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Brahmavihāras: Appreciative Joy (2 of 5)

Good morning, good day. I realize I'm beginning to go over time with both the meditation and the short talk. I plan to get back on track, but maybe it's a little bit the nature of the topic this week: appreciative joy.

Muditā^[1], the Pali word, the Indian word for what is often called in English "appreciative joy" or "sympathetic joy." I like to call it this week "rejoicing." It's a more energetic and full experience to rejoice than to just appreciate. It seems like sometimes "appreciate" is a little bit of a small word compared to "rejoicing." In my vocabulary, rejoicing is something almost embodied, whereas appreciating is more of a cognitive thing.

It's a meditation practice in Buddhism, and as a meditation practice, it has a lot of benefits. One of them is that it helps to dissolve, soften, or get rid of the feelings we have of discontent, jealousy, or envy. It addresses discontent at the success and well-being of others. Of course, it's very odd to say that we could have discontent toward the joy of others, but for some people, jealousy and envy are a very big part of their lives.

This might be for many different reasons. Sometimes there are historical reasons why that's been cultivated or developed in us. Sometimes there's fear to really acknowledge the well-being of others. Or there's a comparison to ourselves, and we're discontent because if we really admit and celebrate the success of someone else, it might imply that our lack of success means we're not a good person. We might think it's a reflection on us that someone else is doing well, and we're being left behind by life in the world.

These kinds of thoughts and ideas stand in the way of feeling genuine, real appreciation, delight, and gladness. Seeing the joy and well-being of others becomes a hindrance. It keeps us limited and keeps the heart from really opening up to be present for this life in a full way.

As I've been saying, part of the function of this ideal of appreciative joy—rejoicing—is not to obligate us to feel that way, but to help us use it as a reference point. It helps us notice how we're still closed, to notice what stands in the way of opening the heart in a full and honest way.

When we discover that discontent—the word in the Pali texts for the primary hindrance to this appreciative joy—we see it can mean many things, but classically, it is often associated with envy, jealousy, and a certain kind of conceit. Conceit means thinking, "Oh, this says something about me, and maybe it says something bad about me." Conceit in Buddhism is not just thinking you're better than someone else, but also thinking that somehow you're less than someone else or don't measure up. All this concern with self-measurement and comparative thinking is a hindrance to having the heart open, relaxed, and present.

This mindfulness practice is really a practice to recognize what gets in the way of our open heart and our full presence to experience. The art of it is to notice what gets in the way, but then don't pile on more suffering, more judgments, or more aversion. Learn how to breathe with it and open to it. Learn how to hold it in the soft palms, the cupped hands of awareness.

Learn to open up to the realization that we can hold the challenges we have—the envy, the jealousy, the discontent—in a wider field, a wider sense of embodiment or in-mindedness. There is much more here that we can begin sensing when we learn how to be present in a non-reactive way. Without being swept up in our thoughts and judgments about it, we just allow it to be there.

Then, we begin to open up and feel whatever goodness is there. Maybe part of that goodness is the part of you that wants to help, the part of you that cares about yourself and wants to be supportive of who you are. Mindfulness practitioners realize that one of the ways we fulfill the desire to be helpful to ourselves is, paradoxically, not to do too much, except to really hold our challenges in awareness. Something opens up, something reveals itself that has a lot of goodness, joy, and well-being beyond the edges of it—in the rest of the body or somewhere else. There is just the goodness of having a practice.

So we want to learn to recognize the hindrances to sympathetic joy. We also want to recognize what the tradition calls the "near enemy" of it. The near enemy is that which looks like rejoicing, this muditā, but it's not really it. It is actually another way in which we're not fully open. The tradition defines it as the gladness or joy that comes from—you have to listen to this carefully, because in English it might come across a little bit off—"domestic life."

In the ancient language, "domestic life" was a synonym for the joy that comes with some kind of attachment, sometimes clinging to something. The primary one referred to here is associated with sensual pleasure—attachment to sensual pleasure. If we feel joy in someone's engagement in sensual pleasure—for example, "Wow, that was really good to get my fifth alcoholic drink of the day, I'm so happy to have it," and we feel joy in that person's happiness in having five drinks before noon—that's not really it. It's kind of sad. Having joy in that kind of pleasure is not really helpful or supportive for a deeper process.

I've seen it here in the United States among practitioners of muditā. The near enemy of muditā is often something a little different: giddiness. We feel joy and delight in what's happening, but get kind of giddy about it. Giddy, I think, means to be a little bit clinging to something, a little bit self-conscious, with a little bit of conceit and over-involvement with the joy. It feels a little bit off. There's a little bit of hyper energy involved, which is not a settled, open, free flow of joy, but something that actually separates us from the appreciation and delight we take in a situation. There can be a joy and well-being where, when the self gets too self-preoccupied or concerned with itself, we lose touch with the very thing we're appreciating.

That's my understanding of this term "giddiness." When it's used in English for us, it's a bubbling up of joy that is self-preoccupying, self-concerned, or self-oriented. That gets in the way of this boundless feeling of appreciation, joy, and delight in the well-being and good fortune of others.

One of the ways to have an entry point to this world of muditā is to begin understanding what gets in the way and what's more complicated. In doing so, it makes it much more realistic. We're careful not to override, jump over, or do a spiritual bypass of how we really are. We must recognize who we are, warts and all, with all the shortcomings and challenges we have.

In spite of that—or with that, or because of our capacity to open to that—we are able to have a heart that's more open to experience the joy of the world, the pleasure of the world, the appreciation of all the helpers, the goodness that's here, and the success and good fortune of others. That ability to open is really one of the primary parts of Buddhist practice.

If we can open really to our own suffering with this open heart, that very ability to open is the openness we carry when we get up from our cushion. When we encounter the beautiful things of the world, we're open to that, and there is sympathetic joy. If we encounter the suffering of the world, we open to that, and then we have compassion. Because the doors are open, nothing sticks. As soon as something is stuck, part of the doors are closed.

Keep this open-door policy of the heart. Keep your doors open. Slowly, over time, we can learn the tremendous value of these brahmavihāras^[2]. One of the really great ones that can be nourishing, nurturing, inspiring, and can fuel even the practice of the Dharma is this appreciative joy: to rejoice in the well-being of others.

For this next 24 hours, I'd encourage you to explore this more for yourself. Notice as you go through the day your reactivity to whatever contact you have with goodness in the world, or people celebrating, or having success. See if you can experience it with completely open doors of the heart, or whether you somehow resist it, close down, or distance yourself from it.

With no judgments about yourself, hopefully you can just get curious for one day. Become an explorer, a discoverer of the whole territory of your inner life, having to do with real deep appreciation, joy, and the lack of it for the success, well-being, and goodness that you experience in other people. In the process, let's all become people who can benefit the world by appreciating what can be appreciated.

Thank you very much.