Into the Magic Shop: The Founder of CCARE Tells His Own Story

When CompassionSolution.Org cites Jazaieri's 2013 randomized controlled trial of Compassion Cultivation Training, it is citing research conducted at the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. When CompassionSolution.Org cites Seppälä's 2014 paper on loving-kindness meditation in healthcare, it is citing research conducted at CCARE. When CompassionSolution.Org cites the broader institutional case for compassion as a serious research program at a serious medical school, it is citing the program James Doty founded. Into the Magic Shop, published in 2016, is Doty's account of how a boy growing up in poverty in Lancaster, California eventually became the Stanford neurosurgeon who built the institution that funded the research CompassionSolution.Org rests on.

Doty is a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Stanford. He is also the founder and director of CCARE. The book is part memoir and part exposition of the neuroscience of meditation and compassion. The memoir half is the more memorable. Doty grew up the son of an alcoholic father and a mother who had attempted suicide and become disabled. He spent much of his childhood in motels. At age twelve, working at a magic shop in his hometown, he met a woman named Ruth, who taught him a set of practices, relaxation, visualization, and mindful attention, that, decades later, would be called compassion training before the term existed. Doty practiced. He kept practicing through medical school, through residency, through a successful surgical career, and through a fortune made and lost in the technology boom. The practices were the constant.

The science half of the book describes what those practices do. Drawing on contemporary neuroscience, much of it conducted in his own institution, Doty walks the reader through the neural correlates of the practices Ruth had taught him. The two halves of the book make a particular argument together: that the practices are real, that they are teachable, and that they have measurable effects on the brain and on behavior. The argument the book is making is the argument CompassionSolution.Org is making. The book makes it by showing how it played out in one human life.

Three contributions that bear directly on CompassionSolution.Org

The first contribution is the personal-history grounding for institutional science. The For Clinicians page makes the case that compassion is trainable. Into the Magic Shop is the longer-form story of one practitioner's training, conducted before the institutional apparatus existed. It demonstrates, by example, that the practices were available before the science verified them, and that the science is now describing what the practices were already doing.

The second contribution is the bridge between contemplative practice and clinical career. Doty did not abandon medicine for meditation, and he did not abandon meditation for medicine. He carried both, and the book is the case for why both are necessary. For a clinician trying to integrate practice with profession, the book is one of the better available examples.

The third contribution is the institutional context for CompassionSolution.Org's most-cited researchers. Emma Seppälä was Science Director at CCARE; her work is the source for The Happiness Track. Hooria Jazaieri's CCT randomized controlled trial was conducted at CCARE. The CCARE program continues to produce research that CompassionSolution.Org will, increasingly, cite. Into the Magic Shop is the human face of the institution that produces that research. A reader who reads only the academic papers may not realize that the institution behind them was built by a person with a particular story. The book makes the institution legible.

What the book does not do

The book is a memoir-and-science hybrid, and it makes the trade-offs both genres impose. The memoir half can feel anecdotal in places where readers want more rigor. The science half can feel summary in places where readers want more depth. A reader looking for a single rigorous treatment of the neuroscience of compassion will be better served by Ricard's Altruism or by the underlying primary literature.

The book is also dated in some places. It pre-dates much of the more recent CCARE research, the Compassion Cultivation Training literature that has accumulated since 2016, and the broader institutionalization of compassion-related research that has continued in the decade since. It remains useful as a foundation; it is not a comprehensive update on the field.

Where to put it on the shelf

For any clinician, student, or trainee at the point of asking whether compassion training is something serious people take seriously, Into the Magic Shop is one of the cleaner introductions in print. It pairs naturally with Seppälä's The Happiness Track (CCARE colleagues), with Jinpa's A Fearless Heart (the contemplative-tradition lineage), with Neff's Self-Compassion (the keystone), and with Trzeciak and Mazzarelli's Compassionomics and Wonder Drug (the medical case).

For a reader new to CompassionSolution.Org's argument, the book is also among the more inviting starting points. It does not require the reader to be persuaded that the topic is important before reading. It earns its argument through narrative.

Care differently, not less.