Sustainable Compassion Training—Receiving-Care Mode of Practice

John Makransky will enter participants into two contemplative practices from his Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT) approach for developing stable care and compassion. In this contemplative session, we will do a meditation of receiving care as a kind of empowerment. We are empowered to participate in the perspective and flow of care and compassion first by recalling a moment of loving care from a time in our own lives — a moment when someone was present to you in a relatively unconditional way, rooting for you, wishing you well, taking joy in you, seeing or listening deeply to you. By re-inhabiting one such moment, we re-experience what it feels like to be held in love and to be seen in our deep dignity and worth beyond reductive thoughts of ourselves. This helps empower us for the second contemplative session in which we extend a similar attitude and perspective of love to others.