Cultivating empathy and compassion: Lived experiences of engagement with cognitively‐based compassion training in the US

Abstract

This qualitative study presents an analysis of data taken from 16 participants who were interviewed during and 1 year after they attended a course in Cognitively‐Based Compassion Training (CBCT), a meditation course that seeks to help participants cultivate empathy and compassion. The study sought to examine what benefits, if any, participants in a CBCT course reported with regard to their understanding and practice of empathy and compassion; and secondly, if their statements in the interviews exhibited understandings and practices consonant with emotional, social, and cognitive resilience as identified in the existing literature, and consonant with empathy and compassion as defined in CBCT and in existing literature on compassion. The study found that participant interviews provided significant evidence of the development of skills identified in the literature as components of emotional, cognitive, and social resilience, and that participant descriptions and definitions of compassion closely matched those existing in the literature.