In this lecture, Kelly McGonigal, PhD presents: “How Compassion and Altruism Create Resilience.” This talk explores new scientific insights into how cultivating compassion and practicing altruism can increase our well-being during times of stress.
Kelly McGonigal, PhD, is a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University and a leading expert on the mind-body relationship. She has worked with CCARE since 2009, co-authoring the Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) course, teaching the first CCT class in 2010, and collaborating on the scientific studies examining how cultivating compassion influences well-being. She is the author of several books, including the upcoming “The Upside of Stress,” “The Neuroscience of Change,” and “Yoga for Pain Relief.” Her popular public courses through Stanford’s Continuing Studies program include “The Science of Mindfulness” and “The Science of Compassion.”
Hi Kelly, Found you as a sidebar to Amy Cuddy’s TED talk on You Tube. Subsequently, have enjoyed your videos, have purchased your neuroscience of change CD set through Sounds True, and am waiting for the NIH-approved lower and upper body yoga CDs to arrive. All easy starts for the Buddhist-inclined one I live with to be less of a couch potato as midlife has already come and gone. Glad you put compassion in the neutral terms science offers, so more hear the idea. So too keeping the concept in terms of yoga is hearer-friendly, as yoga lets the body have a say too. Nonetheless, both science and the yoga wisdom tradition come across a bit sterile like vanilla ice cream or cashew nut cream with no mix-ins, and, more dangerously, they let go unacknowledged dimensions beyond the human, whereas wisdom traditions, such as, Muslim, Catholic, etc., that factor in Mary, especially her weeping at LaSalette, also have a market on pondering and in a richer, fuller way, so that, for example, it’s OK that sometimes headaches, for example, warrant tears and words not just neutrality, but, I understand politics’ getting in the way and consequently neutrality’s being a more palatable forum. Anyway, just a caution and a suggestion you have probably already explored a long the way. Best, Anje, Massachusetts, at http://www.getwaisted.com–a plant-based support group P.S. Maybe in one of your future books you could apply yoga-willpower-compassion ideas to stress personified, that is, to Muslim-Christian relations, an interest of mine, especially via Turkish Muslims, Mary, food, and women. Let me know through getwaisted.com > Massachusetts and eventually, hopefully, through Meryem Ana Evi in Selcuk, Turkey, and through LaSalette in France–or in the US in Attleboro, if you make it to the East Coast since there is a mosque in Fall River.