How Compassion Works

A Step-by-Step Guide to Cultivating Well-Being, Love, and Wisdom

Uncover your innate capacity for love, presence, and wisdom with compassion training adapted from Tibetan Buddhism and contemporary psychology.

Everything we care about—our mental and physical well-being, our relationships, our spiritual life, our ability to be useful to others—depends on our ability to access love and compassion within ourselves first. This clear, step-by-step guide offers a way to cultivate this power through an evidence-based meditation method called Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT).

With practices drawn from Tibetan traditions, attachment theory, and cognitive science, How Compassion Works uses a progressive series of meditations to gradually build our capacity for mindfulness and presence—and to help us avoid empathic distress, compassion fatigue, or burnout. Organized into three categories—receptive mode, deepening mode, and inclusive mode—these practices help us cultivate unconditional care and discernment from within.

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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2025 John Makransky and Paul Condon (P)2025 Shambhala Publications