The Lost Art of Compassion: Discovering the Practice of Happiness in the Meetring of Buddhism and Psychology

A Book Review

Author – Lorne Ladner, Ph.D.

A Washington, D.C. clinical psychologist in private practice
Director of the GUHYASAMAJA Buddhist Center in Northern Virginia

Harper San Francisco, 304 p.

Even though author Lorne Ladner is Buddhist and combines concepts from his spiritual practice with professional psychological guidance, you don’t have to be Buddhist to find value in his words. This book is a beautiful blend of East and West that truly gets to the heart of how the implementation of compassion in one’s life can lead to happiness.

Essentially, Ladner presents compassion as a vital part of psychological stability and viable spiritual practice. Smoothly written, this book plunges right to the heart of daily living and  shows how working on relationships of all kinds through the use of compassion ends up being beneficial to all.

Ladner uses examples from his own life and offers readers very practical exercises in the enhancement of their compassionate outlooks. These sample chapter titles give you a taste for what he has to say: “Compassion for Yourself”; “Seeing Through Projections”; and “Joyfully Losing an Argument”.

To be perfectly honest, I found this book of such tremendous value that I took all the underlining I did in it and created a little mini-handbook that I  still refer to periodically. The author’s words rang so true for me that I occasionally send quotes from his work out over Twitter. In closing, I’ll leave you with these words from Ladner, my favorite:

“Heartfelt kindness toward someone who has just treated you badly has the clean, pure feeling of a cool creek in the high mountains.”

Click here to find this book online.