within
themselves the imperative
to serve others and lives
within those principles
modestly, and in
a way, secretly,
is an extraordinary
example to us.
I wanted to understand
compassion better.
I've worked in medical systems
literally all over the world.
I've also had the experience of
having compassion well up in me
and break my life open in a good
way to the truth of suffering,
and also the possibility
to transform suffering,
and to realize that
I, as a person who
was born in the
early 1940s, feel
that imperative on a daily
basis, what can I do to serve?
What can I do to end suffering?
How to keep myself viable to
meet the truth of suffering
in this world.
So I was so fortunate
to be appointed
as a distinguished
visiting scholar
at the Library of Congress.
And in the course of
my time at the library,
I began to map out compassion.
Because I realized
that, first of all,
even though neuroscience and
social psychology, the research
being done in these
areas indicates
the great benefits of compassion
not only to those whom
are served, but those
who experience it
and to society in general,
but also that compassion
is in a way, challenged
in our society right now,
and that it's
difficult for actually
train people in compassion.
Not as an acquired skill, but to
actually create the conditions
where compassion is an emergent
process in our subjectivity.
And so I sat in the
Library of Congress
and began to look at compassion
from many points of view.
And I recognized that
compassion is not
possible without
attentional balance.
This is really critical.
Our capacity to
actually look deeply
into what is happening
in the present moment
necessitates that we are able
to be very grounded and not
divided in our attention, not
dispersed in our attention,
nor distracted.
And just that is the kind
of first base, if you will.
I mean, in a world where
our technology is actually
designed, interestingly enough,
not necessarily to enhance
focused attention, but
actually to ungrounded us
so that our
consciousness can be,
if you will,
inhabit or colonized
by messages which
aren't necessarily
benefiting us or others.
So the cultivation of
attentional balance
is really critical so that
we have high resolution
of perception, that we're
able to also sustain
our attention on any
given object, including
our own subjective experience,
for more than a moment.
It's really hard to put
aside our brain prosthesis.
Because we are,
in a certain way--
these technological devices
have been so deeply insinuated
into my life, and
also I think the lives
of most of us in this room and
who are listening to this talk,
but how do we actually
have the capacity
to allocate our attention to
an individual or to a situation
without leaving,
abandoning that moment?
So being grounded and
cultivating attentional balance
is essential.
It's also essential to
be pro-social in a way
to lift out of the negative
narratives that inhabit us.
And prosociality is the
opposite of antisocial.
So it's very powerful
to engage in practices
that actually nourish
beneficial qualities within us.
It's also essential to have a
motivational foundation which
is unselfish, which
is ethical, which
is about non-harming,
which is engaged
in a process of constantly
inviting us to deconstruct
our fear and open up
to the world in a way
where we're in this beneficial,
non-separate, non-objectifying
relationship with
so-called others,
and to actually develop
the capacity to expand
our subjectivity to include
the experience of others
in a way that is healthy.
It's also essential in terms
of compassion to have insight.
Not only insight at the level of
a metacognitive capacity, which
is to stand outside
of our experience,
to see the truth
of impermanence,
to understand that all beings
are really aspiring to be
happy, even the most deluded
ones and the most politically
confused ones, but also
that we, on one level,
are very connected
to that person
across from us, the dying
person, the prisoner,
our child, our
teacher, our boss,
but also we are not that person.
So the distinction
between self and other,
understanding that
distinction is
critical in terms of us
being able to regulate
our experience of
resonance with whatever is
arising in the present moment.
So the map grew.
And it, I think, has
been of help to others.
People in the neuroscience
and social psychology research
world, but also it's been very
helpful in terms of developing
training protocols.
And I developed a very
simple one called GRACE,
which I can just share briefly
here, which many clinicians--
and actually, there's a National
GRACE Organization in Japan
now--
many clinicians use, and I'll
just give you the shortcut.
The G of GRACE is
gathering your attention.
How do you really get
grounded in this moment?
The R of GRACE is
recalling your intention.
What is our motivation
for any given action?
The A of GRACE is
attuning to oneself,
to one's own subjectivity,
to our somatic experience,
to our emotional experience,
and to the actual cognitive
experience that we have
before we attune to others.
So once you understand
the protocol,
it's a lived in
act of compassion.
It happens in an instant.
You can really assay your
subjectivity physically,
emotionally, and cognitively
before you actually
include the experience of
others into your subjectivity,
engage in empathy.
So this is other attunement.
Attuning first to yourself,
and then attuning to the other.
And then from that base,
the C of GRACE, which is
consider what will really serve.
And then the E of GRACE
is engage and end.
Ending is really important.
So this is a tool that
many clinicians are using
and educators at this time.
And actually, it's just great if
you're a parent or a colleague.
It just has a way of grounding
you, remembering who you really
are, attuning to
your own situation
before you include
others into it
and getting grounded,
and so forth.
So in the process of
working on this project,
I began to consider how
the absence of compassion,
the absence of
attentional balance,
the absence of
emotional balance,
the lack of capacity to tune
into one's own subjectivity,
the inability to be in
resonance with others, and also
how fast the reaction time often
is at great cost in the end,
or how fear inhibits
us from acting.
And over many decades,
literally thousands
of people in end
of life care field,
educators, people involved in
corporations in the business
world, parents, practitioners
have shared with me
the challenges that
they've experienced
in meeting suffering.
And by the way, I'm
not just speaking
about the kind of dramatic
suffering that, for example,
I in end of life care
field would encounter.
I'm speaking about the kind
of day-to-day suffering
that you would encounter as
you meet with colleagues who
are super upregulated or
very depressed or angry,
or with a parent
whose child has died
or whose child is extremely ill.
And I began to
realize, actually,
I suffered in the same way
as those who were sharing
their difficulties with me.
And I located, if you
will, five geographies
in the ecosystem
of our subjectivity
that are really
extraordinary capacities
within our human
experience, without which
we would be deeply
challenged as individuals,
and as a social body,
and as a body that
lives within the
environment on this Earth.
And those five capacities were--
interestingly enough for me--
capacities which had a deeply
challenged shadow aspect.
And they're capacities
which we value,
but we often don't realize
that they can make us ill.
They can be great hindrances.
And this is actually what
I outlined in the book.
I call them edge states.
Because they are ecologies that
include healthy manifestations,
but also they're ecologies
that include unhealthy aspects.
And it's very important for us
to realize this vision of edge
states that falling
over the edge
isn't necessarily a
terminal condition,
that actually climbing back
onto the high edge of any
of these qualities produces
potentially a lot of strength,
a lot of character.
But it's important to
also have the ability
to stand on the high edge
of any of these capacities,
to see the entire landscape
of the toxic aspect,
or aspects in the
challenged aspects.
So the first edge that I
looked at was altruism.
Nicholas Winton
was a great example
of an altruist, someone
who felt the imperative.
Just as [? Chante ?] Davis
says, you step on a thorn,
and the hand doesn't sort
of ask the foot permission
to remove the thorn.
The hand goes immediately to the
foot and pulls the thorn out.
It's this kind of
seamlessness of response.
I read in "The New York Times"
a very interesting story
about a man called
Wesley Autrey.
And Wesley Autrey was
an Afro-American man
who was standing on a
subway platform with his two
daughters, and
there were probably
100 people on that subway
platform along with him.
And all of a sudden, a young
white guy had a seizure
and fell into the subway tracks.
And as this young guy
was having the seizure,
Wesley Autrey saw the
oncoming subway, jumped off
of the subway platform, leaving
his two little girls who
were standing right beside him
there on the subway platform,
got on top of this young
guy, and he realized
that if he wasn't able
to hold this guy down,
and he certainly
wasn't able to drag him
off the tracks in time, that he
and this young guy would die.
And he held this seizing
young man down on the tracks,
and the subway passed over his
head, grazing his knit cap.
And he was hailed as
an incredible hero,
and it was a decision
that was like that.
He didn't say, well,
my military background
is giving me the
capacity to do this,
and I'll be a big deal
in "The New York Times"
and lauded as a hero.
He just went for it.
Now the shadow
side of altruism is
called pathological altruism.
And pathological
altruism is that we
engage in an action of service
toward others, or another,
or toward an institution,
or toward a country which
endeavors to be beneficial,
but that that act of altruism
actually causes harm to
ourselves, to those who we're
endeavoring to serve,
to the institution
that we perhaps are part of,
to the institution that we're
trying to serve, or to the
country that we're serving.
So a good example of
pathological altruism
is what happened in Haiti.
Very interesting, this notion
of pathological altruism.
And also what is
so fascinating is
how tenuous that line is between
altruism and pathological
altruism.
Because if you take the
example of Wesley Autrey,
a very selfless, dramatic act,
unprecedented in a certain way,
no preconception, just a leap.
If the train, the
subway had killed him
and also killed
Autrey, he probably
would have been deemed
a pathological altruist.
So it's very fascinating.
We just-- the line is
fragile, to say the least.
There's a big grey area.
But it's also a very
important quality for us
to examine deeply.
Because just as the
case of Nicholas Winton
and of Wesley Autrey,
both of these people
acted not selfishly,
but from a perspective
of complete unselfishness
in this very
seamless, unfiltered way.
And this is, if you will,
one of the qualities
or aspects of altruism.
The second quality
that I jumped into,
I heard so much about
it over the years.
In fact, interestingly enough,
I was in a conversation
a few days ago with
a young Indian man
who's a Zen practitioner who
is a specialist at AI who
said that he can hardly
turn on the news he's
so overwhelmed in
accessing the news today.
And he had my book and
asked me to sign it.
He said, you know, I'm
beginning to understand
something about empathy
from what you've written.
So empathy is that experience of
somatic emotional or affective
resonance, as well as cognitive
resonance with another.
We can be somatically
attuned, for example,
and not being necessarily
in resonance emotionally
and cognitively, but
we can have all three
of our perceiving
mechanisms engaged,
our sensing mechanisms engaged.
It's that experience where
our subjectivity begins
to drop away in terms
of the small self,
and we practice a kind
of increasing inclusivity
which is really important from
the point of view of meditation
practice.
Because fundamentally,
our realization
in meditation practice,
the sort of sign of it
is that we recognize
that we're deeply
interconnected with
all beings and things.
But when we're so connected
with all beings and things, when
we, for example, over-identify
with the dying patient,
or with our boss who
might be angry at us,
or our child who is acting
out, or a colleague who
has experienced
profound loss, it
becomes a very
difficult situation
where we can experience
secondary trauma.
And I have to say, that
young guy in the AI world
that I talked to, or who
talked to me a few days ago,
I have to titrate my
consumption of news too.
Because I notice if I
take in too much bad news,
I begin to shut down.
I begin to go numb.
But it's very
important to understand
where your boundaries are,
what serves your awakening.
When one over-identifies
with, for example,
the Fuhrer in Nazi
Germany, where you--
it's not just with the
ordinary kind of suffering,
but it's also, for example, in
cults, or views, or even inside
of a corporate
system, and you begin
to lose your own moral compass,
the principles by which you're
living.
Even a corporation
can be a kind of cult,
if you will, where
diversity is not condoned,
where it's looked on as
a threat to identity.
That's why I'm so glad to see so
many different colors of seats
here, and also just a feeling
of diversity in this community
here.
But when that
experience of arousal
happens in connection with
the experience of others,
and if that
experience of arousal
is not regulated, either from a
bottom up perspective, that is,
the perspective of a kind
of natural regulation
that happens to keep us
from moving into overwhelm,
or a top down regulation where
we can, sensing into our body,
recognize the signals
that are coming up
from this amazing
organism that is
a repository of an enormous
amount of information
that we're often dissociated
from as we are attending
to our digital
device, for example,
where we lose touch
with the messages coming
from the body telling us, oh,
I have a lot of fear coming up.
I can feel it in my diaphragm.
I can feel the
tension in my legs.
I know I'm violating
my integrity.
I feel my guts are squeezing.
My heart rate is increasing.
Or I'm witnessing suffering,
and I have a vasovagal moment
where I'm about to pass out.
If we're not able to
regulate ourselves,
we can be traumatized.
We can move into the
experience of distress.
And this is one of the reasons
why practice is so important.
It's not about
disassociating from the body.
It's actually being in this
experience of embodiment
so that we can sense into
our visceral processes
and receive the information
that's coming up
from the body about
what kind of response
we're experiencing in relation
to external events, or even
internal processes.
So this is called
empathic distress
and empathic over-arousal.
It is the shadow
side of empathy.
The next ecology that I
looked at with great interest
was that of integrity.
We can ask what we
mean by integrity,
and from my point
of view, integrity
has to do with nonviolence
and non-harming.
How do we actually nurture
integrity in a world
where there is so much
violence, such deep dissociation
from this planet Earth,
where war is the norm,
and where violence
is being fed to us
through the media constantly?
And I looked at the
shadow side of integrity
and saw there are basically
four valences to what I've
termed moral suffering.
And by moral
suffering, I'm talking
about that feeling of
trespass that many of us
experience when we engage
directly or indirectly
in behaviors that are harmful.
And they include four
different expressions.
And one of those expressions
is called moral distress.
And it's when you see a
situation where there is
a violation of values, of
principles, of beneficence,
you see a way through, but
you cannot actualize it.
Moral distress.
Moral injury, which
is well-documented
in the military, but also, we
see it in education, medicine,
and in big corporations as well.
And this is when you
are in a system that
is causing harm to others.
You either are part of it
or you're witnessing it,
and you feel shame
and self-blame.
Moral injury.
The third aspect is
called moral outrage.
And I have a bit more of a
predisposition toward that.
I have some toward
more moral injury
and some toward
moral distress too,
but it is the sense
of anger and disgust
that arises when you perceive,
external to yourself,
acts that harm.
And it can be chronic.
There are many of my
friends and I kind of--
I don't think I'm
chronically in it,
but I kind of know
it pretty well.
The sense, just looking at
our political landscape,
feeling moral outrage, or
looking at war in the world
and feeling a sense
of moral outrage.
And the shaming and
blaming, of course,
is expressed outwardly
toward others.
And then the fourth one
is called moral apathy.
And actually, I didn't even
think about moral apathy
at all, because I'm in
the bubble of my world,
until I went to see
"I'm not your Negro",
And I heard the
term moral apathy,
and I was like, that's it.
It is when we live in a bubble
of privilege, or of addiction,
or denial, or fear
that disallows us
from seeing what really
is going on at the systems
level in our surround.
Where we have turned
away, if you will,
from the truth of suffering.
And I know recently, I was
flying internationally,
and I had this--
going through the airport
as a privileged Anglo-Saxon
Protestant Zen person,
and I saw a woman
in a burqa coming up beside me.
And I realized she was in a
much more vulnerable position
than I. And I had this
flash about the privilege
that I enjoy, and also
of compassion for anyone
whose identity puts them
on the margin of what
appears to be socially
and psychologically safe.
And I remember just
I did this thing--
I mean, she probably
thought I was crazy.
But I put my hands together and
made a little bow to her just
to make that connection
in that moment.
Integrity.
The fourth edge state
that I've written about
is in relation to respect.
And it's when we hold really,
all beings in equal regard.
And I had when I was working in
the penitentiary of New Mexico
a really deep experience of
walking into a system that
is characterized by
a lot of violence,
of working inside as a
volunteer for six years
with men in maximum
security in death row.
And it was such a
wake up call for me,
because I walked into that
system with a lot of judgments.
And actually, what I
learned from being inside
was these are human beings.
They've caused immense
suffering to others.
It was not a matter
of me being in a kind
of romantic
atmosphere internally
about the truth of suffering
in a very violent, rage-filled
penitentiary system, but it
was developing the capacity
to see the truth of a
particular kind of suffering.
Per individual, every individual
had a different narrative.
Some of the narratives were
really horrifying to consider.
But at the same time,
to recognize that
beneath the narrative,
beneath the actions
of any one of those
individuals was a human being.
No matter that they
had raped and killed
children, or their
parents, or strangers,
there was a human
being under there.
And part of the
work was to actually
hold the truth of the
narrative, as constructed
as it was, and also the truth
that maybe not this lifetime,
but maybe in some
lifetime, this one will be
liberated from their delusion.
So I learned so much
working inside that system.
But that system, our
corrections system,
is actually a kind
of ground engendering
phenomenal disrespect.
And I began also to look
at respect and disrespect
in medicine, particularly
after a student of mine,
who was a nurse, did a thesis
at our chaplaincy training
on what is termed
horizontal hostility.
And this is behaviors of
disrespect between peers.
Bullying, disparagement,
third party communication,
dissing and so forth.
And what she brought my
attention to is that 15% to 20%
of nurses actually leave the
nursing profession because
of having been bullied, and
just being unable to sustain it.
And it's interesting to
look at that in relation,
for example, to the
culture here at Google,
or the culture in any
corporation around gender,
for example, around
race, ethnicity,
around religion
view, around height.
I can say as a short
woman, sometimes
I'm actually treated more
like a pet than a person.
And you can imagine that does--
that's right, moral outrage.
That does nothing for
me or the other person.
I try to do my best to
help set things straight,
needless to say.
So horizontal
hostility is actually
rampant in our culture.
And it's a complement,
so to speak,
in the world of verticality is
called vertical violence, which
can happen in a top down way.
And certainly, we
see it in terms of--
well, you see horizontal
hostility, for example,
in the political arena, of how
candidates treat each other
and speak about
each other, and it's
kind of horrifying for
our children to witness.
But you also see
vertical violence
in terms of the disrespect
that our politicians
engage in in relation to people
who are differently abled,
or from other cultures,
other societies.
There is also a bottom
up vertical violence,
where people who are
less empowered, less
acknowledged actually
manifest dramatic disrespect
toward those who are in power.
So part of the work
is how do we actually
come into this
experience of recognizing
our fundamental humanity in
relation to others, all others?
And respect is something that
is about holding all beings
and things, including all
species on this Earth,
in equal regard.
The final piece that I looked
at was burnout and engagement.
Our capacity to
engage in a vocation,
in work that is meaningful
is really important.
Our workplaces also have to
be nontoxic in order for us
to survive.
And we also have to
have good agreements
with our places of employment.
Engagement is essential.
A sense of enthusiasm, of
dedication, having work
that is about benefiting
others and working
in healthy environments
is really essential.
And by the same
token, what happens
when those aspects are not
part of our work environment.
The outcome, of
course, is burnout.
We become completely exhausted.
So I do a big thing on burnout.
So we can look at our experience
in an interesting way,
because whether we're
in the human rights
field or the health
care field, all of us
have, in one way or another,
fallen over the edge.
And one of the principles
operating in this work
is how powerful it is not
just to fall over the edge
and to encounter failure
and to be traumatized,
but also the repair process that
actually builds character, that
enhances our
resilience, that deepens
our sense of flourishing,
that gives us deeper meaning.
It's really important.
And I said at another Silicon
Valley company yesterday,
it is important to
actually include failure
into the equation of success.
We know from the point
of view of living systems
that systems that break down
and learn from the breakdown
can reorganize themselves at
a much higher and more robust
level.
And robust is the
key here, robustness.
Our capacity to
actually encounter
incredible difficulties,
loss, sorrow, failure,
and to use that
experience as a way
to engender, not only humility,
but to engender wisdom.
The capacity to see deeply
into who we really are.
So I ask myself, what
was the kind of pivot?
How do we actually work the
edge of these edge states?
And I realized that the most
important thing that we can do
is to actualize compassion,
because compassion gives you
the attentional balance,
emotional balance, and insight
that allows you to transform
even the experiences that have
caused us distress, have
caused us the most suffering
into qualities of strength.
So what I'd love
to do in finishing
this short presentation
is to open up
for questions or comments.
I'd be really happy to hear
more from you than from me.
AUDIENCE: Always good
to see you [INAUDIBLE]..
So you talked of
attentional imbalance.
And most of us,
all of us here are
engaged in making very useful
pieces of technology that
has really done a
lot for the world,
including democratizing
information
and enabling compassion.
And yet, I often
feel guilty that I'm
the drug dealer making more
weapons of mass destruction.
How do we reconcile the two?
How do you find peace in that?
JOAN HALIFAX: Well, I'm so
grateful you feel guilty.
[LAUGHTER]
So in your situation, a
little moral suffering
could go a long way.
Yeah, I mean, you
just don't want
to sit there numb and not aware
of the potential consequences
of what you're doing in
this corporation, both
to benefit, and to harm.
And I think one of the facet--
so I've sort of painted
a kind of grim picture
of the human species.
But I think one of the really
incredible things that's
happening today is how
many extraordinary people
and projects are out
there on the landscape,
and I'm sure inside the
Googleplex that are directed
toward benefiting others.
There's so much
that is happening
that is really upholding
the best of our humanity.
And it's also, as
you say, I think
I was a little bit of an
early adopter, so to speak,
in the early 90s,
getting technology
as a good ally in my life.
And I also am sensitive to
what you're talking about.
The fact that our
attentional ground
has been completely fragmented
by our technology, allowing for
means to actually
enter our psyche
and colonize us that
are unwholesome.
So part of it has to do
with self-determination.
That is, somehow creating
the conditions where
I as an individual, you as
an individual, all of you
individuals value and
instantiate within others
the importance of
actual, if you will,
top down control of these
addictive tendencies
in relation to our technology.
And I think that's happening.
I think that I remember--
what is the name of that?
Zenga.
I remember a conversation I
had with one of the founders
of Zenga who said, he was like,
"Farmville", are you kidding?
Now it's like really out there.
There's all these
alternate realities
that people are plugged
into that actually you
have to buy tokens for to create
a kind of bigger power base
and so forth.
I feel like we
should also create,
if you will, tokens of goodness,
not just that kind of power.
And I think we have
a chance to work
in a very creative
way in shaping
what is happening in our
future in a positive direction.
And I'll say from working in
Nepal, which a few years ago, I
don't know if this
is still the case,
but was determined to be the
second poorest country in Asia
after Afghanistan, and I'm
very sensitive to the effects
of technology, both
in the positive sense
and the negative sense,
on Nepali people,
high Himalayan people.
Technology allows for greater
connectivity, more information,
better health care.
It also helps them document the
beauty of their cultures, which
are quickly disappearing
at the same rate
that the glaciers are melting.
It allows them to
access language in a way
that they could never
access up until that point.
It gives them access to
education in a way that
was never possible.
But also the
downside is the sort
of deeper strains of those
Himalayan cultures are
being negatively
affected by technology.
How do we reappraise,
if you will,
the value of cultural
diversity and the importance
of cultural identity in a
world where tribalization
is often negative?
And I think that technology
can play an important part
in that regard.
And I'm counting on
you guys to do it.
So good for you for
your moral suffering.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I've read a little bit recently
about compassion fatigue, which
is something professional
caregivers spend
so much of their
energy helping others
that they find that they don't
have any left for friends
and family.
And in my last
relationship, I was
very much on the receiving end
of that, which was very hard.
I'm a nurse who worked in
Nepal after the earthquake.
JOAN HALIFAX: A nurse who worked
in Nepal after the earthquake.
Daniel.
The question Daniel asked
is very interesting.
It was about the
challenges associated
with so-called
compassion fatigue.
So I think Richie
Davidson, [INAUDIBLE]
and I agree on many
things, including
the fact there's no such
thing as compassion fatigue.
Yeah.
What actually one
is experiencing
is empathic distress.
And it's created a problem
inside health systems
where the word or the
term compassion fatigue
has been used, and
so it's conduced
to a situation of suspicion
toward the experience
of compassion.
So when we're in this
kind of resonance
with others and over-identified,
we can be easily overwhelmed.
But compassion as
I described it,
as composing or comprised
of attentional balance,
emotional balance,
inside an embodiment,
it does not fatigue you.
And what the fascinating
research done by Davidson,
and Lutz, and Chuck
Raison, and Tanya Singer,
and a number of
other neuroscientists
and social psychologists
have given us
a good view that compassion
actually enhances
resilience, enhances immune
response, enhances longevity.
It's morally elevating.
And when we don't
respond compassionately,
we feel morally compromised.
As well, it's contagious.
So when you see someone
out in the world doing
a good thing, like for example,
Nicholas Winton or Wesley
Autrey, you have this feeling
of I want to be like that.
It's this natural arising of
this experience of the value
of being in service to others.
So I would love for you
to just delete that term
from your psyche
and to actually use
another term which is called
empathic distress in its place.
I have experienced
empathic distress.
In the introduction--
but compassion fatigue,
it's not compassion that
we're talking about.
It really has to do with
empathy and burnout.
And so in the introduction
to the empathy chapter,
I talk about being in this
small clinic in Nepal,
and a very haggard man walked
into the clinic clutching
a little bundle in his arms.
And one of our clinicians
walked up, helped the man unwrap
the bundle, and it was a little
girl who was horribly burned.
And so we took her into one of
the clinics rooms and began,
the clinicians, the Nepali
nurses and doctors and our team
began to debride her
wounds, but we didn't
have pediatric anesthesia.
And I was in such
resonance with this child
that I had a vasovagal response.
I almost passed out.
I thought I was going to
throw up on the floor.
And I just-- all of
the life ran out of me.
And then I realized, I
had this kind of insight.
Wait a minute, that is
not going to serve here.
And I reallocated my attention
to the sensation of my feet
on the floor.
I got myself grounded.
And as I was grounding
myself, this sense
of gratitude to the father
for bringing this little girl
into the clinic arose.
I could feel my vascular
system warm up, become happier,
if you will.
And then I had this
sort of next wave
of just incredible
gratitude for the clinicians
who were serving this child.
And that's compassion.
Being in affective resonance
and somatic resonance
with the child was empathy.
I would have been wiped
for all of the work
that I've done in the medical
field as a support person.
There's no way I
could've sustain it.
But in fact, compassion
is characterized
by unbiased resilience.
Thank you.
SPEAKER: --for sharing
her wisdom with us.
[APPLAUSE]
