Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 425: Compassion Is the Ultimate Tool for the Truly Ambitious | Paul Gilbert

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

Dr. Paul Gilbert OBE is a professor of psychology at the University of Derby, Founder and President of The Compassionate Mind Foundation, the founder of Compassion Focused Therapy, and in 2011 was awarded the Officer of the British Empire, or OBE, from Queen Elizabeth II for his continued contribution to mental healthcare. He’s also the author of several books including The Compassionate Mind, Living Like Crazy, Overcoming Depression, and his latest, Compassion Focused Therapy: Clinical Practice and Applications. This episode explores:What Compassion Focused Therapy actually is.Why he says wisdom and courage are key to compassion.Some surprising truths about your inner critic.How compassion can be used to your advantage, especially if you’re ambitious.The relevance of various meditation practices to cultivating compassion.How trauma can impact our ability to access compassion, and what we might do about it.The importance of the vagus nerve and its relationship to compassion, mindfulness, and friendship.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/paul-gilbert-425See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, I know I'm not the first person to arrive at this opinion, but it seems to me that our society does not sufficiently value compassion and kindness. We seem to deeply value things like strength, speed, power, ambition, raw talent. You get a ton of respect and social capital if you have acquired, trained, or are naturally endowed with any of the above. To be clear, all of those things can be great. But why in how did compassion and kindness become nice to have, or soft skills instead of holy shit.

It's amazing. You're good at that. My guess today is going to talk about how compassion is actually the ultimate tool, the ultimate life hack for the truly ambitious. Paul Gilbert is the founder of something called compassion focus therapy. We talk a lot about compassion and also self-compassion on this show. It's one of my favorite topics. We get a huge audience response whenever we cover this on the show or over on the 10% happier app. Paul's approach is slightly different from our much and deservedly Bally Hood former guests such as Kristen Neff and Chris Gurmer in that compassion focused therapy is based in a

psychotherapeutic model. In other words, it's a kind of psychotherapy. Anyway, Paul will explain that better than I am doing right now. A little bit more about Paul. He's also a professor at the University of Derby over in the UK. And in 2011 was awarded the Order of the British Empire, or OBE, from the Queen for his continued contribution to mental health care.

He's also written books, including the compassionate mind, living like crazy, I like that title, overcoming depression, and his latest compassion-focused therapy, clinical practice at applications. In this conversation, we talk about what compassion focused therapy actually is, why he says wisdom and courage are essential ingredients to compassion, some surprising truth about your inner critic, how compassion can be used to your advantage, even if perhaps especially if you're ambitious, the relevance of various meditation practices to cultivating compassion and what the science says about that, how trauma can impact our ability to access compassion and what you can do about it.

And the importance of a part of the body called the Vegas Nerve, that's not like Las Vegas, the V-A-G-U-S Nerve, and its relationship to compassion, mindfulness, and friendship. The discussion of the Vegas Nerve, by the way, makes this episode you're about to hear rhyme quite nicely with the one we dropped on Monday with Deb Dana, where we talked about how you can become what she calls an active operator of your own nervous system. If you miss that, go check it out.

You don't have to have listened to it, though, in order to listen to this one. Okay, we'll get started with Paul Gilbert right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap

between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis Santos to access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com.

All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from.

And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. What's up? Dr. Paul Gilbert, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Dan, and it's a great pleasure to be here. Likewise, likewise, great pleasure to be here.

Likewise. Likewise, great to have you here. Let me just start with a very broad question, which is, what is compassion-focused therapy? Well, it sort of arose out of cognitive therapy in a way. Now, in cognitive therapy, what you do is you help people to identify a sequence of thoughts and beliefs that are associated with the problems of their facing. So, people who are anxious tend to have anxious thoughts and people who are depressed and have depressing thoughts. And so, if somebody has a set of depressing thoughts like I'm a failure, I'm a good, the future is hopeless.

You help them stand back from that and begin to think of maybe alternatives about what they say to a friend or how would they see the situation if they went depressed, could they think of a more balanced view and so on. And that can work pretty well. I work with people who had severe depressions and chronic depressions. For those individuals, for who didn't work so well, I was kind of intrigued about that. And one day I asked this lady who had been adopted and she had this idea, she shouldn't have been born, she wasn't gullible. But she had a good relationship with her husband, a three-lovely children, and so on. I said, well, when you think about

looking at alternative thoughts and thinking about the fact that while you've got a husband who cares about you, you've made a good marriage, you've got three-lovely children. How do you actually hear these thoughts in your mind? How do you actually hear them? And she was a little embarrassed. I was thinking, I'll speak them out as you actually hear them. And she said, okay, come on, you're doing coming to therapy, aren't you? You got a husband who cares about you? You got three lovely children. And that was my first shock to discover that actually part of the problem was the hostility in the tone. The tone, the emotional experience, was one of quite a lot of hostility and content. Nobody had told me to look for the emotion in the alternative thoughts. So I started to look

for that and learn how that turned out quite commonly. People would have very good caping thoughts, they would be able to challenge some of the negatives, but the emotional tone that they experienced was pretty hostile. So an actual thing to do was just to help people to really focus not only on re-evaluating their thoughts, but actually creating a compassionate motive and a compassionate tone, a friendly kind tone, right?

So that shouldn't have been straightforward, except it wasn't. So this lady said, absolutely not, I'm not doing that. I can't see how that's going to help, but you've got to force me into believing these alternative thoughts. So she didn't want to do it.

She couldn't see that was really easy to do. And the third shock was, which in a way, I think I was quite naive, I should have appreciated this, is that when we started to do compassion, we opened up an Aladdin's cave of trauma, probably wrong analogy. But the point about it is, is that if you have trauma in any kind of motivational system, right? So, it's opposing you like holidays, you love hot days, isn't it wonderful? And then one day you go on holiday and you get

very badly beaten up. The next time the concert holidays are triggered for you, you won't remember all the good times. The first thing that will hit you will be the trauma. So people who've been traumatized in childhood, for example, neglect or abuse, whatever, the moment they start to do compassion work, caring work, they're gonna whack into that caring system, that caring system, that motivational system

has trauma memories in it, that's what they start to experience. So when they try to be compassionate to themselves, they actually start to become frightened or they become overwhelmed by grief and sadness. And so a lot of compassion for the therapy really is about facilitating the ability for people to use a caring system for themselves and for others. And so that's basically how it started over the years. We've been guided by our clients and our patients who've shown us how difficult it is, and really difficult for some people

to have compassion for themselves. That's fascinating. Let me see if I can restate some of that back to you, and then you can tell me where I mess it up. So you're initially interested in cognitive therapy, sometimes called cognitive behavioral therapy. It is a cognitive or sort of intellectual process where you learn to challenge some of these unskillful thought patterns, habitual patterns, storylines that we can run. You notice,

after well, that for some people, they could learn to muster the counter-programming thoughts to challenge their old, not so helpful storylines. But when you honed in on the tone of the thoughts they were using to challenge the old, unhelpful thoughts, that tone in and of itself was unhelpful because it was, as you said, hostile. So you tried to hack that by changing the tone to a more compassionate one and to install a sort of compassionate motive, I think, used the term, so that people are intentionally trying to comfort themselves. The problem then was that when people tried to tap into their mammalian care system, that was bringing up a lot of trauma.

Perfect. That's perfect. That's so rare. So for people who don't have trauma, I think I'm lucky enough to say that I certainly wasn't abused or neglected as a child. Would compassion focus therapy just be an easier process? It can be.

I mean, there are other reasons why people can be a bit resistant to to find it difficult. For example, individuals who are very competitive and feel the driving and succeeding and so forth, they can be a little bit cautious about compassion because they think, well, yeah, but maybe I'm going to lose my ambition, I'm going to lose my edge. And so you can have all kinds of other reasons why people will struggle with compassion, but generally the ones that really struggle are the ones that have had childhood

difficulties, but other people can have difficulties too with compassion. What is the move when you're confronted with one of these difficulties, such as the arising of ancient trauma or the arising of resistance based in ambition? Those are two separate questions. I suspect two separate sets of tools you want to use to help people get over these humps and you can take it in whatever order you would like, but what do you do when people bump up against these challenges? A number of different things. One is really clarification about what we mean by compassion because there is quite a lot of different views about what compassion is. Now, in our approach to compassion, we have an evolutionary approach and we help

clients recognize that caring behavior evolved over hundreds of millions of years and basically it's an algorithm. And in the attachment system, what happens is that the mother evolves a capacity to be sensitive to the needs and distress of their infant, whatever species it is, that sensitivity then triggers behavior. So, for example, if the infant could be a bird or monkey, whatever, if that infant needs feeding and the mother will feed it, if it needs rescuing, the mother will rescue it if the distress call is because it's cold

and needs thermal regulation, then they might have to take it close to its body. So caring behavior then involves this capacity to be sensitive to signals of distress and need. And we know that that evolved with a whole series of physiological systems to do what is called the vagus nervousness part of your autonomic nervous system.

But also that once you are sensitive and triggered, then you also have to behave appropriately. Now, one of the interesting things about that is that if you kind of look at that process of what caring is about, the sensitivity to distress, to trigger appropriate behavior to alleviate or prevent it, that algorithm can actually be quite complex. So you're wanting to help people firstly recognize how are you sensitive to your distress? Are you able to be empathic to it? Or you also highlight the fact that actually the two key things of compassion are courage and wisdom, because without courage, you're not going to go anywhere near to stress, are you? I mean, say if you think about a firefighter, for example, who is sensitive to distress and

will go and rescue people, they need both wisdom and courage. So wisdom and courage really are central to what compassion is. So helping people understand that is really quite crucial. So helping them understand those two aspects to confession, firstly, how they are sensitive to their suffering and then and needs or difficulties and then how they work out the wisdom of what's going to be helpful to them. So the point is compassion can't be unhelpful because that wouldn't be very wise. If I see somebody fall into a fast flowing river and I think I must say them so I jump in so that's okay but then I can't swim and I've got my wallet to do some so I think like a stain that's not very helpful so courage

without wisdom can be reckless and wisdom without courage can be ineffective and so we have quite a lot of discussions around this issue we use examples of a firefighter or somebody fighting in justice, what combines all of these activities is the motivation to address suffering. And that motivation has to be based on courage and wisdom. So we do quite a lot of that stuff with people and then we help them understand that, okay, so what would be the courage and wisdom of compassion that would actually help you be at your best, right? Be at your sharpest. If you want to be ambitious, be at your most ambitious. But at the same time, have an ambition which is not about harming others.

In C of T, you have to also be aware of your impact on other people, which is very crucial. So it's not just about you pursuing your own ambition, but the consequences of your ambition on other people. So from our point of view, it courage and wisdom of the two things we move promote and CFT, and that tends to get around some of the compusions about what compassion is. Well, let me stay with the ambitious person because I can identify. To drill down on this a little bit, somebody comes to you and says, I get it,

I'm beating myself up, and it's degrading my resiliency. It's degrading the quality of my life. I'm taking it out on other people. It's putting me frequently into what a friend of mine calls the toilet vortex where I'm mean to myself and then I mean to other people and because our relationship's so important, meaner to myself and then meaner to other people

and then down you go. So I get it. I get what you're saying, Dr. Gilbert, but I need this self-laceration because I have a really competitive career. And if I take my foot off the gas, if I stop liberally applying the internal cattle prod, my competitors will eat me alive. What do you say in those moments? That's brilliant brilliant example because that's exactly the kind of thing that happens

that people think that if they Stop being critical they will take the foot of the pedal, right? And so part of what we help people realize is that's actually not the case now If you forgive me, I can take you through a little example of this So we would say to people okay, so look, I tell you what, tell us one of these things, right, that you're critical about. Let me say, okay, I would like you to spend a little bit of time just imagining you can see your critic.

So we get them to do a little meditation, like I see the critic outside of themselves. And then we invite them to just listen to the critic, what does the critic say to you? So we do that for a little bit, you know, a minute or two, not too long. And then we invite them to explore what does the critic actually feel about you? And then they get into that, and then what was the critic want to do to you? Now when we take people through this process, actually often people are very, very shocked when what they discover. Often the critic has a rather harsh appearance. Sometimes people even see witches or sharp objects or all kinds of things can represent the critic.

And typically, the critic, when you let it go, what is it actually think about you? It's pretty nasty. It'll say, you're stupid, you messed up, you're useless, you're never gonna do anything, you know, you're just a fake, you are. And the emotion of the critic is again, very hostile. And often what they want to do to you is to push you, beat you into what it is. So when you actually invite people to, okay, that's what really explore this critic,

let's see, is this critic really going to help you? Does it really help you? When they spend some time really sitting with the critic, exploring the critic, it's not unconscious for getting so slightly below the surface of what this critical system is about. Again, they run into this recognition that it's intense or silly, and then we say to them, okay, so how does that inspire you? How does that encourage you? How does that help you deal with setbacks? How does that pick you off the floor? How does it take pleasure in your success? Okay, how does it give you joy and excitement to do better? Well, it doesn't.

Does it really? I mean, once you've done this exercise, you realize that actually you're going to keep it going, keep it going, keep it going. But sooner or later, you're going to crash. Because you're not using the right motivational system. So let me say, okay, well, let's use a different motivational system rather than a fear and rage system and an attacking system.

So let's see how a compassionate system would take your values, check what you want and inspire you and help you. It's so that if you do something and you fall over and it doesn't work out, how will it pick you up and help you learn from the experience so you can do better next time. Now, it may well be, and as you go through that process, your values may change or they may not, but that will be up to you. But the key thing is helping people realize that vicious critics are coming from what we call the threat system was if you switch out of that into a compassion system,

you're using a different set of brain systems, which are there really to inspire, encourage, and support. And those actually are much more likely to help you to achieve your goals in a way, which is not halved to other people as well. So your values may change slightly as you go wrong, and then they may soften down a little bit. But your joy and your happiness would be much better.

So if you're really ambitious, then it is to your advantage to see that it is a cleaner burning more effective fuel to use an inner coach than an inner drill sergeant. Yeah, because what happens is you see part of the problem is the vicious critic is sitting on a lot of fear. A lot of the harsh critical ambitious individuals are absolutely scared of not doing well because then they get rejected, then they will be nobody, then they'll be left on the side of the road, right? So underneath hostile criticism is usually all kinds of fears or rejection, not being good enough, not being wanted. And that is linked to various problems, as you can imagine. So when you're working clinically, we don't tend to work too much with the credit itself. We work with the fears that sit underneath it. Okay, suppose you can't reach your ambition.

What are you most frightened of? What is your greatest fear of actually saying, okay, yeah, and not good enough? Supposing that's the truth, what would really worry you about that? And usually, not always, but usually comes down to the a sense of isolation. Usually, if you ask people to imagine themselves in a state of not being good enough, they nearly always imagine themselves being alone. They never all very rarely imagine themselves.

People say, oh, we'd come around, you mean support, you'd be there. We'd say, oh, we're just like you, we're failures, too. People very rarely imagine that. Usually if you ask them, give me an image of yourself as a failure, it's nearly always an alone, miserable person. That's what they've got in their mind. That's what they're running from. And the compassion goes to that part of working with the underlying fears, it's driving this hostility. The hostility is coming

from threats. So what is the threat? Coming up Paul's going to explain how to move from the threat system to the care system until diving to some meditation practices that can increase your capacity for compassion. That's after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle. And we're the host of Wondy's new podcast, Dis and Tell,

where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous

conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Britney. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App. I'm going to say something I've said before on the show.

I apologize for being repetitive. But I'm saying it because it's relevant and I want to hear what you think about this riff of mine. There is this idea in Western individualistic society of slaying your dragons, and that would perhaps apply to something like the inner critic. The Western approach might be a kind of a hostile one of, you know, I'm going to face this inneric down and vanquish them. What I've seen over time is that that doesn't work. The hostility just makes everything worse.

But if you shift your view of the inter-critic, and I have like many people, quite prominent one, if you shift your view to see that, well, this is just a warped expression of self-love, self-compassion. It is the organism trying to protect itself. It is sort of an ancient, unskillful set of inner habits we've developed to help ourselves survive. Seeing it in that light, then instead of trying to slay the dragon, you can high-five the dragon. And then the whole system kind of calms down, the whole nervous system, in my experience calms down with that approach, especially in meditation. So am I full of garbage, or does that make sense to you?

No, absolutely right. The only thing I would add to that is you're quite right. If you try and slay your dragon and you're staying in the threat system, you're using the fight system to seduce the fight system biologically. That's what you're trying to do. And that won't work because you can't do that. And the point is, even if you succeed today, if you get to Prestormarrow, you'll find your credit will just bounce back at you even harder, so that doesn't work. So you're quite right. You need to move out of the system. You need to get out of that brain system altogether. And that's why we move into the care system. So what are you going to

care for? You're going to care for what is driving your critic, right? So what's driving your critic is these underlying fears or concerns or whatever. And you're quite right that criticism is usually a response to those fears. You know, you have to succeed, you have to achieve, because if you don't, and that's the issue, if you don't, that's the thing we go after. So one of the things you can do is that you can imagine the credit in front of you, and then imagine you as the compassionate self, you move around the side of the credit, almost like, you know, the Wizard of Oz, and you think, what is driving this credit? What has heard it? What has injured it? This part of me is an injured frightened part

that's actually literally having panic attacks. We never work directly with the critic. We always try to heal it in a sense. And as I say, get around the back of it and see where it starts. But the problem is, as you say, we're so far away from hunter-gatherer societies where we were just accepted in our communities

as we were, we have a society that drives us otherwise to see ourselves as not good enough. That we're caught up in this very hostile world really. You seem to be referencing some sort of practice that one could use in order to sort of create a different relationship to the inner critic. Was I hearing you correctly? Were we referencing a practice? And was that something one does in dialogue with a therapist or a solo meditation practice that one can do? There are a number of practices actually, but one of the things is you want to use the body to support the mind. One of the practices is using posture where you sit that your shoulders back and

open chest to allow you to do what is called soothing rhythm breathing. A breathing pattern which stimulates the vagus nerve because when your critics go in then you're stimulating your sympathetic nervous system so that's not terribly good. So you do a breathing pattern which is, we use a very basic pattern which is five second breaths, two second pauses, five seconds out. So you're breathing with your diaphragm and you're imagining the breath going down to the base of your spine. So you're getting the body into a position where it can begin to stimulate the compassion motivational system and that also involves things like your front cortex, oxytocin and so on. So the next thing then is there are

certain kinds of images and certain kinds of ways of focusing your mind and then to stimulate these physiological systems. Now the fact that you can stimulate physiological systems by what you imagine is quite profound. Humans can do this, but we don't always use it particularly well. For example, look, if you're very hungry and you see a meal, this will stimulate your harbathalvas, it gets saliva in your stomach, acids will go. But if you don't have any money, you could just imagine a meal, couldn't you? And then the same thing would happen. If you're critical, guess what? You stimulate the same systems in your brain as if somebody else has been critical to you. And so when it comes to compassion and caring, if you learn to practice certain kinds of

compassion, images and compassion and focuses, what happens is you're stimulating particular brain systems, which will help you to stimulate those systems, which are conducive to well-being and conducive to confidence and conducive to actually being able to deal with the credit. So you're bringing all these things together, you're helping people realize that the credit is rooted in the threat system, then you say, okay, so we want a different system to work, so then we stimulate the care system by stimulating the physiological processes and some of the brain systems. And then when you have that state of mind, now you are ready to engage with the critical process.

So I think I understood the deep breathing part. You call it soothing rhythm breathing. And the point there is to activate the parasympathetic nervous system instead of the sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight flight or flee nervous system. So I think that part makes sense. You're just calming the whole system down. You called it vagal breathing, which is a reference to the vagus nerve. You also reference a second practice that involves a kind of harnessing of the imagination.

Can you say more about the basic blocking and tackling the sort of how to aspect of this imagination-based practice or practices? Yeah, so there's two basic practices. Really, one is imagining dialoguing with a compassionate other. And the other is imagining yourself as a compassionate being. Now, as you probably know, in the Buddhist traditions,

there are quite a lot of practices which involve meditating around the Buddha. So one of them, for example, is where you imagine the Buddha, the center of the universe emanating compassionate wishes that may all sentient beings be free of suffering, the causes of suffering. So you imagine that. And then you imagine that as a sentient being you are the recipient of that, of this loving kindness, this eminence that's coming from the center of the universe. And then you imagine that you fuse with the putter and then you imagine that you are the putter

and you are then. So this process of giving and receiving, that's an example of a practice which is really quite an important practice of receiving compassion. What we have done in a modification that, what does it say that, is we have done in sort of modification, that you want to say that, is we invite people to kind of start to imagine what a compassionate figure would be for them,

you know, what qualities would they have, what they'd be male, what they'd be female, what they'd be older, what they'd be younger, how would they be empathic to you? What would it like to feel that there is this other mind, this other being, there's very empathic to you and cares about you? And of course, you often run into lots of resistance.

I can't do that at all. So you have to work through that. And that's the process of practice. I've just practiced the scene imagining, receiving from this compassionate mind. The wisdom of compassionate we use is that all of us have just found ourselves here. Nobody chose to be here. We're all basically DNA created beings. And so your compassionate other, your compassionate-wise being that you're relating to, understands

that. That can be quite a power for meditation. And there are all kinds of variations of it. You can ask people what would happen if you changed the gender of your compassionate other. Would that be easier? Would you resist it? And what does it mean? What would that mean if you didn't want that? And then the next thing is you imagine yourself having all of the qualities of compassion that are important to you. So imagine yourself, you have a great wisdom about the nature of life that we've always found ourselves, everything's impermanent, a great wisdom about the nature of friendliness, or those ideal qualities that you would see, if I could be like that, that would be my ideal compassion itself. And then the next thing is you simply practice them.

So walking down the street, you remember to practice friendliness because if you smile at somebody and they smile back at you, you've actually given them a little buzz of dopamine, you've given them just a touch of a good feeling, and there's another wonderful thing to do. There's a lot of practices about how we support moving towards becoming this ideal self. So all of these practices really are things that we do in order to harness and develop

the capacities within our own mind to live a compassionate life. And a lot of the work that's going on at the moment on neuroplasticity and how your brain is changed by practices so that you can change your brain through these practices, through certain meditations, you know, loving kindness meditations has an impact on your brain. So there's quite a few of these practices that can help us. But for some people that relating to compassionate other can be quite powerful for them. I'm curious, you've made a reference to some of the resistance. Some people might feel when you describe these practices. I certainly, when I first heard about loving kindness practice, thought, well, this is ridiculous. This is so forced, so sappy. There's no way I'm going to do this.

I don't feel that way at all now, but I think there are a lot of people, even people who've done quite a bit of meditation practice, often I find that these are men who really just can't get over the hump to do these practices, because they feel it's forced and cheesy or artificial or whatever. And I'm curious in your practice, when you hear folks articulate a resistance, what do

you say to help them get over the hump? Well, the first thing is to explore what the fear is about it. So, okay, supposing it's cheesy, why does that worry you? What difference does it make? Do you always drop it into what sits underneath the resistance. Sometimes you have to go two or three levels down. The second thing is you say, what do you think imagery is, and you use it all, and they obviously, no, I can't see it. And they say, okay, next time you're thinking of sounding sexually, just remind yourself that you are using imagery to get yourself aroused, right? And what would

happen if today I stopped you? I took out your capacity. You could never ever imagine anything sexual ever again. How would you be with that?" And they said, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, that would be terrible. See, the point is imagery is incredibly powerful. It's very, very powerful. So, yes, loving kindness, you could say it's a little bit cheesy, but you're using it like you use an exercise bike. You're stimulating systems in your brain, you know, you don't get on an exercise bike and paddle for 20 minutes and then say, this is ridiculous, I'm gone anywhere. Because you know what you're doing before, you're doing it to stimulate systems in your brain, you're doing it to create feelings and so forth. So yes, of course, it is completely

cheesy. That's absolutely fine, but it's very powerful. It's a very powerful cheesy. Yes, I agree. I often quote a meditation teacher whose name I don't know who said to some student, if you can't be cheesy, you can't be free. And again, for me, coming at this from a very specific perspective of privileged, ambitious, straight white guy, you know, and I often think about how to reach other people like me because we have so much power and often are doing so much damage on the planet. You know, I think speaking as the Buddha did to the pleasure centers of the brain, to the ambitious part and saying, look, just as you did, caring may not be something that some people value,

especially ambitious people, but we evolved to be caring. It is right there at the heart of the survival of the species. So if you want to be happy and successful, you will work on this. So I like that approach to speak to the truly, truly skeptical. Another approach is a lot of skeptical people really like big challenges. They'll climb up a rock face.

They'll ski down very treacherous slopes, take on big professional projects that are daunting. You have referenced several times that if you want to do this work, you're going to have to look at the Leviathan of fear that is lurking beneath many of our behaviors. And that requires courage, which isn't appealing quality, I think, even to skeptics. Yes, very much so. I mean, I think it's a brilliant point you make because we work with veterans. There are two types of courage, right? Physical courage and there's emotional courage. And we unfortunately, guys aren't, there might be very good physical courage,

okay? They're risked their lives to save you. But they might not be very good with emotional courage. They're not very good at tolerating intense emotional pain. And they can be quite surprised at that. And one of the veterans who worked with the group said, you know what, I had the courage to dive and not to cry. And that was really important because you'd seen his friends burn up, and that's really, so helping to bring the concept of compassion and allowing him to really seriously grieve, well, you feel like very tough because he wasn't used at all, or dealing with very powerful emotions. So sometimes these guys are sitting on quite serious grief and they don't want to go anywhere near that because again, crying for them is a sign of weakness and also because it's physically

dangerous. I mean, when you cry, you can't see, you can't breathe, you lose muscle control. And these guys just feel very vulnerable. So emotional courage, I think, is extremely important. And we just don't teach guys emotional courage, we just don't. It's bringing me back to the subject. You raised really at the beginning of the conversation, which is trauma and how doing this work can bring up a bunch of trauma for people, whatever gender. And I want to give you a chance to say a little bit more about, because I'm sure there are a lot of people listening who fall into this category. What are the ways to work with trauma when it comes up while doing compassion, focus therapy,

or any kind of contemplative work in this zone of compassion. Well, it's a great, great question. I mean, ideally, obviously, you would work with somebody, a therapist or whatever, who would guide you through and support you through it, rather than trying to do it by yourself. So that's the first thing. This journey into trauma is easier if you have somebody who will be there with you and support you. Sometimes that can be doing it with people who have been through the same thing that you have and they can guide you through and so forth. When it comes to trying to work by yourself on your own, things are a little bit more tricky, but if you take it step by step, if you go very slowly, if you realize or recognize that it's not to experience yourself to be

ill in one go, but just acknowledge that you have trauma in this area and then practice developing your grounding in your body, your breathing, practice focusing on generating that kind, understanding voice in your mind so that when you actually begin to work with a trauma, you have that sense of inner supportiveness that will help you with the trauma. The other thing is being clear about how these trauma memories work and what thoughts might come with those traumas.

Any shame that's associated with a trauma again, that is something that you can begin to think about and to look at criticism that's associated with a trauma, just noticing if when you have these experiences, you also become very hostile to yourself, but the key thing is just to never go faster than your body is ready to let you go, is it where? Just take it easy.

Slight problem is that when you actually get underneath trauma, there's also always a lot of grief. I mean, in our work, you've always got the big three. Firstly, there's the anger, then there's the anxiety, then there's the grieving. Those three main emotions are often what you have to work through in the case of trauma. And the ability to work through those three emotions, but holding a compassionate orientation so you're compassionate to your anger, you're compassionate with your fear, you're compassionate

with your grief is the way in which you can gradually ease your way through. Coming up, Paul explains the two different kinds of shame the benefits compassion can have for everybody around you and what all of this has to do with the vagus nerve that's coming up. What evidence do you have that CFT compassion focused therapy or just compassion practices generally actually work? How strong is the science here? It's pretty good. Wisconsin, quite a lot of studies on loving kindness and so on. And we've got, I think over 100 studies now looking at the effectiveness of compassionate therapy in different conditions and the data is pretty good. I'm not going to say it's magic because it isn't, but I think it's helpful.

And it can be integrated to our therapies like, you know, specialist trauma therapy. We would argue if you can bring a compassionate orientation to that journey into trauma, then it will help people. So we've got studies showing that if you add compassion into standard therapies, that can help, but also some of the compassionate stuff, the standard line can be really quite helpful as well. Not for everybody, but for quite a few people. I believe, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong here, that there's some evidence too that if you can develop a compassionate attitude toward yourself, it will actually impact the way you are with other people.

Oh, very much so. Absolutely, very much so. Yes, yes. Because you're less vulnerable to rejection, you're less vulnerable to criticism from others. It doesn't bother you so much now, and so you can be much more open, much splice, and much more playful. You know, this is quite a lot of evidence coming through now in hunter-gatherer societies, one of the things that bound them together was playfulness. And if you look at some of these societies and you do the anthropology, you find that they laugh a lot. And they smile a lot. And that's often when we are at our happiest when we are out with friends, so we just have any good time, so we're just having a good time. We'd like to have a good time.

We'd like to tell jokes. We'd like to share stories. So when you are comfortable with yourself and then you're comfortable with others, that allows you then to engage in this much more playful way of being in the world, rather than always thinking you've got to defend yourself, because at any moment, something will put you down. And you also, as you mentioned yourself, you take more of an interest in the well-being of others around you. So those two things that you become more playful, you become gentler,

you become more interested in other people that all makes for a much better way of being. My meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein has said that one way to think about the process of enlightenment is becoming less self-centered. Exactly. Brutus self-centeredness is feared. When people are no longer frightened of being rejected, they feel inherently lovable. They might not be loved, but they feel inherently lovable. And I don't mean the narcissistic pretence that I'm lovable, I'm great, I'm wonderful.

That's a narcissistic defense because I don't mean that. But I mean, when there's a genuine sense of that, and there's something about the nature of interconnectedness, the nature of being in the universe as it were, which is profoundly moving to people. I mean, it really does connect them to our true nature. You probably know these analogies, these lovely stories. There's two waves rushing across the Pacific

to the Big Sur on California. And the big wave system, the little wave. Oh, it's all going to end, you know. There's rocks ahead, we're going to be smashed, his foam everywhere, it's disaster, it's terrible. And the little wave says, no, no, it's we're actually fine, we're fine, we're just on the journey. And the big wave says, that's because you can't see what I can see. And the little wave says, yeah, but you see see you're not a wave, you're water. And that's that sense that this concept of this individuality, basically you're a consciousness that's experiencing a biological form, right? You

got this DNA, blah, blah, blah, that was built for you didn't build it, but there's a consciousness that flows through it. So you are conscious of nature's body, really. The body of the nature is created for you, but is that it then? And so the big debate, isn't it, in physics and in all the areas of the moment, is consciousness of biological creation or is biological creation tapping into the field of consciousness? Now, in the Buddhist tradition, there is the latter and that tends to be the position I take. So when you begin to get that sense of interconnectness, whether you do it through some of the ways in which we work or whether you do it through dem meditation, it allows you to reduce your fear, you know, your fear of separation, your fear of aligning this, your fear of

abandonment, it settles down. It's pleasantly headspinning, pleasantly vertiginous to hear you talk about being water rather than wave and the this sort of wisdom around interconnection. We've talked a lot about fear, you've talked a lot about fear, invention, anger as well, sadness. What about shame as something that blocks us from tapping into this deeper stuff that is quite attractive when we think about it. There's what we call X-Town-Shame and internal shame. So X-Town-Shame is where you're very sensitive to how other people think about you, what's going on in the mind of the other. And therefore you behave in a way that you do not want to stimulate their criticism of you. There is another root in this, which is called humiliation, and that's much more dangerous. That is, if people do seem to shame you or criticize you, you will attack them. It was in terms of shame as linked to this process of self-criticism

that we said, the sense of feeling inferior of the Sunning Roman, the Iron Floor, and this, all that. So in terms of shame, then you're back into the same processes that we talked about earlier about understanding what that's about. So shame can be, it's a serious inhibitor really. It's such a sad thing, you know, people are very fright to reveal what they think or people often might go to therapy because they're very ashamed about what they might reveal. So it is a bit of a tragedy shame. We've had on the show several of the academics who are like you very much associated with compassion, particularly I'm referring now to self-compassion like Kristen Neff and Chris Gourmer both two academics both have been on the

show. What if any differences are there between your view of compassion and theirs? Well, Kristen, as you know, kind of developed her approach through personal experience. She had some personal strategies in her life, and so she worked out what was helpful to her, and she has said that ideas that compassion is linked to kindness and common humanity and mindfulness. And that's a very practical approach to compassion. And it's been incredibly helpful to a lot of people. Our approach, on the other hand,

is an evolutionary approach that has two components to it, which is the ability to be sensitive to suffering, and then the wisdom of working at what to do. So that's slightly different. We would emphasize things like empathic engagement. We would emphasize things like empathic engagement, we would emphasize things like distress tolerance. So, you know, our form of compassion has been developed in the clinics with people who have got quite severe mental health problems, whereas Christians has been developed for self-help

primarily, and with the Kris Goma. They are slightly different models, but they're pursuing the same aim, which is to release people from the tyrannies of self-criticism and so on. So when you say Germer and Neff are aimed more at self-help, you mean as opposed to your work with people with serious mental illness, that Germer and Neff might be for sort of a broader swath of the population that worried well as opposed to the folks with, you know, pathology that is truly derailing their lives. I mean, I've never fallen for the phrase, the worried well. Most people worried sick actually in this day, but have books and really aimed at the general public and to be helpful to the general

public. And they now have trainings, you know, eight week training courses for people to become mindful compassion trainers, right? To me, 10 years to become a clinician, it's complicated stuff. They would not present that as a deep form of psychotherapy. They wouldn't present it that way. They would present it to help people in everyday life who are battling with things like self-criticism or have the ups and downs and disappointments and the frustrations of life, right? And how to come through some of the sufferings that we all sometimes have to go through.

So, you know, they've done terrific in bringing the concept of compassion to the general audience, I think, in a way that we haven't. What is the biggest nerve and why is important? Why should we care? Okay. So you have what is called an autonomic nervous system. And this is connected to all the organs of your body, right? So your heart and your lines and

the releases, sugars and your pancreas and all kinds of things, right? So signals to set from your vein down through your autonomic nervous system. So for example, you're going to have to change what your organs are doing if you need to take action. If you need to run away from a lion or something like that or you need to fight or you need to get excited, you need the organs of your bodies to give you energy. So it will put up your heart rate, your release glucose in your body or tighten up your guts, you won't be digesting at that point because you need to kind of focus on action. So the sympathetic nervous system is really

the action system. It's slightly accelerator on your car. You can drive both positive and negative emotions actually. Anything where there's an activation. So if you win the lottery and you get very wealthy, hundreds of millions of dollars, you will certainly have sympathetic activation, but you'll be very excited. The parasympathetic system on the other hand is more of the breaking system. If you just kept, you know, being aroused and aroused and aroused, sooner or later you're all going to get burnt out in there. So the parasympathetic system really does exactly the opposite of the sympathetic system.

Sympathetic system speeds up your heart, is the parasympathetic slows it down. So what happens then is that this system of slowing down, it also gives you a sense of settling and calming. And it's called the vagus nerve. A vagus means bag of bond, basically, wandering, wanders all over the body, and is connected to lots of different organs. So when you breathe more quickly, what will happen is you're stimulating sympathetic nervous system and you get like headed, right?

But if you slow your breathing down to say you're five seconds for each breath and it's two seconds stop and five seconds out, nice smooth in, smooth out, you'll find that you'll feel more heavier in your body, you'll feel more grounded, you can feel the chair holding you up. So the way we breathe has a major impact on the sympathetic nervous system. But when we slow the breathing, then we stimulate the vagus. When we stimulate the vagus, you get the you do mindfulness, that's also very good for the

Vegas. And the Vegas is also stimulated by friendship. So, for example, imagine that you have to go to a party, you don't know anybody, but you gotta go because it's a work party. And then you walk through the door and you see your best friend and you see the friendship on the face, oh hi, that will immediately stimulate your vagus. You'll immediately change your anxiety to one from, your emotions will be from anxiety to one's enjoyableness, right? And that will, that switch will be because the friendship has stimulated the vagus nerve. So when you do your meditations, what we'd buy people to do is to also always produce a gentle face because that also is connected to your vagus. So the Vegas really

is a very important part of your autonomic nerve systems that facilitate grounding, it facilitates friendliness, it facilitates calming of the mind, it also has an impact on the default moment in your brain and so on. And these exercises are really quite important to get your Vegas working for you. I'm curious to what your level of optimism is about the state of the world, because it seems like the Vegas nerve of the species is insufficiently activated. The sympathetic nervous system is just in modern life aroused all the time, which oddly makes us quite unsympathetic, quite a lack of empathy and compassion abroad in the land.

And so when you survey the news, or just take a look around you in your own world, what is your optimism level about the future of the species? I'm pretty optimistic. Firstly, you're quite right. I mean, we are grossly overstimulated. The dopamine system, the sympathetic nervous system is grossly overstimulated through the media, through television, all television now has to excite you. We know that a lot of the entertainments have become more violent over the last 30 years, all in the service of

entertainment. So there are some serious worries about that, quite rightly so. But equally, you know, if you think about where we were two or three hundred years ago, we're a much more compassionate society than we were then. Still got huge steps to take. Of course, we have, you know, if you look at the big picture, actually, people are becoming more sensitive to creating a compassionate world. We've got a lot of pressures pulling this back from it. I quite agree with you. And the politics, we do a lot of work with our group called Compassion in Politics.

The politics and the media, those two things together are rather pulling this in the opposite direction because they've just become a, you know, a punts and judy show, which is not really about solving the problems of the world. But I think humanity is becoming more interested in generating compassionate solutions. You know, people are taking more interest in climate change. And particularly in the schools and the children, my for this, as you know,

is gradually creeping into the schools, compassionate training, and this gradually creeping into the schools. And these are all wonderful signs, really, I think, for the future. But for sure, we've got some very serious tools in the opposite direction. It's a pretty good place to leave it. Before I let you go, Dr. Gilbert, for people who want to learn more about you, maybe access some of these practices that you've referenced, read some of your books.

Can you just go into shameless self-'s a very different item of your books. Can you just go into shameless self-promotion mode and talk about your books and any other resources that are available publicly? Yeah, so basically if you want to find out anything about us,

it's www.compassionatemind. That's one word.co.uk and there's lots and lots of materials on there. There are exercises and practices you can go to, you can find out about the books and the papers and the research that we're doing there. And if anybody wants to contact me, they can contact me through that organization. And if you go on to Amazon or wherever and put in Paul Gilbert's compassion, you'll get a few books coming up for you as well. It was a pleasure to chat with you and so I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Thanks again to Paul. I really also want to thank my friend and colleague,

Caroline Keenan, who gave us the idea to bring Paul on the show. Thank you, Caroline. And finally, I also want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. The reality, Samuel Johns, Gabriel Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davie, Kim Bykama, Maria Wartell, and Jen Poyant. And also, of course, our friends over at Ultraviolet Audio who do our audio engineering. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus meditation on self-compassion from my friend and teacher, Alexis Santos.

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