Embodying Virtue: Combining the Classic Empathy Circle with Universal Human Values
Speaker:  Janna Weiss  & Maria Trottmann (20 min)

Overview

Janna Weiss and Maria Trottman discussed the integration of universal human values into Empathy Circles, emphasizing the importance of embodying virtue. They highlighted the 16 Guidelines for Life, derived from ancient Tibetan teachings, which promote cultivating our innate qualities and values, such as humility, patience, contentment, honesty, generosity, forgiveness, gratitude. These Guidelines are practiced in Empathy Circles, fostering a supportive environment for open communication and mutual understanding. The discussion underscored the benefits of these practices for individual and societal well-being, aiming to transform harmful intentions, and foster inner peace and world peace.

Dedication

• Closing dedication/verse is posted into the meeting chat so participants can read and share it.

May anyone who sees me, hears me, thinks of me, talks about me, loves me, hates me, doesn’t care about me, by my presence in their life, may they somehow benefit, have their suffering transformed and happiness enhanced.

May this [Empathy Circles] benefit all beings directly and indirectly.

By doing this [interdependent mutual reflection on the Classic Empathy Circle and Universal Human Values], may we one day completely perfect our compassion, love and wisdom so that we may have the skillful means, the embodied virtue, the kindness and discernment, to bring all other beings to that state.

Outline

Embodying Virtue and Universal Human Values

• Cara Jean Wilson introduces Janna Weiss and Maria Trottman, highlighting their roles and backgrounds.

• Janna Weiss begins by expressing gratitude and outlining the topic: Embodying virtue through classic Empathy Circles and universal human values.

• His Holiness the Dalai Lama defines universal human values as qualities appreciated by all, emphasizing compassion as a fundamental human instinct.

• She explains the ethics of virtue, referencing Buddhism and ancient Greek thinkers, and the importance of context in ethical actions, with quotes by Matthieu Ricard and neuroscientist Francisco Varela. 

Positive Mental Health Outcomes of Universal Human Values

• Janna discusses the positive mental health outcomes of practicing virtues like forgiveness, gratitude, hope, humility, and practical wisdom (phronesis).

• She mentions the Harvard Global Human Flourishing Project and the science of virtue (e.g., Blaine Fowers) studied by research psychologists.

• The primary reasons for practicing universal human values are inner peace and world peace, as per a public health model. 

• Janna critiques the Western model of violence, which includes aggressive measures, and introduces the Buddhist mind science model.

Buddhist Mind Science Model of Violence

• Janna explains the Buddhist mind science model, which identifies harmful intent as the root cause of violence.

• She outlines the three root causes: self-centered view, all-good and all-bad projections, and us-and-them thinking.

• The model emphasizes the destructive nature of self-centered attitudes leading to greed, envy, anger, and hatred.

• Janna integrates the Western and Buddhist models to create a comprehensive Public Health Model to Heal Violence.

Historical Context and Practical Application

• Janna recounts the transformation of Tibet from a violent society to a compassionate one through the teachings of Buddhist teachers.

• She introduces the 16 Guidelines for Life, based on a short verse by an ancient Tibetan king, and their secular application in universal education suitable for any human being. 

• Alison Murdoch and Dekyi-Lee Oldershaw developed the 16 Guidelines, which Janna and Maria are using in Empathy Circles.

• Janna thanks Larry Lawhorn and Ruth Cook for their contributions to the Empathy Circles with the 16 Guidelines. 

• Janna introduces the Guidelines' antidotes to root causes of violence: Humility is the antidote to pride and self-centeredness, especially a proper perspective: I am one of 8 billion people. Patience is the antidote to anger. Contentment is the antidote to greed. 

Maria Trottman on Empathy Circles with the 16 Guidelines

• Maria Trottman takes over, expressing gratitude and outlining the structure of Empathy Circles with the 16 Guidelines.

• Empathy Circles involve breakout rooms, are free speech spaces, and include full group debriefs.

• The first part of the circle includes a topic introduction, shared reading of texts, and role models.

• Maria provides examples of how the Guidelines are practiced in Empathy Circles, such as patience, contentment, honesty, and generosity.

Practical Examples of Guidelines in Empathy Circles

• Maria explains how patience is practiced in Empathy Circles through a calm and spacious mind.

• Contentment is practiced through mutuality and equality in the circle.

• Honesty is practiced by speaking from the heart without defensive armor.

• Generosity is practiced through listening with full attention, a generous gift.

Qualities of Forgiveness, Gratitude, and Principle

• Maria discusses the quality of forgiveness, which is practiced through being heard in a non-judgmental way.

• Gratitude is practiced through the connections and positive feelings shared in the circle.

• Principles are practiced by speaking with clarity and reflecting on what is said.

• Service is practiced by listening with an open mind to benefit others.

Closing Remarks and Wishes

• Maria concludes by thanking the team and expressing gratitude for the practice of Empathy Circles.

• A regular participant shares a positive experience, highlighting the transformative nature of Empathy Circles.

• Maria reads a closing wish for the practice to benefit all beings and for the embodiment of compassion, love, and wisdom.

• Summit Host Cara Wilson emphasizes the importance of embodying values and thanks Janna and Maria for their insights.

Transcripts

Speaker 1  0:00  

And now we've got more. I get to bring up Jana and Maria next. Jana Weiss is an Empathy Circle facilitator and trainer. She is accredited facilitator for the foundation of developing compassion and wisdom in the 16 guidelines international flagship program. Maria Trottam is an economist interested in building institutions and social systems that foster humans flourishing and social harmony. Also, an empathy circle facilitator who has participated in and facilitated numerous empathy circles on the 16 guidelines. Today, they're going to share with us on embodying virtue, combining the classic empathy circle with universal human value. Take it away.

Janna Weiss  0:49  

Let's see, so thank you so much for being here, it's really a joy to be here. Thank you to the Empathy Summit team. Thank you for everyone who took time today to be here. Just keep track here, if at all possible. So, embodying empathy circles, embodying virtue, the classic empathy circle with universal human values. Delight to share this with you. See, have to play. So, first of all, What are universal human values? We'll start with some quotes by inner values I mean the qualities that we all appreciate in others, and toward which we all have a natural instinct bequeathed by our biological natures animals that survive and thrive only in an environment of concern, affection, and warm heartedness, or in a single word, compassion. The essence of compassion is a desire to alleviate the suffering of others and to promote their well-being. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. And what is embodied virtue, or the ethics of virtue? The ethics of virtue is the ethics proposed by Buddhism and some ancient Greek thinkers, like the Stoics and Aristotle, a plea for the animals, and Majurikar, and he continues as the neuroscientist and philosopher Francisco Varela wrote, a truly virtuous person does not act out of ethics, but embodies it like any expert embodies his knowledge. The wise man is ethical, or more explicitly, his actions arise from inclinations that his disposition produces in response to specific situations. In other words, the context matters. So we're firm when that's beneficial and gentle when that's beneficial, and so on. Why practice universal human values? So, studies by research psychologists have found considerable positive mental health outcomes, and the values or virtues that have been studied extensively are forgiveness, gratitude, hope, humility, and practical wisdom, which is a translation of Aristotle's phronesis, which means doing the right thing at the right time, and research psychologists from these areas have studied these different values or virtues. There's a vast literature of positive psychology that one can explore that you can explore, and that was followed up on by Harvard Global Human Flourishing Project, and now there's a science of human flourishing, and more recently the science of virtue addressed and studied by research psychologists, so why practice universal human values again for a genuine sense of inner well-being, and to heal violence for a more peaceful society. In short, for inner peace and world peace. So I'm offering this reasoning through a public health model, which will help us heal violence. This is a Western model of violence taken from the John Hopkins School of Public Health, and it starts with the individual predisposed to violence, who then encounters a situation predisposed to violence, then perhaps a triggering event. You can see that these two gentlemen on the right here in the situation are starting to point fingers and getting a little heated, and then resulting in violence, and this model leaves something to be desired. The way we understand this in the West, this is the model we use for our institutions, and based on this understanding, we apply our resources and. To violence at the end by applying handcuffs and prisons and state and legal measures that are quite aggressive, and also we put a lot of resources on the situation predisposed to violence, more policing, security laws, legislation, regulations, green spaces are very nice and helpful for us to feel connected, and after, programs are also lovely. It would be really wonderful if they all had empathy circles with universal human values. So, the Buddhist mind science model of violence actually ends where the Western model begins. An individual predisposed to violence is not anything external about them, it's not their body size or their gender or their skin color or their religion, their externalities, what they're wearing, not easily picked up on at an airport with cameras. It is what happens in our minds, and so an individual is predisposed to violence if they have a harmful intent intent, and the Buddhist mind science model shares three root causes for all our harmful intents.

Janna Weiss  6:12  

So I'll elaborate a little more on these root causes: the I, me, my mind, the self-centered view, and from it arise the all good projection, seeing the things that I like and that I want and that identify with, and that are me and us, and separating that from the things I dislike, I hate, that I want to get rid of, or destroy the them. So this us and them thinking this view is very destructive, and so we have these mental afflictions that arise, the pride, the self-centered attitude leading to greed, envy, anger, and hatred, and these just to emphasize that this I is the root cause of the three root causes, and nothing against carrots, so if we put these models together, we get a complete model of violence, a public health model to heal violence. And Tibet was a very violent society 1003 or 1400 years ago, and King Sonsen Gambo united the kingdom and brought teachers from India Buddhist teachers of compassion to Tibet to help transform the society to a compassionate, peaceful society, and he himself wrote a very short verse, 16 lines that included just general human values, how we can treat each other, respect for the elderly, generosity, loyalty, kindness, and so forth. So these are basically synonyms, synonyms, exchangeable human values, social values, guidelines, and so forth. And over 20 years ago, Lama Sopa Rinpoche, Tibetan teacher, advised his students to take a closer look at this short 16 lines that the ancient Tibetan king wrote, and to see whether they could apply these general guidelines for human conduct to something that is secular, universal education, good for all human beings, and so Alison Murdoch and Dickie Lee Olderschar took up the project, and they wrote this beautiful 16 guidelines for life, a book that's available on the Foundation for Developing Compassion and Wisdom website, and Foundation FDCW has also created this PDF. It's a free PDF that has excerpts from the book 16 guidelines, and we are using that for our empathy circles, empathy circles with the 16 guidelines. So I just want to thank Larry Lawhorn and Ruth Cook, who started offering these empathy circles with me, and now Maria and I are doing this, and we started last year. So just to give you a taste of how these guidelines counteract these three root afflictions or causes of violence, we have pride, self-centered anger, greed, and their antidotes. The first guideline is humility, especially a proper perspective. I'm not the center of everyone else's universe, but rather I'm one of 8 billion people, so a proper perspective and one of many living beings. And then patience is a direct antidote to anger and contentment, a direct antidote to greed. So, if we practice these well, and a few more things, then we totally uproot these root causes of suffering, and we transform our minds. And now, Maria will continue, and I'll continue to share the screen.

Speaker 2  9:46  

Yeah, thank you very much for to the summit team for letting me speak here in front of this wonderful crowd, and thank you everyone for being here, and thank you, Channa, for this really nice introduction, so. So I'm going now to talk a bit more about how we do these empathy circles with the 16 guidelines, so we have a very classic empathy circle structure. Jana, you can maybe move. We have breakout rooms with up to six participants. We cultivate a free speech space, so there is always an invitation to speak on whatever is on your heart and mind. We also do a full group debrief after each circle, which we commonly do in the empathy movement. Then we have some add-ons, so maybe the first eight minutes or so are spent on a topic topic introduction. This is usually done by a shared reading of some texts, and that's also really nice. We have participants from different networks, so there are two Buddhist centers from Lama Sopas Network, the FPN team, who have it on their program. There is the FDCW, this foundation for compassion and wisdom that have them ask them on the program, and of course this wonderful empathy movement. So, what we do, we first do an introduction to the guideline, for example, service. So, we would start with a little definition of service, service is the outer expression of a wish to benefit others to increase their happiness. This is a direct excerpt of the 16 guidelines guidebook, and we may be having some, a bit of a longer text, then we always have some role models. The 16 guidelines book has also role models, because these people embody these qualities so well, they can really inspire us. For example, Martin Luther King is the role model for service, and his quote would be, life's persistent and most urgent question is, What are you doing for others? Wow, what a way to live. And then Archbishop of Desmond Tutu, he is the role model for forgiveness in the 16 guidelines, but he, of course, spends his life as a with a lot of service to others. So we can also have a quote of his here. Do you a little bit of good where you are, it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world. So, we don't have to be in this diamond league of beings to be of service. Just do what you can, wherever you are. Then we have our suggestions. Topics, an example would be, what might limit your ability to be of service, and how might these limits be a good thing, or whatever is on your heart and mind, and then now I'm going to make some examples why we think these empathy circles is really just an ideal practice for embodying the 16 guidelines, for example, in the section of how we think, we have the guideline of patience. Patience is defined as cultivating a calm and spacious mind, regardless of what is coming up. And in the empathy circle, we really practice with this calm and spacious mind and listen with this common fashion mind, so that is certainly getting practiced. Then we also have contentment now in the empathy circle. Everybody is equal, mutuality is a big inbuilt in that structure, and this equality makes us more happy with who we are and what we have contentment is practiced. Then, in the how we act section, we have, for example, the quality of honesty. Now, in an empathy circle, we can really speak from our heart, because we are heard in a non-judgmental way. There is no need for a layer of defensive armor or people pleasing makeup, we just can speak whatever is on our heart, so honesty is certainly practiced. Then we also have generosity. Now listening with your full attention is a very generous gift that we can give to each other, and we shared in one circle that even in quite intimate relationship where ships where we would go to grant to great length to help the other one sometimes listening is not a gift we always give and it's very good to practice it this kind of generosity then we have the how we relate to others. Here, we, for example, have the quality of forgiveness.

Speaker 2  14:46  

Now, this being heard in a non-judgmental way really helps us to let go of resentment toward ourselves and also towards others. So, this forgiveness is certainly practiced. Then we have the quality of gratitude. Now I've noticed that often when people come back from the circle they have this glow in their eyes because they're so happy about what has been shared and the connections they could feel, so it really also helps us to be grateful for just being human and being with other humans, then how we find meaning here. For example, we have the quality of principle. Now, in an empathy circle, we are invited, or we practice to speak really with clarity, and because of the reflection, we can also have a good sense about what we are saying is really in line with what we are feeling inside, and if there seems to be a little tension there, we are given the time to pause and really feel that, rather than just talking more or talking louder, which we sometimes do, so I think being in principle is really also practiced in the empathy circle. Then we have a quality of service. Now, listening with a call and call openness is really crucial to benefit others. If you are trying to benefit somebody, but we are not willing to listen. Maybe the outcome is not as good as it could be. So, thank you very much, Edwin, and all the team. You really invented the perfect practice to embody these ancient wisdom and also give us the opportunity to have a bigger, deeper understanding of them, and how they are relevant to our lives today. So, one of our regular participants actually said it best, and she wrote to us, empathy circles to me are an amazing experience. There was no one session where I did not have an aha moment, a new and widened understanding of the world. We all become each other's role models for the guidelines. Very nice quote by Maria Cavarani. So we usually close with something that is not part of the empathy circle or the 16 guidelines, but we like to create a wish that this practice is somehow beneficial not only for us but also for all humanity, so we close with this wish, and I would like to read it out here as well. May anyone who sees me, hears me, thinks of me, talks about me, loves me, hates me, doesn't care about me. By my presence in their life, may they somehow benefit half their suffering transformed and happiness enhanced. May empathy circles benefit all beings directly and indirectly by doing this interdependent mutual reflection on the classic empathy circle and universal human values. May me one day completely perfect our compassion, love, and wisdom, so that we may have the skillful means, embodied virtue, the kindness, and discernment to bring all other beings to that state. So, thank you very much to everyone.

Speaker 1  18:19  

Yes. Yes, yeah, yes, don't just act the values, embody them, and yes, empathy circles are a fantastic practice for embodying so many of those values, the compassion, the kindness, the humility, the space taking and space giving, and that dedication. Chef Kiss, will you please post that into the chat? Because that was delicious, and I would like to say it more often. Yes, please. And thank you. Thank you so much.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai