Exchanging Self and Other

This chapter looks at the technique of exchanging the self and other. This technique originates from Shantideva, an important Buddhist thinker from eighth-century India and was later developed in the Tibetan tradition. It involves imagining the self from different points of view and cultivating certain responses from those imagined perspectives. It aims at changing an individual’s fundamental orientation to the self and others to combat feelings of envy, jealousy, and insecurity at their source. More importantly, the central aim of this exercise is a simple one: to make the self more compassionate. Imaginatively, adopting these different points of view forces the individual to stop and take other people's experiences seriously. Rather than simply accepting the personal take on situations, the individual starts to see more clearly that other people see the same situation very differently.