InsideOut Interview: Marc Barasch

by Owen Lipstein November/December 2008

Compassion: We’re going to need it—to give and receive it. So, who we are we going to call?

How about an old friend? Marc Barasch is a former editor at Psychology Today, and the best-selling author of The Healing Path (Tarcher, 1994), as well as Remarkable Recovery (Riverhead Trade, 1996). And it just so happens that he has also written a wonderful book on the subject, Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness (Rodale, 2005).

InsideOut: Tell us about the process of writing your book,
Field Notes on the Compassionate Life, which is a wonderful set
of vignettes.

Marc Barasch: [I wrote this book after] having gone through this period of relative isolation. It’s kind of part of a return to the world and the world of other people. And I realized that the one thing that really was the central sine qua non of all of this [in my life] was compassion. And I realized that I still was not that compassionate person. You know, I’d taken [Buddhist] vows and had always had this aspiration. And I thought that the place to start would be to persuade myself to take a journey, as all these books are journeys in one form or another.

IO: Tell us about the guy who gave up his kidney.

MB: Well, you hear about cases sometimes where somebody will give away a kidney, a father will give a kidney to his son, or people will be very altruistic toward the people that are closest to them. And this is something that is well-anticipated and predicted by [Charles] Darwin and [Richard] Dawkins [in his book] The Selfish Gene. People take care of their own, in other words. Readily.


But these were people, these kidney donors, who gave kidneys away to total strangers, which is not predicted in the Darwinian model. So I thought if there’s really such a thing as selflessness, and compassion at the level that religionists talk about it, here would be a place to investigate.

IO: And here is this big guy who looks like a lumberjack.

MB: Yeah, he’s 6-foot-6, he plays basketball, he’s a salesman, he’s happily married…

IO: And he gives a kidney to a stranger.

MB: He’s quite sane. This doesn’t happen out of the blue, necessarily. His father had died of cancer. This was a very painful experience to him. And very often compassion begins with pain. This is something that St. Thomas Aquinas said. You can certainly find it in Buddhism. You can’t really empathize with suffering very easily…until we suffer ourselves. Otherwise, you just sort of wonder what all the whining and crying is about.


So, having had this extremely painful experience, he wanted to help somebody else. He had offered to donate bone marrow but it didn’t match the recipient. But then he was on a plane and he happened to see a film about someone who had donated a kidney. And he took down the phone number and he began looking into it, and got very interested in the idea that you could give a kidney to someone of another race. So he decided that he wanted to do that.


He had to knock on a lot of [hospital] doors, because hospitals don’t do this. And in fact, in the mid-’60s, [regarding] these altruistic kidney donations—I think they’re called “altruistic stranger donations”—it was decided by a panel of surgeons and psychologists that nobody sane would do this. And in fact, the operations were never done from that point on.
So for somebody to say, “I want to give my kidney away to a total stranger,” was not very easy. This was something that he just arrived at as a way of becoming a more whole person. That’s the paradox: Giving away a part of himself to become more whole.

IO: Tell us about your tree.

MB: Well, after having done this book and meeting these fantastic people—[I was] convinced that you could be pretty selfless and actually quite happy. And sane. I decide that it wasn’t enough just to write books about this, but I wanted to actually help the world in some way that was tangible, not just cut down trees to make wood pulp to make books.


So, I just stopped everything I was doing. My mother died at the end of my book tour, and that occasioned a lot of thought, and having to look at my life. And I had this gap in my career. I decided that I was just going to see if I set the intention of finding a way to really help, if something would essentially drop in my lap.


And I did meet somebody who was doing agroforestry in the developing world. And the minute I heard about this, I thought, “Well, this is fantastic. It’s a way to help the planet; it’s a way to help impoverished people.” It appealed to me because it was active. It’s a way to take degraded land near deserts and actually restore it to fertility, and support the communities that live on it, preserving their cultures and their biodiversity.


And I liked the iconography of a tree. It occurs in the narrative of every spiritual tradition, the tree of life or the Buddha being enlightened under a tree. It appealed to my model of holism and wholeness.

IO: I was going to say you’ve gone from the inside out.

MB: Yeah, it was like going from inside out, but, I also think it has a sort of metaphorical dimension, an inner dimension. A tree [has] roots and a trunk and branches, and fruit and seeds, and it spreads and gives shelter. There’s something very psychologically, spiritually resonant about it.
But in the end, yes—it’s very practical. My paperback publisher is going to plant a tree for every copy that’s sold. I’ve arranged that with them.