More Than Mindfulness: Making Room for Compassion in Your Meditation

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Mention meditation to most people and they’ll picture mindfulness: sitting quietly, following the breath, noticing thoughts come and go. That picture isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. Meditation is a large tent, and mindfulness, or what researchers call the “attentional” practices, is only one part of what lives under it.

Three Families of Practice

In academic settings, meditation is often sorted into three families: attentional, constructive, and deconstructive practices. That framework comes from my friend Cortland Dahl, who developed it with his colleagues Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson in a 2015 paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. It’s an elegant model, grounded in the cognitive mechanisms each style of practice engages. In my own teaching, though, I lean toward the more descriptive names I first heard from my teacher, Mingyur Rinpoche, who divides meditation into practices of awareness, compassion, and wisdom. These categories have shaped how I practice and teach ever since.The awareness practices are the ones most people already know: resting attention on the breath, scanning sensations in the body, noticing sounds or thoughts as they arise. These are essential. For most meditators they serve as the main course, the foundation everything else is built on.

Compassion practice isn't just about humans.

The compassion and wisdom practices are every bit as beneficial, yet they rarely get the same airtime. Compassion practices in particular tend to be relegated to the back burner, especially in secular mindfulness programs. I understand why. Wishing others well can sound a little soft, a little “love and light,” and it’s easy to imagine it not making the cut when meditation is being packaged for hospitals, schools, and workplaces. But I’d argue the opposite: the compassion practices are among the most important of all, and among the most transformative.

A Simple Place to Start

If compassion isn’t yet part of your meditation, here’s a gentle way to begin. It’s what’s called an analytical practice, which simply means that rather than resting attention on a sensation like the breath, you contemplate an idea and let it sink in.

  1. Bring to mind yourself or a being you love. This could be a person, an animal, or anything you hold dear. The choice is yours. Some people connect readily with their own basic goodness, while others find it easier to see that goodness first in someone they love.
  2. Contemplate that this being yearns to be happy and free from hardship. Reflect on the many ways that longing shows up: in the small daily efforts to feel comfortable and safe, in hopes for the future, in the ways we reach toward connection and away from pain.
  3. When you notice you’ve drifted, gently return. Distraction isn’t failure; it’s part of the practice. Simply come back to the contemplation.
  4. After a few minutes, transition to an awareness practice of your choice, such as following the breath, and let the warmth of the reflection settle into the background.

What tends to surprise people is how ordinary this insight is, and yet how much it shifts things. The wish to be happy and free from suffering is the most universal thing about us. Seeing it clearly, first in ourselves or someone close, is the seed from which a much wider compassion can grow.

Why It Matters

Compassion practices aren’t just pleasant. They’re good for you, both mentally and physically, and a growing body of research is beginning to illuminate why. I’ll explore the mechanisms behind those benefits in an upcoming post. In the meantime, I invite you to try this practice for a few minutes each day this week, and simply notice what changes.

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