Your brain shows compassion. Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN weighs in on a recent study that shows an area of the brain that lights up when you are feeling compassionate toward someone. In this report, he talks about people who can meditate toward being more empathic toward others. And he mentions these monks who prayed for 10,000 hours to up the compassion meter. (Nothing against prayer, but I'm thinking, if you're praying all that time, WHEN do you have time to show compassion to someone?)
2 comments:
Your comment about the monks drew me back to the book I wrote a comment about earlier, Eleanor Clift's Two Weeks of Life. She writes about a federally-funded study released in 2006 that found no difference in recovery rates among patients told that strangers were praying for them, a second group told that strangers might or might not be praying for them and a third group that was not prayed for at all. She writes that Raymond J. Lawrence, an Episcopal priest who directs pastoral care at a couple of large hospitals, thought this was "welcome news." Lawrence told the New York Times that, if such praying could be proved to work, "our religious institutions and meeting places would be degraded to a kind of commercial enterprise, like Burger King, where one expects to get what one pays for."
But prayer from people we love is always welcome. It makes us feel better to pray for others and to be prayed for in the right circumstances. We just don't confuse prayer with the promise of healing, we hope.
I had to laugh when a cousin of mine told me she had been praying for me after my brain tumor was found and removed. Chuckling, I said, "Maybe you should have started praying earlier." She and I grew up together amidst some turmoil, and she said, "Honey, I have been praying for you for a long, long time."
What a great story! You have so many.
And I like what the late great CS Lewis said about prayer: I don't pray to change God; I pray to change me.
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