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Mindfulness and compassion book co-authored by Paul Condon of SOU Ashland

SOU faculty member co-authors book on mindfulness and compassion

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(Ashland, Ore.) — Paul Condon, an associate professor of psychology at Southern Oregon University, is co-author of a new book that blends psychological science and contemplative theories to inform mindfulness and compassion practices for the general public. “How Compassion Works: A Step-by-step guide to cultivating well-being, love and wisdom,” was written jointly with Boston College professor John Makransky and will be released June 24.

The book, published by Shambhala Publications and distributed by Penguin Random House, offers a guide to embody the qualities of love, compassion and wisdom from within, using an evidence-based meditation method called Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT). The compassion training style is adapted from Tibetan Buddhism traditions, attachment theory and cognitive science.

“Organized into three categories – receptive mode, deepening mode, and inclusive mode – these practices help us cultivate unconditional care and discernment from within,” the publisher’s description of the book says. “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.”

The book uses a progressive series of meditations that readers can use to gradually build capacity for mindfulness and compassion.

Makransky and Condon, who are both practitioners of Tibetan Buddhist meditation, worked together to develop SCT as a means of teaching modern Buddhists, those of other faiths and people in caring professions to train compassion and wisdom.

“Befriending one’s mind through formal meditation practice can be thought of as a radical act of love, sanity, wisdom, and healing,” Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), said in a review of the new book.

“’How Compassion Works’ is a high-resolution guide to both the instrumental and non-instrumental dimensions of meditation practice based predominantly on Tibetan teachings yet explicitly inviting a broader inclusivity,” said Kabat-Zinn, the author of “Wherever You Go, There You Are” and “Coming to Our Senses.”

Makransky, Ph.D., is a professor of Buddhism and comparative theology at Boston College. He has served as senior academic advisor for the Buddhist Studies Center at Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Nepal, president of the Society of Buddhist-Christian studies and “contemplative fellow” of the Mind and Life Institute in Virginia. He was ordained 25 years ago as a Tibetan Buddhist lama.

Condon, Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychology at SOU and a research fellow at the Mind & Life Institute. He has been a visiting lecturer at Rangjung Yeshe Institute, and a guest teacher at Kagyu Sukha Choling in Ashland. His work has appeared in several leading psychology journals, Buddhist magazines and other publications.

“How Compassion Works” will be available in paperback or as an ebook for $24.95, online through Penguin Random House or through retailers including Target, Walmart, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s and Hudson Booksellers.

Bloomsbury Books in Ashland will host a book event from 7 to 8 p.m. on July 21, with Condon in conversation with Cody Christopherson, Ph.D., who is a professor of clinical mental health counseling at SOU.

-SOU-

Paul Condon on mindfulness

SOU’s Paul Condon has essay on mindfulness published

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Paul Condon, an assistant professor of psychology at SOU, recently published an article in Current Opinions in Psychology’s special issue on mindfulness about how meditation may increase empathy and altruism in certain contexts.

Current Opinions in Psychology, a scientific journal dedicated to recent discoveries and papers in the broad field of psychology, published the special issue on mindfulness in August. It included the work of more than 100 scholars from around the world to create the largest ever field-wide collection of texts on mindfulness since it became a scientific discipline two decades ago.

“It is without a doubt the most comprehensive and authoritative scholarly work on mindfulness that is currently available,” Condon said.

Mindfulness is defined as the awareness of one’s present experience, a type of pure “living in the moment” that was particularly central to Buddhist teachings. Nowadays, people practice mindfulness across many disciplines, including health care, social justice movements, corporations and mobile applications. Scientists have looked at mindfulness with an increasingly critical eye as it has increased in popularity, trying to explain how useful the practice is without making it seem like a cure-all.

Condon’s article focuses on how meditation and other mindfulness exercises can increase pro-social behavior, such as those that help the collective instead of the individual. Condon notes that the increase in pro-social behavior seems to only happen in certain contexts, and when meditating in a certain way.

“Various (historic) meditative practices support the cultivation of virtuous mental states and behavior…,” Condon said in the article. “In contrast to Buddhist traditions, many modern mindfulness programs emphasize an ethically neutral context. Yet an ethically neutral context could lead to problematic applications of mindfulness-based training.”

Testing and research hint that neutral-value meditation – which focuses on letting all feelings, even negative feelings and ideas, enter and leave one’s mind – can both raise and lower pro-social behavior depending on what the person was like before meditating.

Positive-value meditation – in which a person discerns between morally negative and positive thoughts while meditating, and focuses only on the positive ones – shows a stronger link to increasing pro-social behavior.

“Participants who completed a mindfulness or compassion meditation program offered their seat to (a) suffering confederate at a much higher rate (50 percent), compared with those in a wait-list control (15 percent)…,” Condon’s article said. “Other measures of prosocial behavior include reductions in hot sauce used to punish a transgressor; willingness to include an ostracized individual in the online ball-tossing game ‘Cyberball’; email messages written to an ostracized individual; and visual attention to scenes of suffering measured with eye-tracking.”

Ultimately, while the evidence is encouraging, Condon concluded that much still needs to be done and the study of mindfulness and pro-social behavior is still a burgeoning field.

Students and other members of the SOU community can read Condon’s entire essay, and the rest of Current Opinions in Psychology’s special issue, for free on this website until Oct. 30.

Story by Blair Selph, SOU Marketing and Communications student writer