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Guided Meditation: Compassion

Welcome. You know the drill here; let's sit together.

Just let there be space in your heart for all the joys and sorrows of being human. When the heart begins to give permission, something drops in the body, something settles down. No one has a perfect, shiny mind or a perfect, shiny life. There are some loose ends in every human life. We develop the confidence that we can take our seat amidst it all.

When we stop trying to control our experience, the necessity of love becomes more and more apparent. Just breathe and relax into the condition of your life this moment.

You're not responsible for solving the predicament of the human condition. You're simply being asked to bless the intensity of the human condition, the intensity of a moment, of an urge, or a feeling—to bless this with wisdom and love. Every moment is practicable in one way or another. In the wake of letting go, there's something like a quiet love that remains.

And turning now more explicitly to compassion, just bring into your heart and mind someone you care about who's suffering. When we first fill out the landscape of their pain, to actually take that into our heart, to consider their inner life, the life of their body, and develop a kind of vivid sense of their suffering. This is only one part of our practice, but this is the first part.

And to understand their pain, of course, we naturally draw on our own pain, from memory or from life right now. We make vivid the suffering of this person we love and care about. So in compassion, one dimension is a willingness to grieve.

But we do not stay here; grief is not the last word. As the vision of their pain is dramatized, made clearer and clearer, our heart makes another move, and we pour all of our love into them. As if we fill their mind and body with our care or wishes that their suffering be alleviated, that they be at peace. Of course, there are traces of the grief, but it's mostly displaced by the warmth and love of compassion. It is a kind of compassion that doesn't fatigue our own heart, one that feels good to dwell in.

We're not insisting that someone stop suffering; we're offering our love and our blessings that it might be so. We just rest our mind, abiding in that warm care.

And then maybe these last few minutes we let go of orienting to one person, of orienting self and other. Instead, we practice just dwelling in the openness of compassion, distinctionless compassion.

Reflections on Compassion

It's good to sit with you.

Suffering is both everywhere and super obvious, but it's also kind of shocking that there is suffering. There's something shocking and startling about that, at least startling to our nervous system. And when there's some hard moment, I find there's a part of me that can barely believe it. Of course, I know I've contemplated dukkha^[1] a lot, but there's some naive part of my mind that is like, "How is this happening?" We can have that sense of, "How did the universe conspire to do this to me this moment?" And it might be just some small ache.

Hala Alyan^[2], a psychologist and poet, wrote a kind of grief poem. I think it was published in September or October of 2020. So, pandemic, George Floyd, election—a staggering amount of dukkha. And one of the lines in that poem was, "The patients who come to me swarmed with misery and astonishment, their hearts like newborns after the first needle." Dukkha can feel like that.

The Buddha asks that we comprehend suffering. I somehow like that translation: comprehend suffering. And the act of really comprehending suffering highlights the necessity of love. Sometimes I feel like the First Noble Truth—that there is dukkha—contains the next three, in a way. To really comprehend suffering, that is, to know the necessity of love, of compassion. Otherwise, we just kind of armor up and try to make the First Noble Truth vanish, or we crumble and collapse.

So the alternatives, when I think about it, the alternatives to love, really, are something like hate and apathy. Those are the alternatives. And so while we have some details to work out, no doubt, the path is actually pretty clear. Compassion is love in the face of dukkha, the wish that it be alleviated.

Part of compassion is coming to a more nuanced understanding of our own suffering. We first comprehend our own suffering. So often, without training, we basically misdiagnose our own suffering. It's just like people are trained in differential diagnosis, and we have to train in diagnosing our own suffering too. Because our habit is to embrace monocausal models. Single cause: "This is what's doing it. This is the source of my suffering."

Buddhist psychology invites us into a much more complex map of causality. It's almost never just this. Our mind gets seduced into that, but as we practice more, we start to appreciate the complexity of causality. We have that fantasy: "If I could just pull that one thread, the whole thing unravels." But our dukkha is a testament not to one thing, but kind of to everything. And if we have the wrong diagnosis, we can issue the wrong treatment. So often, we want to control our suffering rather than understand it. Compassion makes us patient in our understanding of suffering.

The compassion, the love of which I'm speaking, is not a kind of enmeshed love. It's not emotional contagion. In that first phase of taking in the suffering of another, the willingness to grieve with them, it's not this pure emotional contagion. My conditioning around love is a kind of enmeshed model, where it's like, "Your pain is my pain," and love and space are somehow in tension, rather than space affording room for love. And so I've found that the suffering of loved ones spins me in particular ways. My words might masquerade as compassion, but what they really testify to is the intolerance of their pain. It's somehow wanting to quickly manage dukkha.

It makes sense that as children, the suffering of a parent or caretaker is like an existential threat. At some level, growing up, all of us want the adult to be fully enlightened, to be free of suffering, to be a kind of master of samsara^[3], and that is not so. And so maybe some of that sense of threat, the threat of the suffering of the other, encodes some fear. As we grow up, in our own families and commitments to loved ones, the suffering of the other spins us. But compassion is not a kind of insistence that someone change; it's not even an insistence that someone stop suffering. It can feel that way, but then we just need to issue our own heart's love. This compassion is love in the face of suffering.

The monk Matthieu Ricard^[4] and brain scientist Tania Singer^[5] were doing a study where he was in the scanner doing compassion practice. She's interested in what this person's brain is like, and she asked him afterwards, "What were you doing?" Because the brain activations looked quite different from what she had expected. She saw some of the familiar nodes that light up when people are in a state of empathy—the brain regions you would see activated experimentally when a loved one is getting an electric shock, where we're feeling the grief of the other's pain, and that's hard. Compassion might use that as a seed for generating our commitment, but that's not the last word. There is this turning of the heart to love, to actually enjoying it, in a subtle way.

Thich Nhat Hanh^[6] said, "True love never makes you suffer." Compassion is a form of true love, and love doesn't hurt. Clinging for sure hurts, controlling for sure hurts, but this kind of love doesn't.

So we recognize that without compassion, the path can sometimes feel almost like greed: "More and more happiness, ease, and peace for me." And so we center this commitment to the welfare of others. We develop our own compassionate motivations by knowing suffering intimately in awareness. Every day we can do this: the pain of pain, the pain of change, the pain of the disjointedness of samsara.

And as we start to release our own pain, to comprehend dukkha, to become more and more free, the pain of the world doesn't so much resonate with our wounds, but with our heart. Our compassion is vitalized. Our own healing energizes this kind of care, makes it more urgent, because we know suffering so vividly, so intimately. We start to wish more and more naturally that it be alleviated in others, and body, speech, and mind follow.

Dzigar Kongtrul^[7] said, "Secretly, you have to fall in love with sentient beings."

For your consideration, please pick up whatever is useful and leave the rest behind. I would never say the same thing to each of you, and so it's your job to decode the beneficial from what can be left behind.

Every once in a while I have this moment with my webcam knowing you're behind it, having one of those now. Okay.