Story 1 – pg 6


With Wise Crane’s wisdom now stored in his heart,
Little Panda felt ready for a brand new start.
He looked at the river, and felt its calm power,
As it moved with the wind and danced with the flowers.


He vowed to remember the lesson he learned,
To go with the flow, and let go of concern.
For life, like the river, has its own pace,
And by trusting the Tao, he’d find his own space.

Useful Links

  1. Revolutionary I Ching App Harness ChatGPT for Hexagram Insights, Apple App Store – Google Play Store
  2. Collection of engaging and enlightening stories for children that explore the principles of Taoism. Download on Amazon
  3. Learn more about the aiching.app
  4. Interested in Tai Chi?

New study shows that training adults in a loving-kindness-style “compassion meditation” actually makes them significantly more altruistic toward others.

How to train the compassionate brain was an article from Mindful.org. A new study finds that training in compassion makes us more altruistic.

The first time I ever tried a loving-kindness meditation, I was overcome by a feeling of complete… futility. Mentally extending compassion to others and wishing them free from suffering seemed nice enough, but I had a hard time believing that my idle thoughts could increase kindness in the real world.

Turns out I was wrong.

A new study, just published online by Psychological Science, shows that training adults in a loving-kindness-style “compassion meditation” actually makes them significantly more altruistic toward others.

The study suggests not only that it’s possible to increase compassion and altruism in the world, but that we can do so even through relatively brief training.

What’s more, the study is the first to link these behavioral changes with measurable changes in brain activity, shedding light on why compassionate thoughts may actually lead to compassionate deeds. “We really wanted to show that compassion is a skill that you can work on, like exercise or learning a musical instrument,” says the study’s lead author, Helen Weng, who is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she’s affiliated with the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds.

Training to help

In the study, Weng and her colleagues gave participants one of two trainings. In both trainings, the participants listened to a 30-minute audio recording on their own once a day for just two weeks.

One was the compassion meditation. The compassion meditation gently instructed the participants to extend feelings of compassion toward different people, including themselves, a loved one, a casual acquaintance, and someone with whom they’d had difficulty.

The researchers call the other audio recording a “reappraisal training” because it involved recalling a stressful experience and trying to think about it in a new, less upsetting way, such as by considering it from another person’s point of view.

Before and immediately after each two-week training, all participants had their brains scanned in an fMRI machine while they looked at a series of images, some of which depicted people in pain, such as a burn victim or a crying child.

Also immediately after the trainings, the participants played an online game designed to measure their altruistic behavior. In the game, they were given $5, another player was given $10, and a third player had no money. (The other “players” were actually computer generated, but the participants were led to believe they were real people.) Each study participant first watched as the player with $10 was asked to share some of his money but gave only $1 to the penniless player, who the researchers refer to as the “victim.” The participant could then choose to spend any amount of his $5; whatever he spent would have to be doubled by the wealthy player and given to the victim. So if the participant was willing to part with $2, the victim would receive $4 from the other player.

Would people who received the compassion training be more willing to spend their money in order to help a stranger in need?

They were—in fact, they spent nearly twice as much as people who received the reappraisal training, $1.14 vs. $0.62.

Changing the Brain

It’s important to note that, during the game, participants weren’t instructed to think about anything they’d learned during their training. Yet that brief daily meditation still seemed to have a strong carry-over effect on their behavior.

“This demonstrates that purely mental training in compassion can result in observable altruistic changes toward a victim,” the researchers write in their paper, “even when individuals are not explicitly cued to generate compassion.”

And these changes were also reflected in changes to brain activity. Specifically, when compared with their brain activity before the training, people who received the compassion training showed increased activity in neural networks involved in understanding the suffering of others, regulating emotions, and positive feelings in response to a reward or goal.

The researchers saw similar brain changes in the reappraisal training group, but that brain activity didn’t translate into altruistic behavior. To explain this, the researchers propose how the interaction between the training, brain activity, and behavior may have differed between the two groups.

They point out that a heightened sensitivity to suffering causes people to avoid that suffering because it doesn’t feel good; however, because the compassion training also seemed to strengthen the brain’s ability to regulate emotions, people may have been able to sense suffering without feeling overwhelmed by it. Instead, the care for others emphasized by the compassion training may have caused them to see suffering not as a threat to their own well-being but as an opportunity to reap the psychic rewards from achieving an important goal—namely, connecting with someone else and making him feel better.

“When your goal is to help another person, then your reward system will be activated when you’re meeting that goal,” says Weng. By contrast, the reappraisal group’s goal was to decrease their own negative emotions, making them less inclined to be altruistic when confronted with someone else’s pain. “When you’re focused on decreasing your own negative emotions,” she says, “I think that makes you less focused on other people.”

Building on previous studies

This study follows prior research documenting the positive effects of other compassion training programs, such as the Compassion Cultivation Training developed at Stanford Univeristy and the Cognitively-Based Compassion Training out of Emory University. A study published earlier this year, also in Psychological Science, suggests that training in mindfulness meditation significantly increases compassionate behavior.

But this new study is noteworthy for several reasons. For one thing, many of the previous studies have examined trainings that took several hours a week for at least eight weeks; this study’s compassion training, by contrast, took just a total of seven hours over two weeks.

Also, prior studies of compassion trainings have mostly looked at their effects on brain activity, emotional well-being, or physical health. But this is the first study to both examine “whether training in compassion will make you more caring and helpful toward others,” says Weng, and then document how “those changes in behavior are linked to changes in neural and emotional responding to people suffering.”

Weng says she’s excited by the implication that people can develop significantly more compassion and altruism, even outside of a training like the one she helped to create.

“Our findings support the possibility that compassion and altruism can be viewed as trainable skills rather than as stable traits,” she and her co-authors write. “This lays the groundwork for future research to explore whether compassion-related trainings can benefit fields that depend on altruism and cooperation (e.g., medicine) as well as clinical subgroups characterized by deficits in compassion, such as psychopaths.”


I was fortunate enough to have started Tai Chi a moving meditation at a very early age. Practising Tai Chi for over 25 years has allowed me to build a solid foundation to support the most important aspect of EQ development, which is attention training.

If you are interested in supporting yourself or helping the teams you manage, the links below can help you learn more about EQ training.

  1. What is EQ?
  2. Emotional Intelligence Training Course
  3. Learn to meditate with the Just6 App
  4. Meditation and the Science
  5. 7 reasons that emotional intelligence is quickly becoming one of the top sought job skills
  6. The secret to a high salary Emotional intelligence
  7. How to bring mindfulness into your employee wellness program
  8. Google ’Search Inside Yourself’

Can you tell what compassion looks like? According to research, yes. Our EQ course automatically helps build compassion because you meditate.

What Compassion Looks Like was a post I found at mindful.org.

Can you tell who is compassionate just by looking at them?

According to research, yes.

Imagine this: you walk into the laboratory, and are a shown a series of 20-second video clips. In each clip, a different person is shown listening to another person. You can’t hear what the speaker is saying; there is no sound to the clip. But you’re told that the speaker is talking about a time when they suffered. The researchers ask you to rate how compassionate the listener is, just by what you can see: his or her body language and facial expressions.

This study was conducted by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, who found that people agreed on who was a compassionate listener. The participants all seemed to rely on the same cues to assess compassion: more open body language, eye contact, head nods, and smiling. I was excited to see this finding because I teach compassionate listening as a skill in the Stanford Compassion Training. Students in the training learn to deliberately do exactly what the participants in this study were using to assess compassion.

1) The first step is what I call “listening with the whole body.” This means literally tuning in to the person who is speaking. “Compassionate” body language includes: Turning toward the speaker, not just with your head, but positioning your whole body to face the speaker. Open body language, such as arms and legs not crossed (and certainly no distractions, like a cell phone, in your hands!). “Approach” signals, such as learning toward, not leaning back from the speaker. This counters our usual instinct to “avoid” or withdraw from suffering, even at the subtle level of body language. In previous studies, people who felt high levels of compassion spontaneously shifted into this posture. But in my experience, just assuming this body language makes it easier to make a compassionate connection with someone.

2) The next step is what I call “soft eye contact.” When it comes to listening, eye contact is usually better than avoiding eye contact. But the most supportive and comfortable eye contact isn’t gazing deeply into a person’s eyes, or staring them down without a break in eye contact. Instead, it’s a soft focus on the triangle created by a person’s eyes and mouth. This allows you to take in the speaker’s full facial expressions. It also includes occasional breaks in eye contact to reduce what can be an uncomfortable intensity.

3) The last step is to offer “connecting gestures.” These gestures let a person know that you are feeling connected to what they are saying. The most appropriate connecting gestures are smiles and head nods, without interrupting the speaker. Connecting gestures encourage a speaker to continue, and often feel more supportive than when the listener jumps in verbally to make comments. When appropriate, touch is an even more powerful connecting gesture. Previous research has shown that people can more easily recognize compassion through touch—such as a comforting hand on your shoulder—than through voice or facial expressions.

These three steps are simple—listen with the whole body; make soft eye contact with the intention of really seeing the speaker; and offer connecting gestures without interrupting the speaker to share your own comments or stories. Simple—but not always easy to do when we’re distracted, busy, or stressed out ourselves. This approach to compassionate listening can be a tremendous gift to the person who is talking, and to ourselves. It helps us stay grounded in the present moment, and more fully receive the gift of another person sharing his or her experience with us.

This practice is also a good reminder that we don’t need to wait for compassion to spontaneously arise. When we have the intention to experience and offer compassion, we can make choices—even small ones, like how we make eye contact—that can lead to both the authentic experience of compassion.


I was fortunate enough to have started Tai Chi a moving meditation at a very early age. Practising Tai Chi for over 25 years has allowed me to build a solid foundation to support the most important aspect of EQ development, which is attention training.

If you are interested in supporting yourself or helping the teams you manage, the links below can help you learn more about EQ training.

  1. What is EQ?
  2. Emotional Intelligence Training Course
  3. Learn to meditate with the Just6 App
  4. Meditation and the Science
  5. 7 reasons that emotional intelligence is quickly becoming one of the top sought job skills
  6. The secret to a high salary Emotional intelligence
  7. How to bring mindfulness into your employee wellness program
  8. Google ’Search Inside Yourself’