Ancient Rituals, Contemplative Practices, and Vagal Pathways Stephen W. Porges As contemplative neuroscience emerges as a discipline, research is being conducted to identify the neural pathways that contribute to compassion. Paralleling these scientific explorations, clinicians in mental health disciplines are developing inter- ventions designed to enhance compassion of others and self (Gilbert, 2009). Limit- ing these investigations and applications is the lack of a consensus definition of compassion. This ambiguity limits both scientific investigations of the neural path- ways determining compassion and the evaluation of compassion-based therapies. Definitions of compassion and the tools used to assess compassion vary within the literature (see Strauss et al., 2016). Compassion has been viewed as an action, a feeling, an emotion, a motivation, and a temperament. Although common themes may be extracted from the literature, no assessment tool conforms to the standards commonly employed in scientific research (Strauss et al., 2016). Without a consen- sus definition, researchers investigating compassion lack a toolkit that would foster scientific inquiry, and clinicians lack a metric to assess the outcome of compassion- based therapies. In contrast to the frequent definitions of compassion as a psychological construct, this chapter proposes that compassion is an emergent process dependent on one’s neurophysiological state. Consistent with this perspective, compassion cannot be investigated as a voluntary behaviour or a psychological process independent of physiological state. Thus, compassion cannot be taught through classic rules of A version of this paper was published as Porges, S. W. (2017). Vagal pathways: Portals to Compassion. In E. M. Seppala, E. Simon-Thomas, S. L. Brown, M. C. Worline, C. D. Cameron, & J. R. Doty (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science (pp. 189–202). Oxford University Press. S. W. Porges (*) Traumatic Stress Research Consortium, Kinsey Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA e-mail: sporges@indiana.edu © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gordon-Lennox (ed.), Coping Rituals in Fearful Times, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81534-9_3 43