How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [106]
10
COMPASSIONATE COMMUNICATION
Dialogue, Intimacy, and Conflict
Transformation
Meditation is good for your brain, and it can bring you closer to God. But we discovered that it can also be used to rapidly establish intimacy with others. “Intimacy,” as we are using it here, does not refer to sexual closeness, but to those qualities associated with friendship, trust, and compassion. When we feel intimate toward another, we willingly suspend self-protective attitudes that we normally use when closely interacting with others. Intimacy fosters acceptance, and greater degrees of intimacy are correlated with greater personal health.1
In this chapter we'll discuss how you can build on the meditation exercises in the previous chapter and apply them directly to the process of communication with family members and friends. The technique that Mark and I designed was specifically created for working with spouses and partners, but we will show you how to adapt the exercise when interacting with colleagues, distant acquaintances, and even strangers. When you do so, you can turn an ordinary conversation into an extraordinary event in less than fifteen minutes, because it will neurologically undermine defensive behaviors inherent in any dialogue. This creates an environment in which conflicts can be more easily resolved.
You can even use this meditation technique to teach groups of people with opposing perspectives how to be more accepting of each other's systems of beliefs. We call this exercise “Compassionate Communication” because it helps individuals express vulnerable thoughts while maintaining mutual sensitivity and respect for each other. Here, we define compassion as the neurological ability to resonate to the emotional feelings of others, to share their suffering and their joy. Our ability to be compassionate is part of our biological makeup, but every human brain has a different degree of emotional sensitivity when it comes to reading the inner feelings of others.2 From the research we've accumulated, we believe that anyone can strengthen his or her neurological capacity to feel greater compassion toward others.
In fact, we view the overall concept of compassionate communication as essential to all forms of interpersonal exchange. Compassion is a fundamental tenet of nearly every spiritual tradition, and it is especially critical when considering the larger issues of interfaith dialogue, discussions between atheists and religious individuals, and communication within the science and religion debates.
Compassion also implies the neurological ability to express kindness, empathy, and forgiveness.3 Like intimacy, compassion is associated with greater emotional and psychological health.4 From a neurological perspective, it is generated and regulated by the anterior cingulate,5 and as we have explained in prior chapters, this unique part of the human brain enhances social awareness, recognizes the feeling states of others, and decreases our propensity to express anger and react with fear. The anterior cingulate is also one of the core neural mechanisms responsible for our deepest feelings of romantic love.6 It allows us to feel emotionally connected and attached, but if it functions poorly, a person's ability to resonate to the feelings of someone else will be impaired.7
P254: MEDITATION, COMPASSION,
AND MIRROR-NEURON THEORY
In psychological, anthropological, and neuroscientific communities, there is much excitement about the potential discovery of a human mirror-neuron system that would explain how our brains come to “know” what is going on in the brains of other human beings. These unique neurons are located in areas directly affected by meditation and appear to be intimately involved in the processes of facial recognition, compassion, communication, and self/other consciousness. The rapidly expanding research in this area suggests