This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Compassionate Accompaniment; Sources for Care-Giving (4 of 5) Compassion. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Compassionate Accompaniment; Sources for Care-Giving (4 of 5) Compassion

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 02, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Hello everyone, and welcome to our morning meditation here in Redwood City, California, and around the world in different time zones.

Today, the general topic, going along with the talks on the sources of caregiving, is compassion. For me, compassion has been an extremely central feature of my adult life. How it became such a central feature was gradual and imperceptible to me, unplanned, but it came from sitting peacefully and calmly enough in meditation. In my years of Zen practice, sitting close to my own suffering, at some point I was changed, healed in some way, through a field of compassion and care from people who understood my suffering. They felt it, had compassion for it, recognized it, and offered their kindness and their accompaniment with it. They seemed to want me not to suffer and demonstrated another way of living, another way of being with suffering.

One of the meanings for me, how I came to understand compassion—"com" with "passion," passion being the Latin word for suffering, like the Passion of Christ—is accompanying suffering. It's having the ability to accompany one's own suffering when it's there, to accompany it with care and love, to accompany it with attention. This is the kind of attention where our identity, our sense of self, doesn't get subsumed or absorbed into the suffering. Instead, we realize that there's a different way of attending and being with suffering, and that is to accompany it. We accompany it from some place in the heart, in the mind, in the belly, that is not suffering but cares about the suffering. It recognizes it and is willing to accompany it in a way that makes space, opens up to it, and makes room for it, without being troubled by it. This allows the inner suffering to find its own healing, its own relaxing, its own balm, its own way of working through it.

This is the miracle of meditation and spirituality for me: how much self-healing there can be. We don't have to do much except to offer a deep, profound accompaniment, listening, and being present.

So for this meditation, whether you're suffering or not, consider that meditation is the art of accompanying all of who we are. It is accompanying what is here within this psychophysical being, in our mind and body, where the accompaniment, the attention that we offer, is a calm attention, a soft attention. It's kind of like listening to a friend who's troubled and just really being a listening, attentive presence, not trying to fix, but just being here.

To begin, we want to do our best to establish a degree of stable calm. It doesn't have to be dramatic. And then have that as a basis for this profound accompaniment, profound listening, profound presence that provides the room, the medicine for the self-healing, the self-transformation, and the self-growth that our psychophysical system is capable of.

So, gently close your eyes. With your eyes closed, give a little more attention to your posture and then begin the process of stabilizing and calming.

Taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. Breathing in and feeling your body as it is. A deep breath, feeling it. And on the longer exhale, relax, soften.

Then letting your breathing return to normal. Continue for a few moments, a few breaths, to feel your body as you breathe in. Maybe with the idea that the filling of the lungs, the expanding of the belly, is stabilizing, grounding. Maybe as you breathe, there's a downward momentum or gentle pressure. Sometimes when I breathe in, I feel a slight downward pressure pushing my sitting bones, as if the sitting bones are becoming rooted in the earth. And then on the exhale, to soften throughout the body.

Breathing in, breathing out.

If any part of breathing feels easeful or pleasant, any part of the cycle of breathing in and breathing out, imagine that that easeful feeling is here to accompany you as you are, without any judgment about how you are, without needing to change anything or get rid of anything. The simplest aspects of breathing can be a gentle accompaniment of how you are.

Like how a person might reassure you that they're there and they're supportive by gently touching your elbow, your shoulder, maybe the back of your hand. Perhaps the breathing can be like that—reassuring.

And as you breathe, also feel the tensions and agitations, if they're there, in the thinking mind. As if the breathing is here to reassure and accompany the thinking mind so it can relax and soften. As if attention rides on the breathing and is lifted into the thinking mind, directed to the thinking mind by the breathing, for a calm awareness of a mind that has some agitation, some tension. Like waves on a lake that are stirred up by the wind, but when the wind calms, the waves settle.

And now, with a calm attentiveness, a calm attention, accompany yourself in whatever way feels supportive for you. Accompany your suffering so it can heal. Accompany your spirit, your dharma growth, so something can grow. Accompany your attachments so they can self-liberate. Compassionately accompany, as if you're listening deeply, attending caringly for yourself.

And as we come to the end of the sitting, feel your way into yourself to where you might feel stability and calm. And imagine how useful that stability and calm can be in accompanying and tending to people you know who are going through a difficult time, or with strangers who are challenged that you meet, or even those that you pass on the street—homeless, poor. Inhale with stability and calm. Compassion. A simple compassion can be present that is there to, even briefly, accompany the suffering of others, so they're not alone in their suffering, in their fear, distress, sadness. So that your kind, stable, compassionate presence shows them that there is an acceptance, a room for their suffering to self-heal. To know that there are people who care and have been touched by the depth of their humanity.

May it be that as we grow in this practice of meditation and mindfulness, that we become increasingly capable of compassionately accompanying the challenges of others. Compassionately listen, be present.

May all beings be free of suffering. May all beings know that there are others who care and notice them and share in the holding of their challenge. May all beings be safe and be offered an accompanying presence that brings peace and calm and room for people to be themselves. May all beings know the power of self-healing. May all beings know the brilliant light of self-freeing. May all beings be happy.

Thank you.

Good morning and good day. This is the fourth talk on the sources of caregiving, and today's topic is the source of caregiving that's probably most commonly associated with it, which is compassion.

Many Buddhists put a tremendous emphasis on compassion, and I think compassion is a very profound emotion, attitude, and practice. This is partly because compassion belongs to a place that has a very deep, personal, intimate source or operating system deep inside of us. When we have cultivated a kind of presence, openness, and sensitivity that taps into the deeper places of care and compassion, we allow ourselves to become people who can be touched by the suffering of the world. The suffering of others can touch something very deep, essential, and core in our very being. As the layers of armor, resistance, preoccupation, and disconnect we have begin to relax and soften, we start feeling more of the deepest sensitivity within us, which is almost like a core of what it means to be a human being.

To have the suffering of others touch this deep place means that we are moved deeply; we care deeply. There's something about encountering suffering that touches this deep place in a very different way than almost anything else. It's not that it distresses us, because the source of distress in us is in a very different place than this soft, deep sensitivity. Distress belongs more to the surface mind, the story-making mind, the mind of attachment, resistance, or fear. When those surface things are settled, to feel the suffering of others can certainly be uncomfortable in profound ways, but there's also a rightness to it. It feels right. Sometimes it feels very sweet, or there are beautiful or sweet sensations inside. It just seems so amazingly right. Of course, if there's suffering, I want to feel it. I want to hold it. I want to be there for it. It's right to be open to it.

The word we have in English, "compassion," comes from the Latin root "passion," which means suffering, as in the Passion of Christ. "Com" means "with." On the surface, it might look like "suffering with others," but it isn't that we want to have the same suffering as them and be as distressed, as hurt, or as incapacitated as other people can be in their deep suffering. For me, the "with" means to accompany. We're here to accompany people. To accompany means to be present in a calm and stable way. Just like if someone's distressed and they just need someone who can really listen well, listen attentively, we sit with them and we're there to listen, maybe leaning forward a little bit. Nothing is required of us but to be a really active, good listener.

Sometimes, all we need to do is provide our presence. Maybe people don't want to speak, but they just want to be accompanied. For someone who has some great suffering, it might be very meaningful that you go for a walk with them in silence. They know that there's someone there sharing the space, holding them, accompanying them—someone who recognizes and knows the difficulties they're going through. And that's enough. It's easier for them to be with their own challenge if they have that accompaniment.

So, suffering with, together with, accompanying with, being present with someone—that's the beginning of compassion. It is the ability to accompany, to listen, and to hold in a way that feels very profound or meaningful for the person who has the compassion. Of course, I'll be here. Why not? This seems like the most important thing.

Compassion often includes the idea that we would want people not to suffer; we want them to be free of their suffering. There's an art to that wish. It can be very meaningful for people to know that others are well-wishing them, wanting them to be free of suffering, and have a vision of them becoming free. They're not being left alone to just suffer and suffer with no one caring. To care means also to want that suffering to be over, to be healed, to be softened, to be liberating in some way.

To feel that someone's not trying to fix you or feels like something's wrong with you because you're suffering, but is accompanying you with a sense that something is right here—not in the causes of the suffering, but something is right about really caring, attending, and accompanying suffering so that the self-healing of the heart, the self-healing of our own inner life, has a chance to function. It's phenomenal, the capacity of our inner life to self-heal given the right conditions. In our practice of mindfulness, one of the right conditions is a non-reactive, clear mindfulness that learns to accompany even our own suffering. We learn how to be with it without fixing it, without struggling with it. We just hold it like we're listening deeply, so that it's not our thinking mind that is trying to fix and solve the suffering, but rather a thinking mind that's there to support this gentle, open, deeper sensitivity that can hold suffering with calm attention.

When we're with other people, wishing their suffering comes to an end, it begins with people just feeling that. I know in my own life, one of the biggest transformative moments where I felt compassion from someone else was when I just felt the person's care for me, their attention fully there, feeling and recognizing my distress. I could feel the person wished it were otherwise but was just making lots of space to let it be there. That was the right recipe for a really deep feeling of respect, possibility, and openness that I had never known before.

After these two things—first, learning to accompany with calm attention and listen deeply, and second, having a real sense that you would like it to be otherwise for the person—then, if it's appropriate, compassion can be put into action. Maybe we find someone a glass of water. Someone's been in a car accident and they're shook up, so we go sit next to them, put a blanket over them, and make sure they have water. Very simple actions to stabilize and support people. Bring people a band-aid, bring them food, whatever it might be that we can do to make a difference. But rather than it being a performance, just giving them something because they need it and that's all we have to do, that doesn't really convey the depths of what compassion is about. So it can really touch the depths of someone else, and we can share the depths of this human experience. This involves having learned how to deeply take in and feel the suffering of the world, know how to accompany it calmly and stably, and learn to listen and be present that way for others. We recognize this wish we have for the suffering to end and somehow skillfully let that be in the relationship, and then offer some way to support and help, whatever seems appropriate at the time.

Compassion, because of its deep connection to some place core to what it means to be a human being, touches us or activates something very different than generosity, goodwill, or not wanting to harm. For some people, this makes compassion one of the most profound sources of caregiving.

We have one more source of caregiving, which is the one that I feel is really the most fundamental one that holds all the others. Rather than emphasizing how profound it is, I want to emphasize that this most fundamental form of caregiving is also the one that is most ordinary. So that'll be [word?], or I translate it as "care," a word that I keep using this week as I've been talking.

In the meantime, today, look for opportunities to recognize, to learn about, to run into the suffering of our suffering world. You don't have to look very far. Maybe don't look for the greatest ones, but look for situations and experiences where you see it, know it, read it, witness it, or accompany somebody with it. See if you can do the first step of compassion: just simply accompany, simply listen. See what it's like to allow it to touch the deepest place inside of you, as if you don't have to do anything more but accompany it. See what that's like, because in doing that, you're also accompanying yourself as you experience the suffering of the world.

Thank you.