Book Excerpt: The Compassionate Life, by Marc Barasch

Ode presents an exclusive book excerpt from The Compassionate Life: Walking the Path of Kindness (Berrett-Koehler, 2009), by Marc Ian Barasch.

Marc Ian Barasch | June/July 2009 issue

He turned to an old friend, Andre Delbecq, a legendary management consultant who also taught at a Jesuit college. Andre had recently gone on his own quest, taking a sabbatical at the height of the Silicon Valley's giddy ascendance to pore over the world's spiritual teachings, seeking “that paradox of perfect humility and perfect hope” that he believed was the hallmark of true leadership. Aft er returning from sailing the Turkish coast, Andre invited Ricardo and a select group of CEOs to hear a presentation of his findings, promising them a management course that would change their lives as well as their business practices.

It was certainly unorthodox. If most executive training is a regimen of psychological power-lifting and ego steroids, Andre replaced yes-I-can with not-so-fast and no-you-don't: Don't be enslaved by your own ambitions; don't think only of the bottom line; don't, for a while, think at all—especially about yourself. He scoured the world's religious practices, in the end deciding to teach his students the Buddhist meditation of tonglen—an imaginative exercise that calls for breathing in others' suffering and breathing out lovingkindness. “There was no other discipline I'd found,” he told me, “that enabled people to immediately grasp openness and humility for themselves.” Ricardo found the practice edifying, even elating.

Andre gave his students assignments that plunged them into places they feared, having them spend time with Alzheimer's patients, prisoners, or the homeless in what he called “I-Th ou encounters, just listening to and learning from, not judging anyone's value or worthiness.”

Andre had the executives tell one another their personal stories, asking if anyone in their own family was struggling with disease, drugs, or mental illness or had found themselves on the wrong side of the law. The Titanium Men of Silicon Valley were astonished to discover that their most formidable colleagues and competitors were grappling with the same mortal complement of weal and woe. Andre became a sort of heart-coach, urging them to widen their sympathies by considering how each of their employees faced similar diffi culties. He assured them that if they entered their workplace with what he called “compassionate presence,” they'd discover the hidden life of their company.

To put that vulnerability into practice in the business world, where dog really does eat dog and big fish swallow little fi sh and pick their teeth with the bones, had seemed like folly. But Ricardo tackled it with his usual full-on commitment. At the time, the fate of his entire company balanced on a single excruciating choice point. He had been negotiating to take over a large pharmaceutical company when discussions had turned hostile, finally reaching a bitter impasse. He put the talks on mental pause. “I decided I had to try to feel empathy for all parties, including the other side, the adversary. I needed an inner answer, not a spreadsheet answer.”

He had a realization that shocked him: “I saw it would be better for them to take us over.

“This would be traumatic for me because I'd be disassembling the business I'd built over decades. But when I put myself aside and considered everyone else involved—our shareholders and employees, the other company's shareholders and employees—I knew it was right.” The decision was pure intuition, he says. People inside and outside the organization thought he'd gone crazy. In 2000 his company's financial bellwethers were surreally bright; every indicator pointed due north. But three months aft er the deal closed, the tech economy went south, and as Ricardo says dryly, “It turned out in retrospect the direction I chose had been to everyone's benefit.” Ricardo found that his practice led him to more-generous policies for his employees. He backed benefits packages that cut into his profits because it seemed to him the right thing to do only to find that it also made the company stronger. Tonglen was, he realized, the spiritual equivalent of the catalysis at the very heart of his business. “You take in suffering, transform it to positive energy, and then offer that out into the world.”

I happened to be present one of the first times Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa sprang this bizarresounding practice on an unsuspecting Western audience. One student of yoga had raised his hand and asked, with some bewilderment, why it wouldn't be better to imagine breathing in love and light and breathing out all negative impurities. Ricardo, the creator of environmentally benign industrial processes, would have appreciated Trungpa's unhesitating reply: “Well, then you'd just be like a polluting factory, taking in all these good resources and spewing out your gray cloud on everyone else.”

The practice is decidedly counterintuitive. Sometimes when I begin tonglen meditation, I feel a wild surge of resistance, a fear of (there is no other way to put this) contamination. The unhappiness of others feels contagious: I don't want to inhale their cooties. But when it “works,” the practice is so rewarding that I'm ready to throw myself in again. To stop dodging people's misery and discord, to discover that I can give of myself with each breath and not feel depleted (in fact, to feel oddly nourished) is a revelation. When I can stay with it, I notice I don't feel so guarded; my borders seem more porous. I'm less inclined to hold people at arms' length. I admit to sometimes finding tonglen a challenge that I don't have the spiritual chutzpah to meet. But at best I find the technique radically simple and simply radical: an imaginative leap into otherness. There's a through-the-looking-glass moment, an almost audible pop, as I seem to find myself looking at the world through different eyes. It enhances what some psychologists refer to as “intersubjectivity” —a shared space of experience. If our usual ego-identity is maintained by keeping the good and estimable stuff in here and the yucky stuff out there, tonglen dissolves some of the rigidity of selfhood.

When my mind has some downtime that I'd normally fi ll by gossiping idly to myself, I try to remember to do tonglen. It's my mental screensaver. On the highway the other day, a college kid whizzed past at one and a half times the speed limit in a silver Hummer, honking wildly, blaring hip-hop from every window of his gas-hog, giving me the finger for good measure. I could feel my temper about to flare like a bottle rocket, my accelerator foot begin to twitch. Instead, I zeroed in on the back of his fastreceding head, breathing in his rage and frustration (which surely wasn't personal). I could almost feel his emotional claustrophobia, his agitated need for speed. I remembered being nineteen, riding the testosterone express.

What amazed me was that I didn't feel anger but some actual sympathy for the guy—along with a whoosh of inner freedom. Normally, when I feel hurt or aff ronted, my emotional choices seem to narrow. I can either absorb the blow and feel wretched or deflect it back to the other person (or later on some hapless bystander): It's like a choice between suicide or murder. With tonglen, I get to choose life.

Shambhala Mountain Center, an ink-brush painting of scrub pine hills, chattering magpies, and skittish prairie dogs near the Colorado-Wyoming border, has for decades been my place of retreat. It is dominated by the astonishing Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, a ten-story shrine whose gold-leaf spire suggests some unregulated spiritual broadcasting tower. Chögyam Trungpa, whose relics it houses, would have found it wondrous and maybe a bit absurd: an ornate memorial to his teachings about the simplicity of the present moment; a soaring monument to the enlightenment that's right under your nose.

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