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

Dharmette: Compassion & Equanimity; Guided Meditation: Resting In Care - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 15, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Okay people, welcome. Yeah, nice to see the messages streaming. And that's me writing when it's highlighted in yellow, "Insight Meditation Center." That's not my assistant; I don't have an assistant. I have lots of lovely people in the background, but I don't have an assistant chatting out good mornings. Anyway, lovely to be with you. It's been sweet to be with you this week. And yeah, that's it.

Guided Meditation: Resting In Care

So just on a dime, just begin with love. Some species of love, gratitude, or compassion, loving-kindness, joy, equanimity, or maybe it's that special species of love that we call grief. But find something that gives you some access to your heart. Just rest in that for a minute or two as we begin here.

Just like irritation, or hatred, or impatience, or a depressive mood—just like all of that can flavor everything, so too can love. In the light of love and care and poignancy, just this breath is kind of a big deal. Kind of wonderful.

The energy of care, gratitude, aliveness just sort of suffuses the body. It need not be dramatic. It need not be rapturous delight, geysers of love. It may be very subtle, but body and mind tilted in the direction of care, tenderness.

Gratitude for finding a path that promises or hypothesizes that any given moment is practice, any life is practice. The possibility of love and freedom is never closed. And we may not be able to think our way into freedom. We may not be able to muscle our way into it, to effort our way into it, and yet it becomes us.

The more stable our mind gets, the more unambivalent our love gets. And when that which is not love arises, we don't have to artificially force our way into ease or forgiveness or joy or whatever. Just when the love is kind of sufficiently humming along, stabilized, a strong container, sort of drop the hate into that love and the hate burns off. It doesn't mean we can't say no, or we can't say no to something, but the hate burns off.

May we be free from suffering.

Dharmette: Compassion & Equanimity

So, thank you. It's good to practice with you. And yeah, thank you to everyone for sitting and practicing. And yeah, Kevin, Julie editing, maybe others too. Nancy scheduled me, the website people, all the managing directors, the board of directors, the volunteer coordinator... oh my god, it keeps going, right? [Laughter] Yeah, it's beautiful. Thank you.

If one were tasked with creating a religion, writing the holy books, right? It'd be a very tall order. You would have to write with two considerations in mind: how will you be read, but also how you will be misread. You'd have to guard against misreadings that would legitimize bad stuff. And part of the Buddha's genius, to my mind, is that his set of teachings provides very few footholds for fundamentalism, very few footholds for the derangement of overconfidence. It's an incredibly nuanced path where, in a way, rhetorical force is usually not privileged over nuance. And so one factor balances other factors, and we can't kind of fetishize any one aspect of the path. That's what I've been highlighting this week, just with pairings of teachings that maybe are not even traditionally paired, but on my own path of practice have been important counterbalancing forces.

And so with the last pairing I'm highlighting that I've been circumambulating often these past couple years: compassion and equanimity. We talk about freedom and happiness and these things, but a huge part of our practice is actually experiencing dukkha¹, experiencing suffering with incredible vividness. And part of why we don't squirm is we're developing okayness with imperfection, but part of why we don't squirm is so that we might perceive suffering vividly. And in a sit this morning, in a retreat, in a sense, it's just for pretend, right? If we're on retreat and there's a lot of suffering or something, we could shift postures, we could skip the sit, we could leave the retreat, but we don't. We don't.

And we sit, and this begins to actually etch into our brain just how hard it is to be human. Just how intense it is. Just how intense even a very blessed life is. And we see the movements of our mind, the ways that it desperately seeks somewhere, someone to pin the blame on when suffering is intense. Maybe it's blame on someone else, maybe it's blame on the self, but it seeks to hang the intensity of that affect somewhere. But we don't. All the blaming really just kind of blunts the insight about the intensity of the human condition. Insight into dukkha, which is a huge, huge, huge part of the path and has huge liberatory potential.

And so what happens to our heart when we open in that way vividly to suffering, undefended? Well, first we sense how deeply we long to be happy, the kind of innocence of that wish. And we sense how deeply that's shared by others. No matter how different their nervous system is from our own, it can't be that different. It can't be that different. And so we dedicate some portion of our energy to alleviating suffering. How much is enough? We don't know, it doesn't matter that much. We start. We start. Marx said, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," and we don't need a kind of authority or government to make us honor that. It's sīla².

So we look to see where we can spend our love well. I'm sort of like a value-conscious person, you know. I am sort of not stingy, but value-conscious, you know. And it's like, okay, where can we get a lot of bang for the love buck, basically, you know? Where can we spend our love? Well, compassion. Compassion entails a willingness to grieve. One element of compassion is grief; that's maybe the first movement of the heart. But that's not the last word. The last word of compassion is love.

Matthieu Ricard³ says, in giving compassion instruction, he says something like, imagine the suffering of the other basically in incredible vividness until it's unbearable. And then there's this inflection point: when it becomes unbearable to open to that depth of suffering, you pour all of your love into them. And sometimes it feels like if I open to compassion, it's going to end in suffering. It's going to end in suffering rather than love. But maybe compassion only ends in suffering when it's not counterbalanced by equanimity. And so we grow. We grow in our strength so that we can love more deeply. Our love becomes stronger.

But even when our heart is very strong, vast love at some point becomes fatiguing. Michele McDonald⁴ talks about flowers a lot, you know, nature generally, and flowers a lot. And she's like, yeah, flowers open, but they don't expect to stay open, you know. Sometimes I found myself prying open an orchid—I know, that's so bad, that's so not Buddhist. [Laughter] Flowers open and then something has to happen, they have to close, right? But what's the closing of the flower of the heart? It's not apathy, it's not hatred, it's maybe something like equanimity.

Equanimity is about refining our relationship to helplessness. Refining our relationship to helplessness. This kind of helplessness is sort of, in a way, a foundational experience, a primal experience. It's the experience that made us howl as children, and it's the experience that still generates tears as adults now. And it is that which our entire body is oriented against. It is the experience that is almost unbelievable to the willfulness of the ego, you know, nothing to be done, no moves to make, the ego all out of moves. So do you mean ungovernable for real? Yeah. And so aging, sickness, mortality, a kind of narcissistic wound, the limits of the ego's willfulness are highlighted. And so part of purifying our love is deeply understanding helplessness, which may be in the end just a synonym for dukkha.

And so we ask the question, can we keep our heart open, relaxed, exquisite on the other side of our power? Can we keep our heart open on the other side of our power? Equanimity is love in the face of the endless ungovernable nature of saṃsāra⁵, the suffering of this realm. But it's not a closing. Equanimity is a very quiet kind of love. It's like the arousal system: joy or something is a very high state of arousal; equanimity, the system is kind of turned down towards zero, but the heart is still wide open.

And one of the functions of this quiet love is that it refines out maybe the impurities in our compassion: the grandiosity or the compulsivity or this kind of simple intolerance of suffering that masquerades as compassion but is not it. That's something that I know well. You know, in the face of a loved one's suffering, it's a kind of intolerance and an agitated effort to dispel it, right? But compassion is a kind of—it may be urgent, but it's patient.

It is equanimity that lets us rest when there's no action to take. It lets us rest when only rest is helpful. It lets us rest when only rest is helpful. And then compassion is born again, then there's something to do and we do something. These cycles of love and rest, love and rest. The rest purifying our love, the love justifying the rest. And we keep going. Okay.