Most of us seek happiness by approaching what we desire, avoiding what we dislike or fear…and ignoring all the rest. Dr. Charles Raison presents a radically different approach to enhancing well-being, one that embraces conflict and frustration as a means to produce internal changes linked to happiness. Derived from ancient Tibetan lojong Buddhist teachings, this approach has been secularized into a technique known as Cognitively-Based Compassion Training. Dr. Raison will introduce this technique and present evidence that compassion training has the potential to optimize emotional and physical health through a variety of interrelated effects, including improving emotional and biological stress responses, and enhancing the brain’s empathic responses to others in ways that might reduce depression.