How Compassion Works: A Step-by-Step Guide to Cultivating Well-Being, Love, and Wisdom

Uncover your innate capacity for love, presence, and wisdom with compassion training adapted from Tibetan Buddhism and contemporary psychology.

Everything we care about—our mental and physical well-being, our relationships, our spiritual life, our ability to be useful to others—depends on our ability to access love and compassion within ourselves first. This clear, step-by-step guide offers a way to cultivate this power through an evidence-based meditation method called Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT). 

With practices drawn from Tibetan traditions, attachment theory, and cognitive science, How Compassion Works uses a progressive series of meditations to gradually build our capacity for mindfulness and presence—and to help us avoid empathic distress, compassion fatigue, or burnout. Organized into three categories—receptive mode, deepening mode, and inclusive mode—these practices help us cultivate unconditional care and discernment from within.  

With a flexible framework that allows practitioners to integrate their own religious or spiritual beliefs, this book offers practices suitable for people of all faiths and those seeking a purely secular path.

JOHN MAKRANSKY, PhD, has been a professor of Buddhism and Comparative Theology at Boston College, senior academic advisor at Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Nepal, president of the Society of Buddhist-Christian studies, fellow of the Mind & Life Institute, and senior editor for the Buddhism section of the St. Andrews Encyclopedia of Theology. John’s scholarly writings focus on connections between devotion, compassion, and wisdom in Buddhism, adapting Buddhist practices to meet contemporary minds, and theoretical issues in interfaith learning. In 2000, John was ordained as a lama in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism—a teacher of innate love and wisdom practices. For the past twenty-five years, John has taught meditations of innate compassion and wisdom adapted from Tibetan Buddhism for modern Buddhists, those in other spiritual traditions, and for people in caring roles and professions. In consultation with participants from those settings, John developed the Sustainable Compassion Training model of contemplative practice (SCT) to help Western Buddhists, people of diverse faiths, and those in caring roles and professions generate a more sustaining and unconditional power of compassion and awareness to support their lives and work.

PAUL CONDON is an associate professor of psychology at Southern Oregon University and a research fellow at the Mind & Life Institute. He has also served as a visiting lecturer for the Centre for Buddhist Studies at Rangjung Yeshe Institute. His research examines the relational basis for empathy, compassion, wellbeing, and prosocial action and the influence of compassion and mindfulness training on those capacities. His writings and teachings also explore the use of scientific theories in dialogue with contemplative traditions to inform meditation practices of compassion, mindfulness, and wisdom. His research and writings have appeared in leading psychology journals and Buddhist magazines, and his work on meditation has been cited in media outlets such as New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Smithsonian Magazine. Paul is codeveloper of the Sustainable Compassion Training model, and he teaches meditation practices adapted from the Tibetan Nyingma and Kagyu traditions for multi-faith and secular application.