8-Week Compassion Course

Live on Zoom: January 20 – March 10, 2027

Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) is an experiential eight-week course that helps participants strengthen compassion for themselves and others. Through guided meditation, reflection, discussion, and practical exercises, participants learn ways to meet difficulty with greater awareness, emotional steadiness, and care.

CCT is designed for people who want to develop a more intentional relationship with themselves and others. No prior meditation experience is required.

Registration for Winter 2027 is Now Open

This course highlights the profound link between compassion and personal well-being. Research suggests that as we become more aware of ‘being’ with ourselves in a compassionate way, we gradually begin to recognize and experience a more fully integrated sense of connection with our deeper core values and intentions. To directly embody and experience the benefits of cultivating and anchoring attention in our body and heart, however, necessitates learning how to train and incline the mind towards a more compassionate, resilient, and authentic life.

How CCT understands compassion

Compassion begins with recognizing suffering and responding with care and a wish to help. It includes empathy, but it also involves the steadiness and motivation needed to take constructive action.

Compassion is a human capacity that can be strengthened through practice. Stress, social pressure, difficult experiences, and working conditions can make that capacity harder to access. CCT focuses on personal and relational skills. It does not replace needed clinical care or changes to harmful systems and environments.

Is this course right for you?

CCT may be a good fit if you want to:

• Respond to stress and suffering with greater awareness and choice
• Develop compassion without becoming overwhelmed by empathic distress
• Strengthen self-compassion while maintaining responsibility and accountability
• Build practical skills for listening, emotional regulation, and compassionate action
• Establish or deepen a regular contemplative practice

The course is experiential. Participants are invited to practice between sessions and to take part in partner and small-group exercises. Personal disclosure is not required, and participants may choose not to take part in a specific exercise.

What you will learn:

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Use foundational mindfulness practices to attend more fully to their own experience and to others
• Apply compassion practices when responding to distress in themselves and others
• Use cognitive reframing and common humanity to respond to difficult experiences
• Distinguish compassion from empathy and empathic distress
• Recognize common forms of resistance to self-compassion and to receiving or offering compassion
• Identify practical opportunities for compassionate action in daily life

What the course includes:

• Eight weekly two-hour classes with instruction, guided practice, discussion, and partner or small-group exercises
• Daily meditation practices that develop mindfulness, loving-kindness, empathy, and compassion
• Real-world practice assignments that bring compassionate awareness and action into daily life
• Opportunities to reflect on experience, strengthen emotional self-regulation, and learn with a supportive group

Meet the Teacher

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Coming this Fall! Compassion & Wellbeing in Healthcare: 8-Week Course

Note to Healthcare Professionals:

We’re excited to share that Compassion Education at Stanford CCARE is offering Compassion & Wellbeing in Healthcare this Fall. It is an eight-week course designed around the unique experiences of healthcare providers.

This course creates a dedicated space for healthcare professionals to explore compassion with others who understand the realities of clinical and healthcare work. Together, participants will have the opportunity to reflect on caregiving, burnout, emotional exhaustion, moral stress, teamwork, and the challenge of staying connected to meaning while working in demanding systems.

Both eight-week courses teach relevant compassion practices. If scheduling is your main consideration, we encourage you to register for the course that best fits your availability.