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Introduction

Good morning, and it would be nice for me to do a sound check. I am using a different sound system than at IMC, and so I want to make sure that it's all working. Sound is fine? Sounds good, great. This is wonderful, thank you. It's also nice to get a little bit of exchange going back and forth between saying something and getting replied to directly, so thank you very much.

Hello, and greetings from Insight Retreat Center. I feel kind of delighted to be here with you today and being here in this room, so thank you for being here.

In doing mindfulness practice, one of the simple ways of describing it is that we are recognizing what's happening in the moment as it's happening. There are two general ways that people can approach this recognition in the present moment.

One is to see things as they are, where how they are is a conclusion. So when we're mindful, we're concluding something: this is what's happening. If we're mindful of the breathing, say we're mindful of the in-breath, the recognition of the in-breath is kind of like the end of the story. Like, "breathing in," and then I'm "breathing out," and that's the end of the story. Or you hear a sound; the recognition of the sound is the recognition of that brief event, and I recognize it. The sound might go on, but the recognition is a conclusion, or it is a thing in itself that has recognized what has just happened.

The other way of doing it is not to be aware of things as they are, but to be aware of things as they are occurring—things as they are becoming. And so there, now mindfulness is not a conclusion, but rather it's a beginning. To be aware of a sound, it's kind of like you're quiet or quieter, where there's a decision to then turn your attention to it. You're not just recognizing the sound, but it's kind of like you're making yourself available to experience it as it's occurring.

If you're recognizing breathing, the mindfulness of breathing is not a conclusion about, "Yes, now I'm breathing," but rather it's a beginning of the experience of being available to know, feel, and experience breathing as it's occurring. And if there's a brief sound, the recognition can still be that way. So it's kind of like you're opening the door. Say you're in a stuffy room and you open the door to the outside, and a beautiful, wonderful, fresh breeze comes in, and you just make yourself available for feeling that fresh breeze. And so the idea is to always use the mindfulness to help you be available for the fullness of the experience as it's occurring, and it might just be momentary.

So being available for the in-breath, breathing in, and then there's an opening to that. The very recognition is opening the door to be aware of the full inhale. Or if you're in the exhale, be aware of the exhale, to be really aware of it as it's occurring, letting it register as it's occurring—the ongoing experience of it. And if you get to the end of the exhale and that door of being available is still open, that spills over into being aware of the transition from breathing out to breathing in.

If you're thinking, it's useful to note that. Be really clearly aware that you're thinking, but not as a conclusion, but as a beginning of making yourself available to register, to feel, to experience, to know what this is like. Even if the thinking stops, the particular thoughts you have are still lingering. Kind of what's that lingering effect, and what's the effect of being available? So you're also letting yourself be available to the experience of being available. So, things as they're occurring.

Guided Meditation: Available Awareness

So assuming a meditation posture, and gently closing your eyes.

And just checking in with yourself: if you are mindful at this moment, if you open your awareness at this moment, what do you become aware of? What is occurring within you?

And what would it be like to open yourself to experience what is occurring as an ongoing event, where the mindfulness is making ourselves available for the occurring—to feel it, to know it, to be aware of it?

And then to do this with breathing in, taking a gentle, long, deep inhale and exhale, being available in your body, in your mind, to know, to experience the full occurring of breathing in.

Being available to experience the full occurring of breathing out.

And letting your breathing return to normal.

And the inhale is a process; it takes a little bit of time, however short or long it might be. In a pretty relaxed, easy way, open the door of awareness to let the breeze of breathing come in.

If something else is happening that you become aware of, open your awareness to register, to feel how that is occurring.

Mindfulness is a particular, continuing action of opening to things as they occur. Where each moment of allowing, being available, might be quite brief before you open the door again.

Through mindfulness to be in availability, an opening to experience, it's important that we're not crowded with thoughts and agendas and wants. Desires and thoughts, agendas become quiet. So when we open the door of awareness, what we're mindful of can flow through it. Whatever is occurring is allowed to pass through for however long awareness is open, and then we do it again.

When awareness is an opening to experience as it's occurring, when we're allowing something to register or be felt or known, there can be a subtle joy or pleasure in the allowing, even when the experience might be unpleasant. Allowing the experience to be registered, allowing it to arise and flow in awareness, however brief it is, can have a feeling of freedom, pleasure, joy.

In the openness, in the allowing, in the feeling of being available to know and to feel.

Putting aside what you want to have happen, putting aside what you expect to have happen, so that you can better be available for the next moment as it's occurring.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, if you're able to have a sense of this opening awareness to what's available, or to what's happening, to what's occurring in availability, an allowing of things to register, to be felt—and if that could be a light feeling, happy feeling, or some pleasure in that availability—then maybe you could also do the same for opening to experience the suffering of others, the challenges they have, or your own suffering. Where oddly enough, opening to be aware of it this way, there's a good feeling, a rightness, a kind of subtle pleasure or even joy. Not in the suffering, but in our wonderful capacity to open to it.

To allow ourselves to feel it as it's occurring, lightly, calmly, opening to the suffering of the world.

Being available, the sense of availability as it's occurring.

Where there are no conclusions, there are no fixed ideas, just a continual opening to things as they are coming to be, things as they are occurring.

And in being aware of others and their suffering, the door of availability—that open door—can then be the door out of which our care and love and goodwill flow.

An open door for what comes in, an open door for what goes out.

An open door for breathing in, an open door for breathing out.

And on the exhale, let the last words of these phrases flow out of you into the world:

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Seven Factors of Compassion (3 of 5) Joy

So I saw some of the messages that the sound was low, so I turned up the input for the microphone on this laptop. But in doing that, I had to use the laptop, and some of you heard the clicking, so I apologize for that. I don't know if the sound has gotten a little bit louder and better now. All right.

Okay, so today the topic is the joy factor of compassion. I think compassion is often not associated with joy. Maybe it could be associated better with joy if we realized that the word joy has a wide range of what it can mean. But it was a big surprise to me—very big surprise—the first time that I was caring for someone, someone who was challenged to make her way around and needed support and help.

I was just doing it in a matter-of-fact way; it was just natural to do it. But what surprised me as I was doing it was the sense of pleasure and joy and well-being that seemed to well up in my chest as I did it. I wondered, is this okay to feel this kind of sense of well-being and joy in helping this person or supporting this person? And then I even wondered, am I doing it for the pleasure of it or doing it to help her get around? But I was so surprised by how good it felt, and since then I've discovered that when I feel compassion, it's possible that compassion comes with a sense of rightness, a sense of joy, a sense of pleasure.

Sometimes when the suffering is really huge, it's a little hard to see it being joyful or exactly like pleasure, but it just feels really good. It feels right to be a witness for the suffering, to be open to it. And so, how is it that compassion, which is the awareness of suffering in oneself and others, can be associated with joy?

The Dalai Lama, I think, has gone around the world with the teaching that if you want to be happy, be compassionate. So how is it? What's associated with that? There are many answers to that. Our inner psychology has many different facets, but one of them is how we're being compassionate. If compassion comes along with a lot of sense of duty and obligation, it can feel quite heavy. If it comes along with a sense of conclusions, like deciding that this means that life is really frightening and terrible, it can really feel oppressive to experience compassion.

But if compassion comes along with an awareness that's open and available, like an open window where the wind can flow through—nothing stops it, nothing blocks it, it just goes right through us almost—we're available for this opening. We have this availability for things as they occur. Part of that joy is in that availability, because we're not contracting, we're not resisting, we're not coming to conclusions. We're not elaborating with, "This means that the world is a terrible place," or whatever it might be. And we're not immediately caught up in, "I have to do something, I'm responsible." The simplicity of compassion, the simplest version of it, is to be open to experience what is.

And this openness, this ability to be available, is a very important aspect of mindfulness practice. Some people use mindfulness as the end process of a very short few moments of concluding, "Oh, this is what's happening; done, I've concluded." Its extreme version is a checklist approach to mindfulness. People use mental noting, and I used to do that. I would note "breathing in" just as I began breathing in, and if the in-breath was a little bit long, I would kind of check out. I would draw from my thoughts for the last three-quarters of the in-breath because I'd already done my mindfulness practice. And then I would try to be at the beginning of the exhale and "out," and done that, and then I wouldn't be very present for the out-breath.

I learned to do what instead is to be available, to be open to experience. So the word "in" for me is an invitation, is an opening, like, "Okay, it's the beginning of a process. Okay, I'm breathing in, that's what's happening. Now let's feel that register, let it be felt more deeply in the system, in the body." And exhaling, this is the beginning of really feeling this. Now it might be very brief, something might be very fleeting, and that's okay. And one of the great treasures as we do this availability—being available to what's happening—is we're also then feeling what it's like to be available. We're feeling what it's like to have the door open as opposed to having it closed, and that feels good. That has a nice feeling.

So when we do that with compassion, we're open, we see the suffering of the world. That's not a time to come to conclusions; this is a time to allow something to begin. At the minimum, it's a beginning of becoming more fully aware of it. And so this sense of being aware is the joy of compassion, at least for me.

So we're doing the seven factors of compassion today, this week, and so we're back into this mindfulness. As mindfulness is, we're being mindful of it in a calm, relaxed way. We become aware of how we're not open, how we're closed or resisting or tight, or we're suffering. In terms of compassion, we become aware of how we're suffering because of the suffering. We're laying layers of suffering on top of experiencing the suffering of the world: our judgments, our fears, taking it personally, and all kinds of things.

So then we learn to make a distinction between these other layers of suffering and just being open to the simplicity of the original suffering we're present for. As we make that distinction, we learn how to be mindful in a more relaxed way, in an open way. And we make the effort to do so. We make a different kind of effort to be present for the suffering, where we're not tightening up and stressing around it. And that leads us to this joy factor: that we're available, we're open in awareness without stress, in awareness without force, in awareness which is calm, light, open. In some ways, the lighter and more calm the awareness can be, the cleaner and fuller can be the experience of compassion, the way of experiencing suffering.

And that can be against the grain for some people, because when we feel the suffering of the world, the suffering of others, we better take it seriously. We better gear up and do something big, and this is really important. Some sufferings are huge. So it can be very counterintuitive that the way forward is not to take it too seriously, or take it so seriously that it's so important that you can't afford to get tense, you can't afford to get stressed out. That it's so important that you let the best qualities of who you are come forward, and your best ability to think and to act and to do is in fact to relax and open and be available in a nice way.

To go back to the example I gave the first day about the girl in the playground who's injured herself, scraped her knee. If the caretaker comes over, cares for her, is distraught, is upset, is angry, feels like this is a disaster, it's a crisis, is yelling for help and saying this is a serious problem, the poor girl is going to learn all kinds of unhealthy things. She's going to feel frightened. She's going to feel, "Oh, maybe things are much worse than I thought. It's bad enough I got my knee scraped, now maybe it's a disaster. I wonder if they're going to call 9-1-1 and the ambulance for me." Now the little girl learns that the world is a frightening place to be in, all because the caretaker got so alarmed and took it so seriously.

If the caretaker takes it respectfully, carefully, lovingly, fully, but has a lightness and ease and a calm, and even has a sense of enjoying or appreciating or feeling the rightness of being here doing this, this little girl learns something very different about life. She learns that this is available in life. She learns that life is a place where things are not a crisis, that you meet your experiences and difficulties with a certain level of calm and lightness and ease and love and care.

So the ability to find sweetness in compassion is one of the great powers of compassion. It's one of the great capacities compassion has. So in this week we're calling it the joy factor of compassion.

I would like to suggest that if you have occasion today to encounter suffering, however small or large it might be—and maybe it's best if you don't have to act quickly and immediately for it, that it doesn't require that of you—see if you can find a way to register and feel and know that suffering clearly. Not denying it, not dismissing its importance, but that you can take the time to let it register and be known in you. That in the knowing, in the being available for it, you actually feel some sweetness, you feel some goodness, you feel some rightness. And then what difference does it make for you if you experience compassion that way? How do you then maybe respond differently with that?

So the joy factor of compassion. Thank you, and I look forward to continuing tomorrow.