This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: The Tender Heart; Brahma Viharas (3 of 5) Mudita - Sympathetic Joy. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: The Tender Heart; Brahma Viharas (3 of 5) Mudita - Sympathetic Joy

The following talk was given by Maria Straatmann at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 24, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: The Tender Heart (link)

Welcome to today's gathering. Gather yourself into the room, your energies, your body, your heart, your mind into this space.

Take an alert posture, but a relaxed one. Allow your body to sink into this space. Feel your feet on the ground, your legs. Feel your hips sinking, your belly. Allow your torso to just arrive and be at ease. Let your shoulders fall. All your elbows sink. Your fingers relax. Your head on your neck. Be at ease, not stiff. Sink your chin just a bit. Maybe a slight curve to your lips. Be happy to be here and just breathe.

Taking in a deep breath. Let it out. Feel the air coming and going.

Experience the joy of just being here. Just here.

As you settled in, allow your heart to be here also. That place in the center of you that is so tender and so soft that we protect so carefully. Allow it to feel what it feels. Whatever it is, know that your heart is safe here. Breathe into that heart. Be gentle. Just breathe.

And when you breathe out, breathe out. Let it take whatever the heart is holding and let it go with ease. Just for now.

Know the simple pleasure of safety. Yeah.

Let the heart feel. Let the heart feels. Joy, sadness. Uncertainty.

May we all be at ease.

And thoughts arise as they surely will. Not the feeling of the thoughts, confusion, delight, troubling. Let it wash through the heart with the breath and out again. Passing through. Just passing through with each breath.

As you rest in this place, know that your tender self can know joy. May you know joy. May it continue for you. May you know delight.

May you receive and appreciate joy in your heart. This tender heart. Why not? Just for now.

Breathing in and out, I allow whatever arises to arise. It's like this. The heart has room for whatever arises.

May I know ease. May I know ease.

May you be happy. May your happiness continue. May you appreciate your joy. I'm happy for you.

May you be happy. May your happiness continue. May you appreciate your joy. I'm happy for you.

May your capacity for joy be ever greater.

Dharmette: Brahma Viharas (3 of 5); Mudita - Sympathetic Joy (link)

Hello everyone. Happy day. Happy day. May you all be having a happy day. Either before you, behind you, ahead of you. May that continue.

Today we're going to talk about Mudita¹, sympathetic joy. My joy and yours. There's some dark stuff to talk about too, of course, because this is the life we live. But I think I want to introduce it with the idea that I'd like us to keep in mind as we talk about that. And I'm going to do it with a poem by Tony Hoagland² called "Grammar."

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend, smiles like a big cat and says she's a conjugated verb. She's been doing the direct object with a second person pronoun named Phil. And when she walks into the room, everybody turns.

Some kind of light is coming from her head. Even the geraniums look curious. And the bees, if they were here, would buzz suspiciously around her hair, looking for the door in her corona.

We're all attracted to the perfume of fermenting joy. We've all tried to start a fire, and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own. In the meantime, she is the one today among us most able to bear the idea of her own beauty. And when we see it, what we do is natural. We take our burned hands out of our pockets and clap.

This is the spirit of Mudita, sympathetic joy. We see others' joy and we are happy for them. It's infectious. Joy is infectious. We see it and we say, "Ah, wow. How great for you."

Now, it's also possible to look at that and say, "Why not me? Why not me? Why can't I fall in love? How come? How come you get to do that? How come she gets to do that? How am I not better?" So Mudita, the practice of Mudita has to do with cultivating a sense of joy and happiness for others. And it's quite obvious that the opposite of that is envy, covetousness, jealousy, which arises out of judgment, comparison, all of those things that we're very prone to. It's so easy to say, "Well, yeah, but I want that. Why can't I have that?"

And we give up. We give up the opportunity to share in the joy of others. We don't even notice that we've given it up. We quickly just let go of that delight that we see. It's a natural thing. We take our burned hands out of our pockets and clap. And then we say, "Yeah, but..."

The practice of Mudita not only is a way of increasing joy, but it helps us see when and how the mind falls into the trap of comparison and judgment that leads us into suffering. And we can catch ourselves doing that and we can say, "I don't have to do that. Oh, that's just comparison. I don't have to do that. I don't have to be trapped in that."

Indifference, listlessness, boredom, those are often far enemies. Mudita also addresses those things that sort of lead us into not paying much attention—not paying attention which is always the trap that leads to suffering.

The Buddha thought this was so important. You know, Mudita, we don't talk about so much when we talk about the Brahma Viharas³. It's easy to talk about loving-kindness and compassion and equanimity; these terms come up a lot. But Mudita, sympathetic joy, we kind of, "Oh yeah." But it is so, so, so important. It touches on everything.

So the Buddha in his third sermon, called the Fire Sermon, talked about the burning fires of greed, hatred, and delusion. Burning with the fire of passion, the fire of hatred, the fire of ignorance. The three fires. These are the three fires that give rise to jealousy, envy, and covetousness. And our task is to be free from enmity, anxiety, and to live happily. To live happily, it's up to us to let go of those.

However, it's harder to say, "Okay, I'm going to stop being envious. I'm going to stop doing this." To forbid ourselves to do things, to say, "Okay, I'm going to stop comparing." And so, Mudita gives us the opportunity to cultivate something else, to put something else in the place of it. So, Mudita is essentially non-judgmental. It's dependent on being able to see that others are worthy of our sympathy. Humankind is worthy of being valued just as a concept. It's worthy of being valued to step out of ourselves and look outward, to look outward and say, "Oh, that's really great." To appreciate. To cultivate appreciation.

To see when comparing mind sets up and say, "You know, what makes this pair of glasses better than this pair of glasses?" They're not better. In fact, this pair is broken. But this pair allows me to see the computer. This pair, not so much. Is one better than the other? No, they're just different. And just see. Thank goodness there are glasses because the eyes are not so good. But they can be improved. I can be better. I can be okay. I can be happy that I can get glasses. Not only that I can afford two pair of glasses. How wonderful to be appreciative, to cultivate appreciation. Not the same thing as gratitude, which is also important, but appreciation of others.

We tend to have goodwill only toward those people that we like, you know. "Oh, she's wonderful," and we like everything she does. "That person I don't like. I hate everything they do." So, there was a particular president that I had a lot of trouble with who was very warlike. And every time his name came up, ill will came up with it. And one day I learned that one of his favorite songs was a Van Morrison song, "Brown Eyed Girl," which was one of my favorite songs. And I said, "Oh, we actually have something in common." And that very thing I could appreciate about him, that he liked a song that I really had great positive associations with because of things that had happened in my life, softened my heart toward him. Gave me something about him to appreciate. And even though I continued to disagree with all of his political statements, I was able to see him as a person, and the ill will I was carrying around in my heart softened.

The same is true of the impulse of selfishness. "I want the biggest thing. I want the best thing. I want the..." "Well, I'll give you that, but I'm going to keep this." To practice. What if I don't have the best? What does it mean to have the best? What does it mean to have the biggest? What does it mean to have whatever the measure is? What does it mean? How do I need that? What is that need about?

All of this practice is dependent on our ability, our capacity to actually feel joy. We have to allow our heart to feel. Now, the danger is we're going to get hurt. But if we practice with something easy, we can do it. We can actually do it.

So, I used to live—I've told you about the house I lived in that I loved, that had soaring windows and it was just a gorgeous place and I absolutely loved it. But down the road from this house was a magnificent house. It had outbuildings and a Japanese garden, and they had gardeners coming twice a week to take care of this place, and I was envious, truly envious of this place. And then I looked at it and said, "Okay, this is a place to practice with." And I began, every time I walked by this place—it was on my daily walk—I would say, "I am so happy for them that they have this place." And pretty soon I said, "You know, I'm really happy for them that they have this place." I no longer needed it. And my husband and I used to refer to it as our "Mudita House." And it brought great joy to us to walk by it and say, "Oh, the Mudita House. I'm so happy for them." And when we met them, we were just overjoyed with meeting them because we'd been sending them happy feelings all this time. We were so happy for them to have this beautiful place. We were happy for them. We didn't have to let go of needing it. We no longer needed it because the desire, the pleasure in their happiness was so much greater.

I hope you can see the subtlety of that, that the joy of being happy for them was so much greater than the impulse to envy, that the envy fell away all on its own. It just became meaningless. And it of course allowed me to enjoy my own house a lot better because I no longer was comparing it. I was just enjoying because comparison had no place.

Compassion and Mudita go together. So compassion balances Metta⁴ so that we don't flood ourselves with being lost in optimism. And the other way around, Mudita keeps us from being lost in the horrors of the world. The joy and the willingness to take in suffering sort of balance one another. So it's useful to see how they blend together, these Brahma Viharas.

So, it's possible to do Mudita practice the way I did with the Mudita house. It's possible to do it using phrases like Metta phrases, similar to the way I ended the practice today. "May you be happy. May your happiness continue. May you appreciate your joy. I'm happy for you." But the important thing is to cultivate joy and your ability to feel joy.

So, I'm going to close with a poem by Mary Oliver⁵ called "Mindful," because this is what it takes.

Every day I see or I hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light. It was what I was born for—to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world— to instruct myself over and over in joy and acclamation. Nor am I talking about the exceptional, the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant— but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab, the daily presentations. Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these— the untrimmable light of the world, the ocean’s shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?

Every day I see something that more or less kills me with delight. Just notice the opportunities for delight.

May you know joy. Thank you.