Power and Promise by Joan Duncan Oliver
The 3 Doors Compassion Project LIVE Online Starts in September
Joan Duncan Oliver has been a Buddhist practitioner for 40 years and is a graduate of The 3 Doors Academy and Compassion Project. She is is an award-winning journalist and author whose most recent book is Buddhism: An Introduction to the Buddha’s Life, Teachings, and Practices. In this article she offers an in-depth look at the Compassion Project, developed by Marcy Vaughn and Gabriel Rocco, with the support of Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.
Suffering is unavoidable, a fact of life, the Buddha taught. And we live in anxious times. According to the Gallup 2018 Global Emotions Report—a survey of adults in 147 nations—worry, stress and pain are at an all-time high worldwide. In the U.S., the American Psychological Association's annual survey found that a significant majority of adults are even more anxious about the future of the nation than about money or work.
But whatever anxieties we suffer, there's good news from The 3 Doors: The Compassion Project, a spinoff of The 3 Doors Academy, is offering its popular nine-month course LIVE online beginning this September.
Since it was launched in 2016, the Compassion Project's program of teachings, reflection and meditation has provided a practical, effective method for helping us transform our pain into compassion for ourselves, the people close to us, and the larger world.
Like The 3 Doors Academy, the Compassion Project is grounded in ancient Bön Buddhist teachings, reframed to address the pressures of life today. Marcy Vaughn and her husband, Gabriel Rocco, senior teachers in The 3 Doors, developed the Compassion Project with the support of The 3 Doors founder, Tibetan meditation master Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. Initially the course was offered to people in the helping professions, but its appeal quickly spread. Now participants include anyone who wants to expand their capacity for caring for self and others.
The thrust of the program–and the vehicle of transformation–is connecting with the openness that allows our natural compassion to arise. “You can’t talk about compassion without talking about suffering,” Marcy emphasizes. Instead of viewing our dissatisfaction, discomfort or disconnection as something to avoid, in the Compassion Project suffering is seen as a doorway to awareness–the key to awakening compassion for others and ourselves. When we can be with our suffering fully, without judgment, opening to it with body, speech and mind, and then resting in open awareness, our perception of pain shifts, allowing it to dissolve into the open space of being that is the natural source of compassion. Resting in the inner refuge–the open space of being–clears emotional blocks. Unwholesome habits lift. Painful reactivity no longer prevents us from responding spontaneously to each other and to life.
So can our direct experience bring us alive authentically? “The premise of the Compassion Project is that yes, it can,” Marcy says. “But the practice is to find out if it does, and to be particularly interested in the places where you’re not open and direct and warmly present. Can you be curious about discovering what supports you in allowing your defenses to loosen, to soften, so that something else can emerge? It’s interesting to discover what emerges, and to realize that you’re not stuck with your suffering. Nothing is as fixed or solid as it appears.”
