Deep Compassion

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Deep Compassion - Gil Fronsdal. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 05, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Deep Compassion

A good number of years ago, there was a man who came to do our year-long introduction to the Buddhist chaplaincy program. I asked him how he got interested, as he had no background in anything related to chaplaincy. He said he had a career that was very technical in nature, spent a lot of time in his head designing things on computers, and he wanted to try to find another way to be alive, to be a human.

So he went to a local hospital to offer to volunteer there. They assigned him to the neonatal unit to go, I think it was once a week for a few hours, and hold a preemie. These premature-born people who ordinarily would stay in the womb, all cozy and nice with physical contact inside their mother's womb, lose that contact before they're really fully developed. It's important for preemies to have physical contact, to be held. He was assigned the job of going there and holding a preemie for a few hours in his volunteer shift.

He did that for a year, and that changed him. It called forth something from his heart, awoke something in him that showed him a very different way of being in the world than the way he had been trained and how he worked in his career. He decided to do more of this kind of caregiving in this kind of way and started going into local county jails to offer supportive training for inmates there. Then he came and did our chaplaincy program to continue that movement. What was it that awoke in him? I'd like to call it his warm-heartedness or the basic human, maybe mammalian, caregiving instinct or capacity we have.

If you want to get really reductionistic, you could say that holding those preemies released a lot of oxytocin in his system, which makes you feel really good but softens you. It's a hormone that helps people be caregivers. It's pretty important to be able to have this caregiving instinct for babies when they're born. To hold a newborn baby is one of the great things in life. I kind of missed a piece of it for my first son when he was born because I didn't know how special it was. I didn't know that the smell of a newborn baby, before they start drinking mother's milk, is just heavenly. It's just like something out of this world. But once they start digesting stuff, things start changing. [Laughter] But you know, this effect that it can have on a person to hold a newborn baby is significant.

It's probably pretty important to have that effect because these babies require a lot of care. The care that a caregiver gives a newborn baby is generally one of tenderness, carefulness, gentleness, love, and warm-heartedness, regardless of what comes out of the baby, both out of their mouth and out of other places. It's amazing to see the emotional range of a baby. At some point, they can certainly express fury, anger, desperation, and all kinds of things in different ways. Their primary vocabulary is different ways of crying. You have to listen to all the different languages of crying to know how to care for them. It can be dramatic, and sometimes they won't stop crying easily.

So, of course, they're kind of a nuisance then, and probably you would just slap them across the face or throw them across the floor and yell, "Stop that!" and be angry. Isn't that how we get our way? Some people do that to babies. Some kids grew up with a lot of anger and violent anger in their family. As a dharma teacher meeting people on retreat where people are touching into some of the deepest places in their hearts, I get a lot of stories of people who never remembered a time in their life that a parent wasn't violently angry, and they grew up with that. A child grows up very, very differently if the parent offers unconditional tenderness, care, and love—regardless of the emotional expression or the challenge that the little baby has—than if the parent responds with anger, hostility, and yelling.

It makes a huge difference for the child and how they spend the rest of their life. That's the case as children grow up. I had one mother tell me that her child, when they were three or four, came and said in the most endearing kind of way, "I love you, I want to marry you." And only 15 minutes later, they said, "I hate you." For both of those, she just held it spaciously and thought, "Oh, is that so?" Because kids are changeable; they say all kinds of things, and so you have to know how to hold it in a generous way. You can make a big mistake in both directions. You don't just take the kid with you down to the county clerk and get married—that wouldn't be good. And then also, you don't get angry at the kid for saying "I hate you." It's just part of the range of what children do.

The consequences are so huge for the child if they experience violence and anger, and if they have occasion to grow up with fear sometimes because a parent is very afraid themselves. I've known people coming on retreat to report that they never knew a time when their mother was not afraid and always anxious. By kind of osmosis, the child grows up and feels that there are reasons to be afraid. Some of these people who come and tell these stories to me can be in their 60s and 70s; these impacts can stay for a long time.

At the beginning of life, when they are a newborn, maybe it's easy to imagine caring for people. And with someone who's old, someone you care for who is going through a natural aging and dying process at the end of a good life, to be able to sit with them as they die is also a very tender time. It's also a time when people who are dying sometimes will say things that are not kind. A good hospice nurse will explain that when people are dying, their biochemistry changes, and it's not uncommon for them to get angry at the people they're closest to. That's a wise thing to hear because occasionally it happens that way. Then the family doesn't take it personally. It doesn't mean that the whole relationship over a lifetime was ruined; it just meant that the chemistry had changed. And so the family holds that spaciously.

Or to sit quietly, like when my mother died in a memory care home not so far from here. In a little room by herself, I was holding her hand, and it was very tender, very sweet. As I was holding her hand as she died, I remembered her holding my hand, bringing me to my first day of kindergarten, walking across the school grounds. It was a very touching moment for me to be able to be there. I evoke this here in a talk about compassion because at the beginning and end of life, it's easy to imagine it being a wonderful, heartwarming, heart-touching, caring kind of time where we're gentle and caring. It's not a time to express our fury, anger, and hostility and yell at people. It calls for something very different.

It's the time in between that—between birth and death—where people feel like the appropriate response is an angry one, a hostile one, even one of violence, to get their way and to make things right for themselves. We find a society that sometimes justifies this. Countries bomb other countries and produce war. My parents were Holocaust survivors. They're no longer alive, but I knew them very well. I saw how the effect of them going through the German camps when they were teenagers continued for their entire lives. It was something that had affected them deeply.

I've met descendants of people who went through the Armenian genocide in Turkey in the 1910s or 20s. They didn't go through it themselves, but they were still living the legacy of that. It can be said that the United States is living through the legacy passed down from the Civil War. Somehow the tremendous suffering of that war and the suffering of slavery goes on for generations. In some ways, the suffering of it gets repeated and recreated in different kinds of forms in American culture.

And so, trying to get our way and making a better life for ourselves through violence and anger actually makes it worse. It might work for short-term survival, perhaps getting what we want in the short term, but it's not something that involves long-term care or a long-term vision of what can really create a good world or good relationships in the long run. That's a very different approach to how we live our lives.

We've been designed to do both. We've been designed to be caregivers, and we've been designed to be warriors, to be fighters, to be reactive. The question is, which takes precedence? Which is the wisest in different circumstances? Different people make different decisions about this. But I think what Buddhism emphasizes over and over again is the human capacity for compassion and how compassion creates the conditions to bring out the best in everyone. It's not an easy thing to do, to bring out the best in people to help transform and change them.

One of the great movements that I feel emerged in the 20th century—although it probably started in ancient times—is the movement of restorative justice. Someone who has done something bad or harmful goes through a community healing process where they're changed, and they'll never commit that crime again. Maybe they did their crime because they grew up in a situation where they were ignored, abandoned, or were themselves the subject of violence, hostility, anger, and isolation. When the community comes around to do restorative justice with someone, they experience the opposite.

Sometimes it takes days for certain restorative justice processes, for someone to sit in a circle with people who care for them, hearing their care, their history, the impact, and what happened. It can take a long time to do that. It might be easier to just call the police, get someone arrested, and locked up—that's easier in the moment. It's not easier in the long term. In the long term, we create the conditions for our future and how we live our lives. I think one of the messages of Buddhism is that the long-term well-being of ourselves and our world comes from the same caregiving instinct that creates the long-term well-being of a baby, which is love, compassion, and care. That doesn't change throughout life. That instinct to care for others is what creates long-term well-being, where we don't shape the babies born today to grow up and come back as our enemies in twenty years because of what their families had to go through.

Compassion is the deep wish for beings to be free from suffering. It's the deep wish, and then the caring response that can follow that. I really like the language of "deep" compassion. The reactive emotions, the reactive expressions that involve our muscles, violent actions, and violent words—which might occasionally be necessary—are kind of a surface reaction. They need to be, because they're dealing with dangers that are immediate.

But this deep instinct, the deep place within where a whole different intelligence and emotional sensibility operates, requires a completely different approach to connect to it, trust it, and be able to listen to it. That's where compassion comes from. Deep compassion comes from this deep place of profound sensitivity. For that to operate, we need to understand compassion well, and we need to understand what compassion is not.

Compassion is not being troubled by the suffering of the world. It's easy to be troubled by what goes on in the world. It's easy to be afraid of it or upset by it, and it might even be reasonable for that to happen, but that's not the source of where compassion comes from. In a way, being troubled and stressed actually prevents touching into something deeper; it can obstruct it. It limits our capacity to touch into the depths of who we are. It's really healthy to question how we're troubled, dismayed, or despairing over what happens, even when it feels so natural and the situation might seem so hopeless. We must realize how much this shuts us out or closes us off from the full intelligence, compassion, and care that we can give the world.

Maybe we put a big question mark around how we're troubled, how we're discouraged. Is this really necessary? Yes, the situation calls for a response. But does that mean we have to be that way? Part of Buddhist practice is to take a deep look at ourselves. We turn the light backward onto ourselves, deep inside, to really understand what's going on in there. What is motivating us? What is the impact on us? We seek to really understand our own suffering, our distress, our fears—to work with it and see it so that we can begin holding it in a different way.

One different way is that we might be able to hold our own difficulties with this beautiful thing called deep compassion. Deep compassion is sweet. Deep compassion is not stressful. When it is there, it can feel quite beautiful even when the situation is quite ugly. The practice is to be able to find this place and to work through the things that obstruct and get in the way. The other thing that happens when we're no longer obstructing this capacity is understanding that compassion is not something we have to build, create, or engineer.

Compassion is a natural capacity. Mostly, it's a matter of getting out of its way, removing the obstacles, and then being able to trust and relax into this depth of who we are to feel what's happening and allow it to operate and arise. My friend who was sent to volunteer holding the preemies—that was a natural capacity that awoke in him. Maybe it took a year of holding them; it's not necessarily automatic. But he spent the year holding them and was changed by it. I don't know how long it's going to take each of us in different circumstances, but it's time well spent to discover how this natural capacity arises.

I just finished teaching a two-week retreat. None of the instructions throughout the retreat had anything to do with compassion or kindness, I don't think. Right? Nothing at all.

[Audience member confirms]

Do you remember when it came up?

Audience: I think it was at the very end.

Gil Fronsdal: At the very end. You're listening! [Laughter] It was at the very end because the context of offering this retreat was one of really trusting something like the innate goodness or Buddha nature^[1] that we have.

It was almost a two-week period of practicing, so by the end, people were ready to understand the innate nature of this compassion that can arise from our caregiving instincts. It had to be offered that way—not as something to cultivate, but as something that is already there as a natural expression of our Buddha nature. What's beautiful for me about this approach is that it's non-obligatory. Buddhism champions compassion tremendously as an invaluable emotion and motivation to have as we go through the world.

Because it's emphasized so much, it can feel like we're obligated—that to be a "good Buddhist," we're supposed to be compassionate. Nope. There's no "supposed to," and there's no obligation to be compassionate. It's not a crime to not have compassion. However, it is a wonderful potential. It's a wonderful possibility for us. It's presented in Buddhism as a possibility that can awaken and arise within us. There's an amazing treasure store inside waiting for you. We're filled with not just compassion, kindness, and generosity, but a deep goodheartedness that is often submerged or lost.

In Tibetan Buddhism especially, they talk about the jewel in the lotus^[2]. A jewel is very precious, and the lotus blossoming is often presented as a metaphor for the awakened heart—the heart that opens and awakens to the world. That's good enough, isn't it? But lo and behold, the treasure inside the open blossom is the jewel, the maṇi in Sanskrit. The jewel in the lotus, the treasure, is compassion.

It can feel like an amazing treasure. This range of caregiving instincts that we have can feel like the greatest wealth a person can possess—the wealth that flows from a generous, open heart that meets the world with its caregiving instincts. I put my trust in meeting the world that way, meeting the terrible things of this world that way, and appreciating that this is what creates long-term well-being and care for people.

This is one of the reasons I couldn't help myself. I tried not to start one more program, but because of what's been happening in the world these last few years, I don't feel capable of not doing something more. So now I've created a Buddhist Peace and Conflict Chaplaincy program. A chaplain is a very unusual profession in this world, where all you do is care for people's hearts, everyone's hearts.

Because they're a kind of clergy, doors open in a completely different way than almost any other peacemaking work that people do. A contribution to the world of peace and conflict work is to train people to be chaplains. I mention this partly because it is an ambitious project, and as a demonstration that compassion doesn't have to be passive. Compassion can be very motivating, inspiring us to respond to the world, sometimes indirectly. Some people have been upset with me because I have not directly addressed some of the terrible, awful, horrendous things happening in our world. There might be wisdom in not talking about it directly sometimes from the seat where I sit here, but the response is here. It just might look indirect.

The world needs more caregivers. You have no obligation to do so, but if you awaken that instinct in you, I'm confident that you'll treasure it. Thank you.

We have some time, and if anyone has any questions or comments about this, I'm very happy to hear them.

Q&A

Audience: I have a comment. You mentioned your friend holding the preemies bringing out his heart. I can feel that when I pet my old cat. She's lost her friends one by one, so she's gotten clingy. When I'm petting her, she looks in my eyes and lets me pet her throat, which is the most vulnerable part. I can feel her trust in me, and that makes me feel that same way.

Gil Fronsdal: That's a wonderful example. We see it in situations like this. While I was teaching these last few weeks, there was also a cat story. A feral cat wandered into the place—I don't know how many people lived there, maybe 20—and the cat took to one person. It didn't really trust anybody else but trusted that person. The cat followed her around like a dog, almost everywhere she went, and it was a very touching relationship.

Audience: Thank you for being here. I'm curious about the chaplaincy program. What modality of Buddhism are you offering it through? When you wind up with your chaplain badge, how do you propose that is used in communities?

Gil Fronsdal: There is a wide range of what people do. Our introduction to Buddhist chaplaincy is a relatively simple program. Several people here have done it—Martha, Heather, Steve. Some people do it just because they want to be better caregivers for their families, and some people do it because they want to become professional chaplains, which requires more training. The most common places to work are in hospitals or hospices. There are people who are prison chaplains. Some people are chaplains for the homeless. There are all kinds of places that people go. Some people just stay as volunteers. Some do it because they're going to be Buddhist teachers in their local sangha^[3], and it trains them in some of the caregiving skills that a teacher should have that they don't usually get. So there's a wide range of applications.

Audience: How does this new chaplaincy differ then? What would they do?

Gil Fronsdal: Oh, the new one. Yeah, I keep creating them! The regular chaplaincy program has been going on now for 22 years. I call it a pyramid scheme for joy [Laughter], because it's such a wonderful thing to train people and then have them go out into the world and do this good work to help and support people. When I was in college, I was very interested in environmental studies and caring for the natural world, but I got waylaid by Buddhism. It has always been a big concern of mine. At some point, I could see that given my Buddhist training and the work we did in chaplaincy, there might be a whole other field that opened up called eco-chaplaincy. People really wanted to specialize in the area of the environment, so we created an eco-chaplaincy program. That's been going on now, and I think we're starting the fifth generation of it soon. That's been a marvelous thing to do, and it's also been a creative process to understand what it means and how to do it.

Now, the Peace and Conflict Chaplaincy is focused on the places in the world where there's conflict.

Audience: Are you thinking people would go somewhere and work in conflict zones?

Gil Fronsdal: It's very important for me not to have too many ideas of what they'll be doing with it.

Audience: Okay, so you're just opening the door.

Gil Fronsdal: Lest I have delusions of grandeur, you know! [Laughter] Some people are doing it because they just want to help people in their local community with conflicts that exist, or in very particular, ordinary settings locally. Other people might take it further. There's a wide range of what people want to do, but each person is going to have to find their own expression and application of it for themselves.

Audience: Okay. Thank you.

Gil Fronsdal: Okay, well, maybe that's enough. Thank you very much for being here. I hope that this talk I gave is, in an indirect way, relevant to some of the things you might be reading in the news. It's an indirect way of responding to it. Maybe if you can read between the lines, you can see that it has implications in all kinds of ways for the wider world. Thank you.