depth of awareness: “Those qualities are part of our buddha nature — innate capacities of our underlying awareness.” ~ John Makransky & Paul Condon
We spend much of our lives trying to earn love’s permission — doing, helping, proving we are worthy of care. Yet what we keep searching for is not imported from outside.
Every genuine moment of kindness, every memory of being seen, quietly awakens a warmth that was already here.
So often we find it easier to offer care than to receive it … but … the moment attention turns inward, something flinches — a quiet fear of seeming weak, or of what might surface if we simply let kindness in.
Yet every genuine act of compassion begins here, in this willingness to be touched … to be vulnerable enough to receive.
From that brief pause that opens into receiving, the heart’s deeper intelligence awakens — not manufactured, but remembered.
This inner remembering is the first movement of compassion — as explored by John Makransky and Paul Condon in their integration of Tibetan Buddhism and contemporary psychology.
Building on this insight, in How Compassion Works: A Step-By-Step Guide to Cultivating Well-Being, Love, and Wisdom, John Makransky and Paul Condon bring Buddhist contemplative science into dialogue with modern psychology to reveal that compassion is not a virtue to acquire but a capacity to remember. Through Sustainable Compassion Training they explore three modes — receptive, deepening, and inclusive — each showing how awareness itself can hold and heal the mind. This excerpt opens with the receptive mode, where the simple act of allowing care becomes the doorway to our innate wholeness.
So, today, we explore receiving before giving — how allowing care becomes the doorway to the love already within — through an excerpt from Makransky & Condon’s book How Compassion Works.
We begin this series by clarifying that compassion isn’t manufactured — it’s remembered … and this Part 1 shows why it can feel hard to receive love and how the field of care practice reveals compassion as an inner source.
In this excerpt, the “receptive mode” of practice becomes a mirror. It reveals how the very parts of us that want to stay safe — the doubting, striving, caretaking selves — also keep us from resting in the love they long for. When we no longer manage or measure compassion, we begin to feel it rising from its own ground: the depth of our awareness.
This post is part of our ongoing Shambhala Publications series that offers substantive previews of selections from Shambhala Publications new and classic titles …
All italicized text here is adapted from How Compassion Works by John Makransky & Paul Condon, © John Makransky & Paul Condon. Reprinted in arrangement with the publisher Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.You can purchase the book at Shambhala Publications or Amazon.
Why Difficulties Arise in the Field of Care Meditation
Why do such difficulties come up in this receptive mode of meditation? After all, in it we are learning to become receptive to loving energies and qualities. Why would our minds have trouble with such a good thing?
One reason has to do with receptivity itself. Another word for receptivity, in this context, is vulnerability. This practice cultivates vulnerability to loving qualities. But various parts of the mind, senses of self that our minds began identifying with in childhood, are very cautious about that kind of vulnerability. These parts of the mind associate the loving qualities we have experienced throughout our lives—feelings of warmth, acceptance, tenderness, and so forth—with people or circumstances outside of us. From childhood to now, these senses of self have been trying to help us find reliable ways of getting these loving qualities by managing our relations to the external world, often supported by attachment strategies that guide our expectations about others. These protective parts of us think we will get hurt if those caring qualities are not received from the external world in a safe enough way, which often means a way that they are in charge of.
For this reason, often the Field of Care Meditation is not just a free and easy experience. It may initiate attachment scripts that resist the practice by clinging to familiar senses of self that prevent vulnerability to loving qualities and their presumed external sources. Noticing and naming senses of self that seek to control external sources of care can further inform our meditation practice. For example, a “manager part” of my mind may arise—a sense of self that takes control of the meditation by thinking of other things. A “doubting part” may arise—a sense of self that thinks up reasons not to trust any caring moment, benefactor, or spiritual field. A “caretaker part” may arise in which I think it is wrong to focus on myself at all because I should always only be taking care of others. A “protector part” may arise that shuts down any loving experience to avoid feelings of hurt associated with unreliable figures of my past. A “self-critical part” may arise that thinks I do not deserve to experience love. An “intellectualizing part” may arise that takes me out of the meditation experience by continually analyzing it at a distance, endlessly seeking to understand the meditation at a rational, cognitive level rather than relaxing more fully into the felt sense of it.
If I am a helping professional, a part of my mind may spend most of the meditation period thinking about how I will teach the meditation to others, preventing me from actually experiencing the loving qualities myself. Or a “striving part” may arise in which I am seeking to quickly fulfill some ideal of meditative attainment rather than following the meditation instruction simply to let the experience unfold in its own way. Noticing and naming such parts of the mind increases granularity for different senses of self through which we become more conscious of the patterns of thought and feeling that impede the loving qualities. We can then let those parts of us experience the qualities rather than obstruct them.
When the mind identifies with any such part of your mind, it feels like the loving qualities need to be controlled, managed, avoided, or prevented in order to protect yourself from vulnerability to their source, which that part identifies with external persons and situations that may not be fully trustworthy. When your mind is identified with any such part, it is unaware that the meditation is simply giving access to loving qualities from the depth of your own awareness, your own fuller being.15
Attachment Theory from a Buddhist Perspective
depth of awareness: “… Caring figures evoke such experiential qualities from our own underlying awareness …”
Tibetan Buddhism and attachment theory agree that we need caring figures in childhood to help bring out our innate, inner capacities of love and care, and throughout our lives to help us further access and develop those capacities. This is why attachment theory holds that we need caring people and caring moments in our lives for our emotional development—to evoke our capacity to experience, live into, and learn to embody loving qualities. Such experience helps us establish an inner core of self-worth, safety, well-being, and loving power—a secure base that enables us to explore the world with curiosity and to become present to others in empathetic and caring ways.
This is why spiritual community is a central support of practice in all religious traditions, including Buddhism. Other persons serve as a scaffold for us, holding us in qualities of love and wisdom so we can learn similarly to hold others in such qualities. The need for connection with caring figures is also why Tibetans who take up Buddhist practices are often told vividly to recall their mothers’ love (or that of another caring adult) as they experienced it in childhood. Doing so helps them access their own loving capacities as an inner secure base from which to experience gratitude and to become a loving presence to others.
John recalls how when he became upset as a small child, his mother came to comfort him and he would experience feelings of comfort and warmth. It felt as if the comfort and warmth came from her into him. But John’s mother never injected those feelings into him. Her caring presence evoked John’s own underlying capacity to experience those positive feelings. He was too young to notice that distinction. Buddhist thought holds that the caring figures in our lives, important as they are, have never actually given us the qualities of warmth, acceptance, or love that we experience when we were with them or when we recall them in meditation. Those qualities are part of our buddha nature—innate capacities of our underlying awareness. Being with caring figures or bringing them to mind evokes our underlying capacity to experience what love and compassion feel like, so we can familiarize ourselves with those qualities, heal in them, settle into their source in the depth of our awareness, and learn to embody them for others.
This means that the various parts of us and attachment strategies since childhood that still think that our experiences of warmth, acceptance, and comfort come just from external sources have always been mistaken.16 Caring figures evoke such experiential qualities from our own underlying awareness, which is the actual source of these qualities. In this way, the field of care practice correlates with attachment theory—we learn to become what we are held in, to love as we are loved. This happens not by learning only to rely on external caring figures but by learning to rely on the loving qualities that they evoke from within us, and to rely on the source of those qualities in the depth of our own awareness.17
Stay tuned for … the conclusion – Part 2 – of this series: trusting remembered compassion — stabilizing the field of care.
All italicized text here is adapted from How Compassion Works by John Makransky & Paul Condon, © John Makransky & Paul Condon. Reprinted in arrangement with the publisher Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.You can purchase the book at Shambhala Publications or Amazon.
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