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Happy Hour: Compassion From the Inside Out - Nikki Mirghafori

The following talk was given by Nikki Mirghafori at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 17, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Happy Hour: Compassion From the Inside Out

Introduction

Hello everyone, and welcome to Happy Hour. I am delighted to be with you and to receive your greetings at the beginning. It always makes me feel connected to this international sangha¹ from so many different parts of the world.

For this evening, I wanted to invite us to engage with compassion practice. It seems like the right medicine for this week, what with what is happening in the world geopolitically, and also what is happening very likely for ourselves and with people perhaps we know.

You can never have enough compassion. Never enough compassion. As the Dalai Lama said, compassion is not a luxury, it's a necessity. It's a necessity for us humans to survive.

I don't think there is much more that I want to say to frame it, but to say that you are invited to practice compassion wherever you are called to in this session. There might be a lot of physical pain right now where you're sitting practicing. There might be heartache in your heart, or there might be deep, deep care for people who are in extremely painful, difficult situations elsewhere in the world. Our sisters, our brothers, our siblings in humanity—we're not so different, and maybe that's where your heart goes to hold them with compassion and good wishes.

So let us engage. Let us begin.

Guided Meditation

Let us begin by arriving, arriving, arriving, arriving. Take a moment to arrive in your body in this moment in time, in this seated posture. Take time to arrive.

The preliminaries are important. How are you sitting? If you're sitting in a chair, are the bottoms of your feet touching the earth? Are you sitting comfortably? Is your back straight? Are your shoulders rolled back, sitting with a sense of integrity and dignity as well as comfort? Is your body relaxed? Is there extra holding and tightness where there is no need for it?

Can you relax your body, especially if there is physical pain present? We often tighten up around the pain, or around emotional pain we tighten up. Can you invite your body, your dear precious body, to relax in this moment? Relax. Relax. Relax. Relax.

Just be breathed. Nothing needed, nothing extra. Relax and let the body be breathed, because it knows how to do this. It knows how to breathe. Awareness simply receiving the breath. The sensations of the breath in the belly are being received on their own. You don't have to add much effort on top of what's already happening.

Let each breath, especially each out-breath, be more and more relaxing. Letting go of expectations, of thoughts, and just be present. Sinking more deeply, allowing preoccupations to be put down, to be released for just this moment. This moment of respite is deeply needed.

And we put it all down in this moment. Just for a moment, we can pick it up later. But first we need to establish the ground, the stability of the heart, intimacy with this breath.

And can we imagine that each out-breath is releasing, calming, soothing, bringing comfort and succor² to this body, to this heart and mind? Every out-breath, as if the out-breath is soothing, calming, massaging, wrapping a blanket of care around yourself. And the in-breath is gathering any acknowledgment of discomfort or pain. Not so much thinking about it, but it's automatically happening, as if the pain in the heart and the body is being collected and transformed in the heart center, and breathed out as comfort and succor, nourishing yourself with each breath.

And if it feels like too much to think about the in-breath collecting the challenges and being transformed in the out-breath, breathing out succor, comfort, and compassion, then let go of the in-breath part. Just consider the out-breath is soothing, comforting, bringing calm care to pain and sorrow.

And now, if you like, you can expand and extend the circle of compassion to include a few people in areas of the world that are suffering right now. Include them in your mind, in your heart, as if your out-breath is bringing them care and succor while they're afraid, grieving, and suffering. They are human beings just like me. Just as I wish to be happy, I wish you happiness and freedom from sorrow and suffering, just as I wish it for myself.

Include all of you in your practice. Include yourself, and others in a challenged area in our world right now.

Just as I wish to be free from sorrow, free from pain, I wish you fellow human beings, I wish you freedom from sorrow and pain. May you have ease as much as possible in the midst of this difficulty. As if with each out-breath you were putting your blanket of care around people you don't know. But it doesn't matter, we're all related. We're all part of the human family. You could have been born as them; they could have been born as you.

And now for the last few minutes of this practice, let your heart be drawn to wherever it's drawn to the most for the compassion practice. Maybe someone you know who's grieving, someone you don't know, yourself, your body, your heart. Wherever you're drawn, breathing out compassion and succor. Care.

Offering your wishes for well-being without attachment, but as a gift to the world, to yourself, to nonviolence, to more love and compassion in the world. Training our hearts and minds to care.

And in the last minute of this practice period, offering compassion to yourself for however this practice period was. Whether it was sleepy or distracted doesn't matter. Offer care and compassion that you showed up, you've done your best, and letting go of the rest.

May our practice be a cause and condition for wisdom, for compassion in our world. May all beings be free, including ourselves.

Reflections and Q&A

Thanks everyone, thanks for your practice.

So the practice of compassion is meeting sorrow and suffering with care and kindness. Tonight, the way I led it, we started with ourselves and then we brought in others. Also, another thing to note is, for those of you who know what Tonglen³ practice is—breathing in suffering, breathing out care—I offered that as one variation early on. But if it became too overwhelming, I invited you to just lean into the out-breath of bringing comfort and peace, meeting suffering. So those are just some nuances of tonight.

Welcome back everyone. We have some time for any reflections if you want to share them in chat. Chat is open, or you can also raise your hand.

Hi Amy, I see your hand, please.

Amy: Thank you so much. I've had a lot of aha moments when it comes to finding ways to elicit compassion for others deeply in hard moments, moments of conflict. One is somatically. Like you guys see me rocking here a lot, the rocking chair reminds me of holding a young child and rocking them and meeting them in their emotions. And the hand on the heart, or a hug.

Another piece I've been doing is putting aside their story and trying to see the emotion that's under that, that I can relate to, and the part of them that probably started having that emotion when they were young. So defensiveness that comes out of fear or sadness, I can relate to that. Stopping my own need to be seen or validated in that moment, but instead, seeing them. Once I can deeply see them for like, ouch, they are in pain right now, and they're relating it to me or relating it to something, and we don't necessarily agree in that aspect—but that doesn't matter. What matters is that they're this human experiencing a pain.

If I can see them, then usually their defenses can come down. Sometimes there's discernment for me to then share mine, and if there isn't, then I can go to a friend or someone who I can feel a congruence, an attunement, a validation, or feel love from. But I feel like that's been a very big aha moment for me in how I try to meet conflicts.

Nikki Mirghafori: Profound. Thank you, Amy, thanks so much for sharing. You shared so much here, beautiful. Both the somatic aspect of relating—because we all have bodies, so that's a doorway of somatic experiencing through the rocking or hand on the heart—and also, as you said so beautifully, seeing not what's happening on top, but what emotion is underneath and how that perhaps came to be when they were younger. The causes and conditions, to bring the Buddhist terminology to that, but really getting in touch with that, and not overlaying your own perspective on it.

Amy: And how I can kind of relate to that pain for them, so that can be the true compassion there. Like if it's, "Oh, I could see how that would hurt," then that can elicit that true compassion.

Nikki Mirghafori: Exactly. "If I were in their shoes, this would hurt, of course." Thanks, Amy. Thanks so much.

Ron: Yeah, someone in our group mentioned something that really resonated, which was when we become so aware of so much suffering and in so many areas, at times it can almost feel like it's exponentially growing and can start to feel almost hopeless in some way. But when we sort of turn inside to focus the compassion on our own suffering, it has a quality to it of: A) it's something that's doable and we have some control over, and B) we're better at being compassionate and helpful to others when we've also turned that compassion onto ourselves and done that work.

Nikki Mirghafori: Indeed, well said. I'm so appreciating you sharing what came both for your practice and also in the small group. It sounds like you had a very juicy, wonderful conversation about the benefits of compassion both turned inwards, how that can actually support it turning outwards, and not veering into overwhelm. Because the mind can get overwhelmed, but the heart, when it stays in the present moment, can always have hope. Thanks, Ron. Thank you.

Claric: So I was starting out trying to envision a family who may be on one side being persecuted, and I was struggling to connect. Kind of to my surprise, a little ways into it, I had this very clear image of somebody on the other side who is doing the persecuting. Kind of like Amy said, seeing the pain of hurting another person, and the bad karma⁴ of that, and then also all the causes and conditions and pain that would have led them up to that.

Then I thought about that scene—I don't know who has seen Everything Everywhere All at Once—but there's a climactic scene where she puts a googly eye on her third eye, and instead of fighting all the other people, she uses this new power to see what needs they didn't get filled in their past life that are making them act the way they are now. She creatively starts helping them fulfill these needs so they don't want to be violent anymore. It just made me think about the courageousness and creativity that you need to respond in the face of really intense suffering like that. I just love that image of her putting the googly eye on, and this wind blows behind her, and she stands there really strong. Then instead of fighting, she just embraces them all with compassion.

Nikki Mirghafori: Beautiful. Thanks for bringing this in, Claric. I've seen the movie, and I'm getting chills as you bring that into this moment because yes, in the movie she becomes the expression of the Buddha of compassion in that moment, really seeing the cause and condition. "What does this person need they didn't get?" and giving it to them. It's so sweet actually, and I'm so touched that you bring this in from your own practice of, "Oh yeah, this is what came up for me." Instead of seeing someone who's being persecuted and seeing their pain, it just flipped naturally, which is beautiful. What an expansion of our heart to be able to go there on its own—that yes, this person who's causing pain is really, really hurt. I'm deeply touched by your practice report as well as everyone who's shared tonight. Ron and Amy too, thank you. Thank you all, beautiful deep practices. Thank you.

And one question is coming: "Nikki, how to overcome a belief that blocks compassion? This happened to me today. My belief about someone or events blocked compassion for me towards myself or others."

So, I would say that in order for me to answer that, I need more details, because there are different things that block compassion. But actually, this is what I can say: I think what needs to happen is that when compassion gets blocked, you need to see with awareness what the belief is that has blocked it. Is it that I don't deserve it? Is it that they don't deserve it? Is it that it's going to make them soft, or me soft? What is that belief that's blocking compassion? That compassion is too soft? There are just so many beliefs I can't go through all of them, but please free yourself. See what the belief is that is causing that block, and then put a question mark next to it. Is that so? Is that really so challenging?

Challenge it instead of just believing it. Because there are so many unhelpful, unexamined beliefs that we can carry around that block compassion. So examine them. That's what I'm trying to tell the person who wrote me the private question in chat. You're welcome.

Thank you, dear ones. Thank you so much for your practice, for cultivating your hearts. I'm deeply, deeply touched with the reports tonight and just holding so many sides of this aching human family where we are in pain and we cause pain. May we grow in love and compassion. May all beings everywhere be free from sorrow. May all beings everywhere be free, including ourselves.

Thanks everyone. Be well.