DNA of Compassionate Integrity | Interview with Dr. Michael Karlin

Dr. Michael Karlin Assistant Professor of Psychology and Associate Director of the Center for Compassion, Integrity and Secular Ethics Find out more at www.compassionateintegrity.org/ Dr. Michael Karlin has always been interested in how the human mind works. So while he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do career-wise growing up, the Bethesda, Maryland native found himself gravitating toward psychology classes in undergraduate at the University of Georgia; he enjoyed learning what makes people tick, how mind and behavior are intrinsically linked. After earning his bachelor’s degree in psychology, Dr. Karlin wasn’t sure what to do next, and chose to go into business. It was the early ‘90s, and his forays into the business world found success via the new era of the Internet. “I ended up being successful in commercial banking,” he says. “With a couple of other partners, I started what ended up becoming the first bank on the Internet and the technology company that sold that technology to other banks and eventually brokerages and insurance companies.” He had made a successful career by learning on the job in a field he hadn’t expected. “All along the way, as exciting and fun and lucrative as it was, I realized that it was not really what I wanted to be doing,” he recalls. “It was kind of an empty life, and I wanted more.” He retired from the business and started a nonprofit that launched two large mythology and story-telling conferences and performance festivals here in Atlanta. Through that experience, he recognized that he wanted to continue learning and studying – he enrolled in graduate school and earned a Master’s in Religious Studies at Georgia State University. He just completed his PhD in Religious Studies at Emory University in 2014, with a focus on the interface between religion and psychology. The teaching of compassion in schools is still an unusual concept, even for more traditional psychology students who often study mental illness diagnosis rather than prevention. But Life University’s holistic focus on overall mental health, not just diagnosis, puts an emphasis on these types of pro-social emotions. “A lot of people are skeptical going into it,” Dr. Karlin says of teaching compassion in class. “Often times the image of compassion is soft or new age-y.” But he points out that to have compassion, you must have courage, and students are able to use meditation exercises to cultivate skills that lead to compassion. Unlike many academic programs, this becomes a first-person experience. “Many courses just convey knowledge and then ask students to critically analyze or apply that knowledge,” says Dr. Karlin. “We’re asking students to really embody that knowledge.” And while an onslaught of media might have jaded the average American, Dr. Karlin says compassion is built into the human DNA, an undeniable biological factor. “It’s not this thin veneer that we’ve sort of built on through society to hold down our ‘evil nature,’” he says. “You’re always going to see elements of compassion cropping up, and people acting benevolently and helping others. Clearly we have a long way to go to take that biological compassion into a universal compassion – that’ll take time, generations perhaps, but we’re doing our best.” He says that practicing compassion is an essential part of good health, just like diet and exercise. As an associate director of LIFE’s Center for Compassion, Integrity and Secular Ethics, Dr. Karlin is involved in a lot of forward-thinking programs that hope to use compassion-based training to make a larger impact on society. “The CCISE is based on looking at the fundamental human values that promote human, social and environment flourishing,” he says. “These are values we can look at through empirical evidence and design research studies around. If we can look to science and say: What does the body look like when it’s feeling compassionate instead of angry? What does it look like when we’re... Support this podcast