This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: The Movement of the Heart; Brahma Viharas: (2 of 5) Karuna - Compassion. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: The Movement of the Heart; Brahma Viharas: (2 of 5) Karuna - Compassion

The following talk was given by Maria Straatmann at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 23, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: The Movement of the Heart (link)

Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good time of day. Good day.

As we sit here, I invite you to take a comfortable and alert position. Find a place that allows you to settle in, but be completely present just here in this space. Gather up your energy to be here. Gather it up. Feel it coming into your body and settling into the stillness of just being here.

Feel the parts of your body settling. Take a deep breath and let it out. Feel your body in this space. Centering here. Arrive in the body. With each breath, feel the flow of energy into the body, arriving here. Let your shoulders relax. Let your belly relax. Just breathe.

Allow the gathering energy, the awareness of yourself, to settle somewhere in the core of your body, your heart center, whatever feels like the center for you, the energetic center. Let your awareness be there. Feel the energy there. Whatever it is, allow it to be what it is. Tentative, easeful. Jittery, smooth. Just settle there in the middle, in the center. Be aware of you in the center. Just here.

Breathe into that center and let it go. And know for now it's safe there.

Gather whatever thoughts you may have. Bring them to that center gently, gently. Know that the past is a memory and the future is a fantasy. And whatever ideas you may have about yourself or others is a changeable idea. Let them come to the center and gently, gently just let those thoughts fade away. Feel the flow of those thoughts coming and going. They're just thoughts. It's just energy coming into your center and flowing out again.

Be gentle with yourself. The soft and tender center that is here, breathing.

If you're still centered, if you're still aware of the center, gather up the energy of your heart sense. Feel what is in your heart. Whether it is anger or sadness or love or peace, whatever the feeling that is there, allow yourself to truly feel it in the stillness of this moment with all the tenderness you can muster. Feel what is in your heart. Allow it to have the feeling it feels. Give yourself this freedom to feel what the heart feels.

No thoughts. Just feel what you feel. Not holding, not pushing away. Gently, tenderly, feel what you feel. Don't even listen. Feel what you feel here in the center. Allow the thoughts to come and go. Feel the energy flowing in and out with each breath. And just breathe. Just be here with your heart. Be here for you.

In the final minutes of our sitting, recall resting in the here and now. All the thoughts and feelings coming and going. The ebb and flow of the energy of the body. Thoughts, feelings coming and going, changing, entering and leaving. And stay here. Stay grounded. Stay in the present. Just be here. Here with your heart, your mind, your body. Rest here. Rest here.

Dharmette; Brahma Viharas: (2 of 5) Karuna - Compassion (link)

Hi everyone, I'm Maria Storti and today we are on number two of the Brahma Viharas¹. One of my favorites, Karuna² or compassion. Karuna, I even like the sound of the word. There's a smoothness, Karuna. The movement of the heart. The movement of the heart. It's not what we do. It is the movement of the heart. It's not about feeling sorry for people. It's located inside. We need to be in our hearts to truly feel compassion.

I was thinking about moments, and this topic brings up all kinds of memories for me. I was a hospice volunteer for about nine years, and all of the people that I recall, all of the conditions, all of the instances that are etched on my mind. The moments of compassion had very little to do with what I did or said and everything to do with being totally and completely, entirely there with them in their suffering. Just there with them when they were coughing up blood or feeling really scared and everyone around them had a white face and theirs was black, or "what's happening to me," or "this isn't what death was supposed to be like." Just being there and how difficult that can be.

You know, compassion is not an emotional response. It's a real commitment. It's a commitment to allowing your heart to feel. So, it brings up the question of empathy. Empathy is very important in compassion, but it's not just any kind of empathy. I kind of like the explanation of empathy where there are kind of three types of empathy. There's the empathy of knowing what the other person is feeling. Con artists are really good at this. "I know what you're feeling and I can play on this." It's a very self-focused sort of understanding of what the other person feels. "I know what you're feeling so I can use that information." It's an important part of compassionate action. "I know what you're feeling, so I know how to respond to you." But it is actually selfish. It's about me.

The second type of empathy is an empathy where I feel what you're feeling. I'm feeling it. I'm feeling it. And you can become quite useless in that condition where you're just feeling everybody's energy. You're feeling their pain. They're feeling your pain. But that's about me again. It's me and you. I'm feeling it. I'm feeling it.

The third type of empathy is, "I feel your suffering in mine and I vow to do something about your suffering." That's where compassion lies. It is the movement of the heart that says no to suffering. It isn't the compassionate action that may follow from that. It is the movement of the heart.

So like loving-kindness, it's not a remedy for something or a place that we go to. It's a place we come from. It's not a place we go to. It's a place we come from. It comes from the heart. It is the attitude of mind that my heart is moved by my suffering and yours and I truly wish for the end of the suffering. And I will direct my actions toward this.

It calls for empathy and yes, tenderness. Tenderness. So tenderness requires gentleness for ourself. Also in the beginning, tenderness for us, for our tender hearts, tenderness for others, but tenderness for us. Sensitivity to what's actually happening. Sensitivity to what's happening for us, what's happening for the other. You have to be willing to feel suffering in the world. To feel suffering in the world. This is not a simple thing.

Tenderness is a way of being openhearted to say my heart is tender and I have a growing understanding for what my heart can feel and the breadth of love it can hold. It is a practice. Compassion is a practice.

Joan Halifax³ wrote about compassion that it is a soft front and a strong steel back. A soft front and a steel back. You need both the softness of the heart and the determination of the heart. So I once wrote a poem about compassion. I'm going to read it to you.

I am a container. It's not so much what I hold, but that I can. What I offer fills me and is given on the way. It does not belong to me any more than I am the source, but that the source sustains, burnishes me, gracing me as it flows into and out. The hieroglyphs on my surface reflect visions, scars and souvenirs of places I have visited. But it is emptiness that is my beauty and strength. Where there is possibility, there is opportunity, a willing open vessel.

It is the emptiness of this container, the willingness to be a vessel for suffering. That's important. You have to show up and be willing to have your heart broken. You have to show up and be willing to have your heart broken.

Somebody once asked me, "Well, what do you do when you see suffering and there's nothing you can do about it and you've tried everything you could try and still people are suffering or you're suffering? What do you do then?" And I said, "Well, you allow your heart to be broken." Now that sounds facile, but never underestimate the power of a broken heart. It's the place from which you can say, "I will not sustain allowing suffering to happen." The movement of the heart gives you a place from which you can continue to show up for other people.

I remember a wonderful woman. She was a Russian woman and she had a form of dementia that was a violent form of dementia. And so people were warned they could not get anywhere close to her bed and you had to stay away. And she was totally isolated and she was really nasty to everybody that came up to the bed. And so I watched her for a long time. And so I went up and over time I would stand there and I would put my hand over the bed and then she would hit my hand and I'd move it back. I would put it over and she'd hit my hand. And after a while she would look at me and I would put my hand up and she'd hit it and I'd laugh and then I'd put my hand up and she'd hit it and then she'd laugh. This went on for some time, and then eventually, we're talking weeks here, she'd let me touch her and she became fascinated with my ID tag.

We had a form of a relationship where I could interact with her. And the head of the hospice came by and said, "Don't get near her. Don't get near her. Not allowed to do that." And I just I'd walk away and he'd leave and then I'd go back.

And she was there many months. And toward the end of her life, her daughter had stopped coming because it was so painful that she wasn't recognized and that she was hostile. The mother was hostile to the daughter. And I told the daughter that at the end she had become quite loving because at the end I would come up to her and she would literally give me her arm to be massaged and she was quite loving. Quite loving.

And really all I did was enter her space and say, "I'll be here with you." That was all. Without expectations, without making anything different, just be with you. I later learned that she was, she had formerly been head of a cardiology department in Russia. She was a brilliant woman. That broke my heart that she had become so isolated and so lost at the end. But it also warmed my heart that I could just be with her.

There are people in your life that you can just be with who are hostile, who are friendly, who are suffering. You don't know what to do with them. I called a friend the other night whose husband recently died and I just listened to her and said, "You're probably tired of people telling you what to do." And she just lashed out at all the people who are trying to be nice to her. And she just wanted to be left alone to figure out who she was. And I said, "Yeah, without bias." And she said, "Yeah, just all she wanted was just to be herself and not have somebody tell her how she needed to be. Who knew?"

But you have to just be present. This is the compassionate heart, to be there and be willing to see someone's pain. She said, "You know, some people call me just because they want to talk about my husband to sort of take care of their sorrow." And I'm sitting here on the phone thinking, "Yes, I'd love to do that, too." But I did not because my pain didn't need to be her pain and I could see. We're both suffering here.

This is it. We see, we feel, and we stay anyway. To not turn our faces away from the suffering of the world even when there is nothing that can be done by us. We vow to put an end to suffering. And one of the primary ways is to just be there and to allow ourselves to be touched. Which isn't to say there aren't things to do.

So, I'm going to read to you a poem by Ada Limón⁴. And I'm thinking, thank you, Debbie Gornstein, for introducing Ada Limón to me. This is called "A Good Story."

Some days, dishes piled in the sink, books littering the coffee table are harder than others. Today my head is packed with cockroaches. Dizziness and everywhere it hurts. Venom in the jaw, behind the eyes, between the blades. Still the dog is snoring on my right, the cat on my left. Outside, all those red buds are just getting good. I tell a friend, "The body is so body." And she nods. I used to like the darkest stories, the bleak snippets someone would toss out about just about how bad it could get. My stepfather told me a story about when he lived on the streets as a kid, how he'd some nights sleep under the grill at a fast food restaurant until both he and his buddy got fired. I used to like that story for some reason. Something in me that believed in overcoming. But right now, all I want is a story about human kindness. The way once when I couldn't stop crying because I was 15 and heartbroken, he came in and made me eat a small pizza he cut up into tiny bites until the tears stopped. "Maybe I was just hungry," I said. And he nodded, holding out the last piece.

Maybe I was just hungry. Maybe I was just hungry for someone just to be there and let me cry and be heartbroken. Let me be the way I am. Let me be in my suffering and you be there with me. "And he nodded, holding out the last piece."

We all long to be touched and to be seen. Be the one who can be touched. Be the one who sees.

May you know love in your hearts for yourself and others. Thank you.