Three Phases of My Practice: Compassion, Loving Kindness, and Caring

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Three Phases of My Practice: Compassion, Loving Kindness, and Caring. 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 July 30, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Three Phases of My Practice: Compassion, Loving Kindness, and Caring

So good morning everyone, and I'm very happy to be here with you all. Some of that happiness is being with all of you, but some of it is carrying with me from my last three weeks that I was at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. It's probably the oldest Buddhist monastery in the country. When it started in 1967, it was kind of revolutionary because it was co-ed, which was very, very unusual—to have men and women practicing together more or less as equals. I think that equality improved over the decades.

I trained there. I began my training there and spent about three years there, starting 43 years ago in 1980. So I went back, and I really went back for the first time to be a Zen teacher there, more or less. I've been back as a visitor over these years, but to go back into my original Zen training monastery where I was really formed in many ways in Buddhism, and to be practicing there—it was a practice period for three weeks.

To be practicing there where these memories would come back: "Well, I was standing there when that happened," and "That happened over here." In the meditation halls, knowing these different spots that were so significant for me, I would visit them and bow to them because, "Oh yeah, this is where I sat when this happened." It was quite an experience. I think one of the very interesting occurrences of being there—at least for me—was to realize how long I've been doing this Buddhist practice. I've been involved now for 50 years.

That's long enough to have an overview of what happens to a person doing Buddhist practice for 50 years. Not just what happens on one retreat or one meditation session, but what happens over the decades. It felt kind of natural and spontaneous being there to have an overview of this life that I've had in Buddhist practice. It might be interesting to hear a little bit of it, not so much because of me, but to appreciate the way in which Buddhist practice works on people.

The highlight for me was realizing that it works in ways that you don't see at the time. Things change gradually over years, and then in retrospect, you look back and say, "Oh yeah, look at that. I had no idea. I thought I was doing X, but really the universe was doing Y for me." The Dharma, the practice, was doing Y. And why is Y flowering, not X? I was distracted by what I thought was important in the moment, what my plans and expectations were, what agendas I had, to notice that something different was happening. I would say some of the profound ways that I've been changed by the Dharma I didn't foresee. I didn't see them coming. I didn't see them happening as they were happening. They happened gradually, and in retrospect, I see, "Oh, that's what happened."

The Three Time Frames of Practice

I want to talk to you about this. Part of this introduction is to say that the Dharma practice, this Buddhist practice, mindfulness practice, works in three time frames: it works in the immediate present, it works in the short term, and it works in the long term. It has ways in which it unfolds, and it's important to appreciate all three. Because if you only think it happens over the long term, you might mess up the long term because you're straining and working for some change that's going to happen in the mythic future, and you're missing the present. If you're only seeing the benefits of the present, you might not really allow yourself to give yourself over fully to the practice so that the long-term benefits can flower and develop over time. To have some sense of the possibility of where we're going is also important. So there is this combination of cherishing and loving the practice in the moment and valuing what happens now, and also valuing what happens over time.

In the moment, just as we're practicing it, even sitting here meditating with you, it could feel sometimes—at the moment of mindfulness, and it doesn't have to be more than a moment—that when mindfulness is clear, there's a kind of lightening up, opening up, calming, or spaciousness. I like to call it a "breathing room." Certainly, there is a breathing room for what's happening now. Some people will talk a lot about mindfulness being a kind of pause, and if that's the case, I like to think of it as a sacred pause. It's a pause just long enough to check in and experience what the present moment experience is like.

That movement of attention to the present moment, which has a higher quality than ordinary distracted attention, is very different from how most people live their lives. Many people are mostly distracted, running around. My wife just told me she read a newspaper article about why attendance in churches is going down. One reason among young people is they're just so busy. You're not going to go to church on Sunday morning when you finally want to spend time with your friends because you've been working and doing all kinds of things. Taking time to feel and sense, to stop, to have a higher quality of attention to what's happening in this moment—discovering, lo and behold, it feels really good. It feels better than some of the alternatives, which often involve rushing off and doing things half-heartedly or distractedly.

One of the great things that's part of modern life is to do things efficiently. And even better, not only efficiently, but to do multiple things at the same time efficiently so you can do more and more things. One of the really big disappointments I have for you about mindfulness practice and Buddhist practice is that it is not efficient. [Laughter] And if that's what you're into, this is probably not for you. If it was efficient, you would come to IMC and say, "Why are we sitting 35 minutes? I can nail that meditation in 10 minutes, and then go off and do the important things."

But there is something really precious. In some ways, the precious and wonderful experience of being alive, even with the great challenges and tragedies of life—there's something about really knowing how to be present for it in a full way. To be present even for a broken heart, even present as we cry. There is something that is invaluable and to be cherished or valued. One of the ways to evaluate it is to realize for yourself that just about all the alternatives to being really mindful and present as we go through life are not better alternatives. If you know of a better alternative than being mindful, then you should probably go ahead and do it. I say that with some confidence because with time you realize this is the best alternative—to really be here and present in a good way. The rewards of that can be instantaneous; just right here, it feels good. That's my hope for all of you: that you will learn enough about mindfulness to feel the instantaneous rewards, the benefits of, "This is good. I'm glad I had that moment to be present. I don't regret it," as opposed to, "I could have been on Amazon."

So this practice works in the moment. It also works in the short term. Some of you might have experienced this just in this meditation session we had. Maybe you sat there long enough and something settled in you. Maybe you're a little bit calmer, maybe your mind slowed down. Maybe it took a while for the busyness of the mind to stop and quiet down so you can feel connected and feel like you're showing up here. It could be that you carried a lot of tension with you that you didn't even know you had—stress of the week or the day—and this was long enough to let that dissipate. Not necessarily because you were brilliant at being mindful, but you just stopped. You stopped running around, stopped checking your devices, and just being still for a while. There is a kind of progression of letting go and relaxing that is invaluable for people. If you add to that recipe mindfulness, attention, concentration, compassion, and kindness, there are all kinds of wonderful things that can happen in a period of meditation.

It can also happen over a week of regular practice or going on a meditation retreat. It's remarkable that most people who go on a week-long retreat will see it as a journey; it unfolds over time. Not a few people want to leave after the first day. If we advertised what the retreat was about based on what happens on the first day, no one would come.

It's a little bit like when I had a running practice that I started up at the monastery. The route I would run was up this five-mile road. Eventually, I got to the top, slowly over a long time getting better and better. But I remember I would start up the road and probably the first 300 yards, it felt like every cell in my body was screaming at me, "Stop!" I hated it; it was horrible. But then something kicked in, and I got into the flow. After I trained for a while, it just felt light to run, kind of like the body ran itself until I got winded. So a little bit like that happens on retreats too. There's a transition: acclimating, getting attuned, letting go of the tensions of our life. Being surprised by all the unresolved issues in our life that suddenly appear that you've been overlooking or distracted from, and having to work through them. So the transition of the first days is a really invaluable and important thing to go through, even though it's often challenging for people.

And then things settle down. I don't want to make any promises, but they settle down, and usually by some point, people feel so happy to be present, alive, and calm. There's a clarity of vision. It's lovely to watch people go outside of the retreat center to be outdoors on the property after about day four. They're just marveling at the trees and the flowers, or just sitting and having a tea as if the cup of tea is their long-lost friend they're so happy to see and be with. It sounds maybe a little silly to live that way, but to have that level of calmness, presence, undistractedness, and non-compulsion is phenomenal. This trend takes some days, and sometimes the longer the retreat, the deeper the process goes, and the fuller this transformation can happen.

So there's this change that happens over time. In retreats, or in a daily meditation practice you might do, there is a kind of change that happens over a day, a week, or a particular session. But often, some of the most obvious benefits disappear once you get back to work or back to your usual life. Sometimes it disappears in a few minutes, sometimes in a few days. But there are also changes that are enduring, which tend to be incremental over time. Often they're so incremental we don't see them.

The analogy that I've used sometimes is from when I lived in Hawaii for two years. When I first got there, it'd be a nice sunny day, no clouds in the sky, and you'd wear t-shirts and shorts. You certainly didn't go around with an umbrella because it was hot. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, there'd be this torrential downpour. I did what I did everywhere else I lived in the world: I ran for cover. I very quickly learned you don't have to do that in Hawaii. You just let yourself get drenched, and then five minutes later you're all dried out again as the sun comes out. So the drenching doesn't last very long.

Where I was born in Norway, in a town called Bergen, it's surrounded by mountains on three sides and the ocean on the fourth. The saying there is that it rains 360 days of the year, and the other five days it's cloudy. It isn't quite as bad as that, but there was all kinds of rain, often a misty rain. I would walk through the town, and the mist was so light that you didn't really feel you were getting wet at first, but if you walked far enough, you got totally soaked and drenched. And because it was cold, it snuck up on you.

To stretch the analogy a little bit: going on a week-long retreat is like getting drenched, and then it dries out kind of quickly. But if you meditate every day, or if you go on retreats often, or if you live in a monastery and you're practicing all the time, it's a little bit like being in the mist and slowly getting wet. Except you don't get cold; your heart just warms more and more as you soak up this Dharma mist. Slowly something begins happening, but you don't see it happening.

So over decades—it's remarkable I can speak about decades now—it's snuck up on me. I can see there have been phases and changes that happen over big chunks of time. It speaks to the natural process of change. If you put together the right conditions, something begins happening within that's natural. I wasn't trying to make these changes. Somehow the psychophysical system that we are has capacities for growing in beneficial ways that we don't always realize, and our society hasn't taught us that this is a possibility.

Phase One: Zen and Compassion

I want to share with you three phases over this time that were very significant for me. The first phase was when I first came to Zen practice. I was new to practice then, and as is true for many people, I came to the practice because I suffered. I'd tried different things, and I didn't know anything else to do for my suffering, so I tried Zen practice. I thought it would maybe make a difference for me.

In fact, when I sat and meditated and did retreats at the Zen Center, my suffering came to the forefront. I saw some of the deeper ways in which my mind and heart worked that accentuated or were the operating principles for my suffering. For example, I had a lot of self-criticism. I had a lot of guilt. Not necessarily that I had done anything wrong, I just felt guilty. I literally felt guilty about how I walked across the meditation hall floor. I was probably walking across the floor the wrong way, and I felt I was somehow inherently wrong. It was a big burden, along with the fear of rejection and all the other fears I had.

So I would sit and meditate, and part of the benefit and the horror of practice is you get to see your mind. "Wow, look at that. This is bad. I had no idea." But it's really good to see it, because then we can take an honest assessment. We can see it clearly enough that we don't give in to it; we learn to find alternatives and we learn to heal it.

In Zen practice, you get very little instruction except to sit still, be still, don't move, and just be with whatever's happening. They didn't tell me what to do about the suffering except just to be with it. I did add a little extra instruction to myself, and that was to unconditionally accept whatever was happening. I was practicing unconditional acceptance—not of the suffering, but of being present for it. Just being with it. And that was a tenderizing process, kind of like tenderizing meat. Something began to soften in me. I didn't see it happening, and I didn't recognize it as happening.

When it began happening, I was projecting my needs into the world. The need I had in contact with my suffering—this tenderizing of what was happening—was compassion. I started first being very strongly drawn to images of compassion. Some of them were the images of the Mahāyāna^[1], the Japanese images of the great bodhisattva, the archetype of compassion, Avalokiteśvara^[2]. I started collecting photographs and pictures of Kuan Yin^[3] and putting them on my wall. I started drawing copies of them. I didn't think about what I was doing or think, "Wow, you're really collecting all these pictures of compassion."

Then I would project compassion onto people that I saw. Sometimes I would say, "Well, that person is so compassionate," and people would look at me like, "You've got to be kidding." [Laughter] But for me, they were. I know some of it was projection because at the Zen Center they had a statue that for many years I didn't know the title of. It was about five feet tall, and you'd see it when you came up from meditation in the basement. It looked a little bit like a very abstract person, very sensuous and beautifully flowing, almost like it had flowing robes. I thought that it was this archetype of compassion, Kuan Yin, and I would come up from meditation and be so moved to see her standing there receiving me. Many years later, I found out that the artist thought he was carving a flame, and the title was "The Flame" or "Fire". [Laughter]

I would also feel the wind blowing against my cheek and think I was being stroked by compassion. That was probably a projection too; I was needing to receive compassion in all kinds of ways. But I did encounter genuinely compassionate people at the Zen Center who, in times of my distress, so impressed me. It made such a big difference for me to feel and be with them. Eventually, looking back over my time at the Zen Center, I saw that I didn't become enlightened, I became compassioned.

My capacity for compassion grew and grew steadily until, near the end of my time at the Zen Center, I made a commitment as part of being ordained as a priest. I decided I was going to dedicate my life to compassionate service, to the suffering of the world. I had met my own suffering, and now I wanted to support others in the world so they wouldn't suffer. Compassion became the operating principle for how I was going to organize and live my life, and that's kind of what brought me here to IMC to you today.

Phase Two: Vipassanā and Loving-Kindness

After my phase at the San Francisco Zen Center, I found myself—somewhat by coincidence—in a monastery in Thailand that taught Vipassanā^[4], or insight meditation. That opened the door for me to continue with this practice that we do here. I was pretty happy doing the practice in Asia first, and then I came back to do it here at the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, which was the earliest big center in our tradition. I did a three-month retreat there.

I was kind of shocked or stunned when I practiced there for the first time with Western teachers, because I came from Zen, which is serious and about direct pointing to emptiness. Being disciplined and stoic was where you were supposed to go. In fact, when I practiced Zen, I had this classic upside-down smile.

So I came to this Vipassanā setting, and they did a surprising thing: they did a guided meditation on loving-kindness. Oh my god! For a Zen student, it was like, "That's artificial. That's too saccharine. This can't be real." So I did the reasonable thing and just tuned the teachers out when they were doing these guided meditations. That worked pretty well for me until about halfway through the retreat. Because three months is a long time, I was just minding my own business meditating, and lo and behold, this very strange, odd feeling arose inside of me. I was like, "I don't know about this." And it was exactly what they were talking about when they did these guided meditations. "This is love. This is loving-kindness. This is a beautiful feeling of goodwill that is very different than the feeling of compassion. Oh, that's what it is." So then when they did a guided meditation, I thought, "This is great! Now I think it's fantastic to do it!"

I wasn't looking for loving-kindness; I didn't even want it. I was maybe holding it at a distance, but it found me. Why was that? For a long time I thought it was because personal practice is somehow different. But lately I think it's because I'd gone through my phase of working with my suffering, when I needed compassion. By the time I came to Vipassanā, I was ready for a new phase. And the phase for me was a phase of a lot of well-being. I had a lot of joy, happiness, and peace in doing Vipassanā. Not initially, but as I went deeper into it in a way that I never had in Zen. With Vipassanā, there were extended periods of great joy and delight.

One of the byproducts of spending a lot of time feeling really happy and delighted in this practice is delighting in people. Feeling happy with people and seeing the beauty and preciousness of others. I wasn't viewing people through the lens of their suffering, but viewing them through the lens of how wonderful they are. Feeling friendly, appreciative, grateful, and feeling a tremendous goodwill for others.

So there was a whole phase where that was the character of what motivated me. I loved this idea of goodwill and delighted in people. Some of that is because of having this community here at IMC for the last 30 years or so. The opportunity to get to know people here in a nice way gave me so many opportunities to be appreciative and grateful, and to see the beauty of people, that I kept feeding this feeling of goodwill. I wasn't trying to do it, but it slowly grew and developed. Looking back and seeing how it developed was wonderful.

Phase Three: Care and Anukampā

Then something different happened. This is kind of the phase maybe that I'm in now, or maybe I'm due to have this one end and something new will happen. I started feeling something different. I still called it compassion, but it had a very different feeling than before. It started to have a lightness and a sense of ease. Just a sense of ease, lightness, and peacefulness around this feeling of compassion.

It caused some problems for me because I thought compassion was supposed to be a kind of empathic pain with the suffering of others. I felt people's pain, I cared for it, and I was concerned for it, but I found myself feeling kind of at ease in the presence of it. I thought, "Am I allowed to feel this at ease when people are suffering? People come and tell me tragedies, and I feel ease, is that okay? Shouldn't I be kind of distressed?"

With the social justice movements that have occurred over the last 20 years or so, there was an expectation that you should be angry. Or with climate change, you should be distressed and upset. I certainly cared about all these things, but I just couldn't find myself getting angry or distressed about them. It wasn't like a choice; it was like, "Why would I give up a state that feels healthy and peaceful for something that feels a little bit like wounding myself?" Even though there was an expectation that I was supposed to be different. It wasn't conscious that I was struggling with this, but in retrospect I saw that I was constantly trying to navigate this territory between the ease and lightness I found inside, and how I was supposed to react to the interactions with suffering and injustice in our society.

What finally clarified for me what I was experiencing was reading the ancient teachings of the Buddha. I discovered there is discussion about karuṇā^[5], which is compassion, but there's a whole other emotion or attitude that has gotten very little press in the West. It is actually more important for understanding the way in which the Buddha cared for and taught the world, and that is the term anukampā^[6].

Anukampā, in some ways, is a more humble, simpler, or more basic caregiving instinct. In the ancient texts, it's like how parents care for their kids, or teachers care for their students. People who care for children have this anukampā for the kids in their care. It was the ordinary offering of care to people. This was the common way the Buddha operated in the world, and it's defined as wanting and working for the welfare and happiness of others. Not just working to alleviate suffering, but for their welfare and happiness. I understand that compassion is a subset of that: when there is suffering, we want to bring it to an end. But a wider scope of care includes wanting people who aren't suffering to be well and happy.

More importantly, what I saw when I started reading about this was that this was a common way in which people operating from a place of non-clinging and non-attachment operated in the world. In the ancient texts, they operated from this anukampā, this care, and it was an expression of their non-clinging. I realized, "Oh, I'm no longer centered on compassion. I have this other thing called care, anukampā."

I'm constantly being informed and guided by the experience of non-clinging and non-attachment. This is such an important reference point for me. It's so clear that I'm better off not clinging and not being attached. Why would I give up non-attachment when attachment is a wound, a form of harm to myself, and maybe sometimes a harm to the world?

So I've come to really appreciate this new phase of how to be in the world and care for the world, supported by this non-clinging aspect. That also evolved slowly over time. I didn't see it coming, I didn't plan it, and it wasn't what I was expecting at all. So first I was compassioned, then I was loving-kinded, and now I've been cared. [Laughter]

Conclusion

There are all kinds of other things I could report about these many years of change, but those stood out to me at Tassajara as I was reviewing my life and these 50 years in which I've been involved in Buddhism. I hope this gives you some encouragement about how this practice can work for you. You don't measure the results by the moment or the week or the month. You don't want to be like a kid in the back of the car saying, "Are we there yet?" Rather, just do the practice.

What I learned in Zen is: if you do the practice, then at some point the practice does you. And then you need to be available for the practice to practice you. It isn't just you doing it, because if it was only you doing it, that wouldn't be enough. You have to also get out of the way and be available for something deeper in your inner life to begin working on you. I hope that was encouraging. For me, it has been a spectacularly wonderful way of living a life. I'm very grateful for the opportunity and to share it with you. Thank you.

Announcements

It'd be lovely to see all of you, or some of you, at the park that's about seven minutes away from here by car. It's Red Morton Park, and there's a small parking lot and a big parking lot. The big one I think is off Roosevelt, so you probably want to park there. Thank you all.