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 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 or those seeking a purely secular path to mindfulness.