This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Deep Rest; Compassion (1 of 5) Compassion without Sinking. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Deep Rest; Dharmette: Compassion (1 of 5) Compassion Without Sinking - Kodo Conlin

The following talk was given by Kodo Conlin at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 06, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Deep Rest

So, well, maybe I tend to underestimate how much joy I'm going to feel when I see all of these "good mornings" and the reports from all these locations. I'm streaming to you from a different place now. I'm nestled in this foggy valley just north of Santa Cruz at IRC, the Insight Retreat Center. I am very happy to be here doing this, and I'm unsure about the connection, so we'll see if the bandwidth holds up. If it drops off, we'll just get to meditate.

I'm very happy to be with you. As I heard Rhonda Magee put it, "Good moment." Not good morning, good afternoon, good night; she just said, "Good moment."

The way I think about our purpose in coming together for these sittings and dharmettes is to be together as a sangha¹, together as a community, and to practice together and have some time to prioritize the Buddhist teachings. Feeding them into our lives, reflecting on them, working with them together as a community so we can learn for ourselves how we want to live well, how we want to live peacefully and dharmically.

The theme I've chosen for the week is the Buddhist teachings on compassion. And why is that? One of my Zen teachers frequently encourages me to give the talk you need to hear. When I asked myself, I thought, "Oh, what would be nourishing this week?" The Buddhist teachings on compassion. I hope you find it nourishing too.

So let's start with a sitting. We will start with a sitting that I hope will care for these hearts of ours that, I think for many of us, really want to wish well for this ailing world. As much as we would like to give and give endlessly, sometimes the heart needs some rest. So our focus for this morning will be rest. We'll do some grounding and balancing at the beginning of this meditation, and then we'll move into the breathing and scan the body so that, bit by bit, we can relax.

Let's find our way into the meditation posture, reclining or sitting. Turning back to this felt body. Prioritizing that aware connection with the body. Maybe taking a few deep breaths and feeling the steadying influence of the breathing. Or maybe starting with the ears, letting the sounds call us back here.

As we prioritize and tune in to this body, this one precious body, inclining the mind to notice its groundedness. Maybe the ways that it's solid. Supported. Supported, firm, steady.

If this isn't the experience of your body in this moment, maybe there's some small place in the body, maybe the soles of the feet, maybe the sitting base, or some of the bones that are just resting with gravity. Balanced, grounded.

Staying connected to the body in this way, the next invitation is to bring some bit of focus to the breathing, especially the exhale. Letting the inhale come in naturally on its own time, and then you can experiment with the exhale just being slightly longer than natural. Just enough to cue the body to relax. A little bit of emphasis on the exhale. Relaxing this body.

Grounding the body, inviting relaxation with the exhale. If just this is for you this morning, afternoon, or evening, if it's nourishing, please continue. And if you would like to follow along with the next invitation, you're welcome to do that. This will be to bring attention to the body, section by section, to notice if there's any tension that's easy to release. Giving permission, in a way, for this tension to rest.

You can do this in your own way, at your own pace. It may be the whole head and neck, attending to this, any obvious tension. Release. One shoulder and the whole arm, and release. The other shoulder and arm, and release. The whole torso and back, release. One leg from the hip to the toes, relaxing, and the other leg, release.

And you're invited to continue in your own way, giving this body permission to rest.

And in the last minutes of this sitting, feeling free to let go of any effort in these activities we're doing. To sense and appreciate any relaxation that's come, any feeling of rest. And if the sense of rest hasn't come just now, may the seeds of rest be planted for the future.

May all beings everywhere know the deep rest of clear knowing and release. May all beings be well.

Dharmette: Compassion (1 of 5) Compassion Without Sinking

Good moment. Hello. During our meditations, the rain started. How wonderful! I'm getting a note that the bell was a little loud. I'll adjust that for tomorrow.

So, welcome again. As I mentioned, the focus for the week is the Buddhist teachings on compassion. I'd like to start with a story to illustrate this theme. The inspiration and theme for the talk today is: how do we have compassion without sinking?

The story comes from the very first teaching in one of the books of the Buddhist discourses, the Connected Discourses². Someone comes to the Buddha and asks, "How does one cross the flood?" And the Buddha, in his care and compassion for this being, responds, "It's by not halting and not struggling that I was able to cross the flood." The person asks further, "Oh, how did you do that?" Fair question. And the Buddha said, "When I halted, I sank. And when I struggled, I got swept away."

So how do we have compassion without sinking? How do we practice compassion without sinking?

I asked a very similar question to Venerable Anālayo³ recently. I asked him, how do we relate to the suffering of this world without being overtaken, in a way? How do we cross the flood, or how do we have compassion without sinking? The background for this question, I think, maybe doesn't need stating, but the phrase "compassion fatigue" comes to my mind, and I hear it from friends often. Of course, in the academic sense, it means something quite specific, but I think in our popular sense, it invokes something or expresses a kind of weariness, a challenge in these challenging times. This is maybe conditioned by the fact that we have in the practice something that I might call a Dharma imperative to sensitivity. We're training in being sensitive, and we're training to care.

So again, this question: how, with a sensitive heart, do we swim without sinking, or care without being depleted? In a positive sense, how do we love in a way that's sustainable?

The Buddha offered his teachings out of compassion, it's said, out of care, and I think we're still benefiting from that. So like I mentioned, we will look into some of these Buddhist teachings on compassion this week. Venerable Anālayo, in responding to my question on how we love sustainably and have compassion without sinking, was speaking from the perspective of meditative cultivation of compassion. The practice of compassion has a broad scope for us as practitioners, and in the Buddhist teaching, we have the meditative scope and what I'll call the daily life scope.

He was really talking about meditation, and he pointed me in this direction: the first step in his answer was to practice recognizing a distinction that allows us to love sustainably. Now, this was given to me at the end of a retreat, so I'd had all this time to rest and to really care for myself, and then I heard this distinction. In the early Buddhist sense, there's a distinction between keeping the heart open to suffering and refraining from taking it on—taking on the suffering of others like putting it on our back. The distinction here is important, and they're related to one another. Keeping an open, sensitive heart is part of the path, and that makes possible the wish for well-being. These two are closely related, but they're distinct, so it takes some practice to start to recognize them.

The example Venerable Anālayo gave me of the difference between keeping an open heart and taking on the suffering of another used the image of a doctor. Imagine a doctor meeting patients. The first one comes in, and the doctor takes on the difficulty of the person. If that's what they focus on, how many people do you think they could see? Two, three, four, five before they were depleted? The wise doctor keeps their senses and their heart open, but doesn't focus only on the ailment. They also focus on the possibility of health: "This is the prognosis, this is the way forward, these are some things we can do, we can try." The doctor sees the whole scope and doesn't stop with just the ailment.

To just stop with the ailment would be, in the Buddhist sense, the contemplation of dukkha⁴, which has a slight distinction from the cultivation of compassion. Contemplation of dukkha makes compassion possible, but it's not the whole practice of compassion. Of course, the Buddha is sometimes talked about as the Great Physician, and it's understood that maybe he borrowed a medical framework when formulating the Four Noble Truths⁵.

The First Noble Truth of dukkha—suffering or unsatisfactoriness—is like the doctor seeing the ailment. The Second Noble Truth is assessing the causes and conditions, the craving that leads to clinging. The Third Noble Truth is like the prognosis: there is an end of suffering that's possible, the cessation of craving. And then the Fourth Noble Truth is the treatment, so to speak: the Noble Eightfold Path.

So in this metaphor of the doctor, the doctor sees the whole scope. They do not limit and dwell their awareness and their heart only on the suffering, but also see these other parts: what are the causes and conditions, what's the possibility of health, and then how do we get there. So Venerable Anālayo's encouragement was to get familiar with this distinction between contemplation of dukkha and the cultivation of compassion. Both parts are in the service of loving sustainably, in the service of not sinking.

I was considering how to practice getting to know this distinction between the contemplation of dukkha and wishing well for others. As I was looking into the teachings on compassion, one of the things we notice is that there's not a very clear definition in the teachings about what compassion is. I was a bit surprised by this, but I started to speculate that the Buddha was a very thoughtful person, and that this was actually in the service of our humanity. Instead of definitions, the Buddha conveys the teachings through images and stories that touch on and light up our social nervous system that connects with other beings. I didn't see the Buddha respond to the question, "Dear Buddha, what is compassion?" with, "Oh, compassion is X." Instead, he conveyed it through story and image so that we connect with other beings.

I think that's basic because the key function of the practice of compassion, as we know, is the wishing well. The wishing that another being have freedom from suffering. It's that close, it's that immediate. It's right here. Wishing that another being be free from suffering, or wishing that we are free from suffering; this is the nature of compassion.

In some of the early groundbreaking research about compassion and burnout, they found the key difference between those that were able to sustain and those that weren't was simply this wish for the well-being of others. Everyone in the study was exposed to a great amount of pain and suffering in terms of images and stories. For those that were able to not sink—to love sustainably—the one ingredient was wishing others well, wishing they be free from suffering.

I think there's a way in our meditation that we can get more and more sensitive to this distinction, and I feel like it may be important in practicing compassion to come into the meditative space and recognize suffering as suffering as it's present. Recognize suffering as suffering, and also sense, as we incline the mind, "May this being be free from suffering," and be very sensitive to what that does. There's a close monitoring that's being asked for here between the mind that draws to the suffering only, kind of like a magnet, and the mind that can be with suffering with an open, sensitive heart and also incline toward the wish for well-being: "May these beings be free from suffering."

So this question of how to love sustainably, how to practice compassion without sinking. This morning, and across these five mornings, I'll be speaking about this topic of compassion. I think it's important to say that it's for each of us to discern what is the right, healthy amount of exertion and effort, and what's the right amount of rest. Discerning our wise relationship. I hope that sharing some of these teachings from the Buddha on compassion can be part of your reflections this week, your practice this week.

In the practice of compassion, may we make every necessary effort, and when it's time to rest, may we rest completely. Thank you for your practice this morning, today, evening. May all beings everywhere be sensitive just enough and wish others well. It's possible. May all beings be free from suffering. Take care.