This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Caring; Compassion. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Caring; Dharmette: Compassion - Liz Powell

The following talk was given by Liz Powell at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 27, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Caring

Welcome everyone. Welcome to the morning meditation. I'm really enjoying being with you and reading the chat, greetings from everyone to everyone.

This week is dedicated to cultivating wholesome, beautiful states of mind. Yesterday we discussed metta, the brahma-vihara¹ or divine abode of goodwill, friendliness, loving-kindness. It's a wholesome inclination of mind that can meet all of experience, as well as a healthy way to relate to ourselves and others. When goodwill meets suffering, it manifests as compassion, or karuṇā² in the ancient Pali language. Compassion is many things, but it's a sympathetic vibration of the heart, or response of the heart that knows, looking at someone else's suffering, that if we had the same conditions we would be struggling in the same ways. And compassion wishes for suffering to end.

It's a practice that helps us grow beyond the self-concern that can keep us wrapped up in the problems and suffering, struggle, stress, dissatisfaction in our own lives. And if we're fortunate enough not to be experiencing difficulty, compassion practice helps us prepare for the future pain or suffering that's likely to occur when we experience loss, sickness, aging, death.

This is a time of year that can seem to magnify the suffering that we see around us and make clear the need for compassion. The disparities to which the human condition subjects people stand out really strongly to many people lately in particular. Disparity surrounds us. There's abundant wealth and there's crushing deprivation everywhere you look around the globe. And this was true at the time of the Buddha too, about 2,500 years ago. It's been true ever since.

So there are ways that the brahma-vihara practices of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity can support us in growing our ability to feel compassion for all of what happens to ourselves and our fellow human beings, and fellow beings of all kinds on this planet. It helps us to stop and realize what suffering actually is and how it affects all of life. And as we progress through these practices, we'll also touch into how to hold it all with a balanced mind and heart, so that we're not crushed with despair looking at all of this.

Meditation practice and mindfulness in everyday life develop the heart and mind in the direction of compassion, and bit by bit we build this capacity to be present and not avoid, or look away, or pretend intense suffering isn't happening. As with the other divine abodes, we can also deliberately practice compassion, starting where it's relatively more doable or we have an ability to do it without succumbing to grief. So with that, let's begin our meditation today.

Settling in. Perhaps starting with a few long, slow, deep breaths. Allowing the out-breath to release any tension from the body that can be let go. And letting the breathing return to whatever is normal for you. There's no special kind of breathing needed for this practice. Giving yourself time to find a comfortable way of sitting, standing, or lying down that is also alert. And it's okay during brahma-vihara practice to adjust the posture when you need to during the course of our sitting. Being uncomfortable does not support wholesome states of mind, especially if it causes pain that lasts. So taking time and bringing ease and care to the body, the heart, and the mind. Receiving whatever is present, whatever arises, as it becomes prominent in awareness.

Allowing it time and space to be known. No need to rush. No need to go out looking for experience, just allowing it to arrive in its own way. And no need to push anything away. There's no right or wrong thing occurring in meditation. Awareness receives everything equally. And if there are difficult or unpleasant experiences that present themselves in awareness, meeting them with the kind of care you might offer a good friend. Offering compassion to whatever difficulties arise during meditation, during the day, perhaps with the silent wish, "May this difficulty come to an end." Not as a demand or an agenda, simply as a gentle wish. "May it be so. May this difficulty come to an end."

Receiving the pleasant, the unpleasant, and experiences that are neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Receiving them all with care, with kindness.

During this meditation, if it fits for you, I'll offer a practice of sending compassion to a living friend. You can pick someone with whom you have an uncomplicated, good relationship, whom you know to be struggling, a little dissatisfied, perhaps suffering. And if this does not suit where you are in meditation, simply let my voice fade into the background and continue in whatever way suits you.

For those who wish to engage in this compassion practice, bring to mind the friend whom you know to be having some difficulty. Perhaps not the worst suffering or situations that tend to pull you into reactive emotions; pick something simpler to start with. And when you're ready, letting your mind and heart fill with images and memories of this person. A felt sense of what it's like to be with them. Bringing to mind their goodness, and then seeing them in their current struggle, and noticing how they are in the face of that difficulty.

And as you fill the heart and mind with them, inclining your mind to wishes of compassion without any agenda to fix your friend, without any idea that their suffering has to go away as a result of your meditation, not solving their problems, accepting them just as they are right now.

And then perhaps taking in the following phrases, seeing which resonate with you for your friend. You can simply receive them, hear them, or you can silently repeat them, radiating them towards your friend.

"I care about you. Your suffering matters to me. May you open to this difficulty with gentleness and compassion for yourself. May you meet this suffering with ease and kindness. May you be free of stress and suffering."

Perhaps continuing to repeat these phrases or other phrases that come to your mind as expressions of compassion for your friend without solving their problems.

"May you open to this difficulty with gentleness and compassion. May you be free of stress and suffering."

And continuing either with phrases or with a felt sense of caring and compassion as we continue the meditation in silence.

[Music]

Dharmette: Compassion

And an invitation. It's traditional to continue meditating as you hear reflections like the ones that I'll offer, so you're welcome to continue to receive experience as it arises in the body, the heart, and the mind as I offer these comments, and then you can see what sticks from the reflections. I used to make an effort to take two or three things from each of Gil's talks for many years that I could practice with during the day or during the week, so the whole 45 minutes could be considered a meditation.

So the Pali word karuṇā is translated as compassion, and it's what goodwill or loving-kindness feels when it encounters suffering; it wants the suffering to end. Gil has written that compassion is sometimes referred to as the jewel in the lotus. The lotus symbolizes the heart or mind that with practice blossoms into freedom, and the jewel represents the compassion appearing in the center of this blossom. So that's how important this is in this practice.

We can cultivate this wholehearted caring for anyone who's suffering, for ourselves and for others. And compassion is not pity. It doesn't look down on suffering from a position of privilege. When we practice compassion wholeheartedly, we put ourselves into someone else's shoes, and we know only too well that if we were living their life with their conditions, we would be suffering in the same ways.

So in addition to sending compassion to those who are innocent and on the receiving end of difficult conditions that just come with human life, we can also cultivate it for people who are engaging in unskillful actions that cause harm. And this practice does not come automatically or easily. It takes time and plenty of mindfulness to get beyond anger at those who harm others, and to begin to see the way that greed, hatred, and delusion are distorting their minds and their actions. It also takes some time to separate the person from their harmful behavior, and to see that even if they seem perfectly fine, content, and happy as they perpetrate harm, we can know that at some point their behavior rebounds into enormous suffering for them as well. At least in the terms of liberation from suffering, from harm.

So in terms of the full practice of the Dharma, full liberation of our hearts and minds, until we can grow to cultivate the compassionate wish for all people, all beings to come to the end of suffering, suffering will not end among human beings. Of course, we can certainly take action in the world to bring harmful behaviors to an end. So true compassion, especially if we decide to support or help another person or group of people, has this ability to differentiate. We work at differentiating between what's helpful and what's one's own agenda. So it is most helpful to begin with respect, listening to the person or the people who are suffering and hearing what they might find helpful, rather than deciding that we know the solutions to their problems.

There's a simple example of this that I guess many people on this Zoom or YouTube have experienced, and that is when one member of a couple or family is upset by something that happened at work or school or in one of their friendships, and they come home and they tell someone else, or they tell everyone. And instead of just listening with care, when the listener jumps into advice-giving mode, often the person who's sharing either seems to fight back against the advice or grow frustrated in some way. Very often when somebody's sharing from their heart like this, they're really just wanting someone else to understand and hear their situation, not to try to solve their problems for them.

Of course, we can also be understandably unhappy about our own past unskillful actions. If we've been around for a few decades, there's probably something we've done that we've regretted, and we can cultivate an expansiveness or an inclusivity of heart and mind that allow us to be open and be present with the resultant discomfort. That discomfort is a healthy conscience at work. We can move forward into compassion for the ignorance in our own past that led to our harming ourselves or harming others. And this is because endless self-punishment won't do the world any good, it won't do you any good. So recognizing what was harmful and growing towards what is non-harming will help those around us as well as ourselves release from the suffering and move towards freedom.

As we start this process, we're using words to begin to embody compassionate wishes. And sometimes when people hear the word compassion, they believe they have to feel highly emotional, or almost oozing compassion, or sentimental. And that isn't the case. The word compassion in one dictionary definition means to "feel with," but that doesn't mean we jump down into the pit of suffering with someone else. The heart and mind can be moved, we can care a great deal, and still be equanimous, a bit objective.

Today some of you may have experimented with this practice of silently saying compassion phrases as I offered that. And that can start any of these practices of brahma-viharas. Saying phrases can start feeling like they're just words, but over time, the more we bring our hearts and our heads together in mindfulness and in meditation, the more we see the benefit of wholesome inclinations of mind, the more the heart gradually opens to this. And in the process, we grow the capacity to be with suffering in a caring way, instead of keeping it at arm's length, at a distance, or instead of pitying anyone who is suffering, or instead of being hard on ourselves because we're suffering.

We can start by offering care for the difficulties we're experiencing. If that's relatively accessible, that can provide a reference point from which we can genuinely develop a caring compassion for others. And there's a phrase that sort of exemplifies this: "Just as I wish to be happy and free from suffering, so may that being, may all beings be happy and free from suffering."

The next person to whom we might traditionally offer silent wishes of compassion might be someone towards whom you have a loving, respectful relationship. Could be a mentor, a valued teacher, or someone who's been completely supportive in your life. And by the way, this practice is intended to develop your capacity to be compassionate towards the living. So when you choose people to whom you'd like to direct these phrases or this feeling, pick someone who's alive. After being able to offer compassion to someone with whom you have this very supportive relationship, that helps develop us towards being able to offer silent compassion for a friend or a family member, someone who we dearly love but maybe we have a relationship that, you know, has ups and downs.

The next step in developing compassion to its fullest is to offer compassion to a stranger. And this is usually someone you see in your life regularly, like a letter carrier or someone whose name you see on this chat, but it's someone you don't really know. And then the final stage in formal compassion practice is to direct thoughts of compassion towards people with whom you have difficulty, or you dislike them. Traditionally it's called the enemy, but maybe you don't feel like you have enemies. Or you might. As you become able to do that, you're really developing this state of mind that can really understand and kind of get on a visceral level that people are not fixed in their nature, nor are you. Nothing is. Everything is inconstant and changing, sometimes rapidly, sometimes very slowly, and all conditioned phenomena, including the behavior of others. It's all subject to suffering or dukkha³ in the Pali language. It all has this unsatisfactoriness.

When we still on some level believe that there are things in this conditioned realm of human existence that can be relied on all the time for happiness, or that things will remain stable and satisfying, or that they have a fixed nature that we can use as a sense of security—as long as we believe any of that, and sometimes we don't even know it but underneath we do believe that, we continue to have stress, dissatisfaction, and suffering. But we can grow with caring and compassion in the same way that we can grow goodwill and the other divine abodes by paying attention to them in daily life, and also by meditating with them in this formal way. That really gets absorbed in who you're sending the feelings towards and filling your mind and heart with them, and then really staying with this practice. It develops this quality of collected mind, fully gathered mind, a samadhi⁴, that ultimately is a source of growth and in insight and in wisdom. And wisdom is one of the keys to becoming free from stress and suffering.

So the meditation practice and daily life practice with these brahma-viharas tend to support one another. They come to a point, if we do them frequently enough and keep at the mindfulness, they tend to arise more naturally in us in response to what's happening around us. The mind becomes very stable and flexible, able to deal with ups and downs without reactivity, and we get to a place where we can remain capable and calm in the face of whatever comes our way.

So for those of you who want to continue or start to treat today and this week like a retreat, you might allow yourself to notice what brings up a response of compassion or caring in you today, and silently you could radiate this compassion, this care, wishes for relief from stress, suffering, dissatisfaction towards anyone who you know is having a hard time. Of course, if you're in a position to actively help, taking the time to listen deeply and carefully to what that person wants in the way of support, but this is a great way to bring the compassion practice into your day.

I wish you all freedom from stress and suffering and an enjoyable day exploring this practice if you choose to do that. See you tomorrow morning. Be well.