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Guided Meditation: Love at its Simplest

Greetings, and I feel very fortunate to be here to be able to reflect on and feel my way into this profound human capacity for love. While we might have different reference points for love—it's such a multivalent word with so many different meanings and appears in so many different ways—one way or the other, when the mind and heart are at their simplest, when they are at their most peaceful state, and when they are least caught in desires and aversions, maybe not at all.

Love at the heart, at the foundation of our being, is a phenomenal capacity. It is phenomenal that we have this ability, that this can happen for us, and phenomenal to be in touch with it. It is so easy to lose touch. To have spent these last six months, now into the seventh month, focusing on this topic of love in different fashions, we come to what some Buddhists would consider the most profound form of love. What I find to be most profound is equanimous love. The love of equanimity^[1] is profound to the degree to which it is associated with a radical simplicity—a simplicity of being. When all our desires take a vacation. When all our aversions take a rest. When all our agitation, worry, and anxieties have been reassured deeply, and our physical discomfort is no longer a preoccupation.

Something deep inside, something in our heart, deep within our torso and deep in the mind, can have a feeling of peace, a feeling of simplicity, a feeling of clarity, a feeling of "this is enough, this is wonderful." There is a feeling of freedom. A freedom from doing, a freedom from reacting. And in that simplicity of this freedom, this non-reactivity, this depth of just being and just being alive is enough. There can be a tenderness, a warmth, a goodness, a form of love, goodwill, care, and gentleness that doesn't need to have a reason, and doesn't need to have an object. It's just the nature of this quiet, still, non-reactive place to want to sing freedom, sing love, sing care, gentleness, and warmth. Its nature, like the nature of a heater is to radiate heat, is to radiate love outward—through oneself, for oneself, and beyond oneself—without any purpose and without any object needed. It just is.

We have a wonderful example in that all of human life, in one way or the other, depends on the existence of our sun at the middle of our solar system. The sun shines on us without wanting anything from us, without being for or against us, in a sense. It just radiates, and we can live. So, deep inside of ourselves is our own sun, our own warmth that can just glow.

So, assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes, and sit here quietly. Start off by not doing much, except doing less. Allowing the body, heart, and mind to become simpler. Less to do, less to accomplish. Less to fix. Just to be.

If what I said earlier is true, that there is a place of profound peace, profound love, care, and gentleness within, below all the layers of reactivity, history, events, and relationships we have... Where would that be in you? Would it be more in the heart, wider in the chest, deeper down and in the belly? Somehow more in the mind, maybe deep in the mind or wide in the mind? Wherever you think it might be, or where you want it to be, let that be the settling spot for your breathing. Almost as if you're breathing from there, or through there. You're breathing with this place.

Gently touching this place as you breathe in. Gently relaxing into it as you exhale. As you exhale, it is as if you're settling down through the layers of your life, so you experience yourself deep within. Any shoulds, or places of reactivity or issues of your life story and relationships, are kind of left behind temporarily because there's a deeper place of simplicity. Simple breathing, settling through the layers, even the layers of discomfort in the body.

Attention settles into a place of tenderness, kind of like settling into a refreshing pool of water. As you exhale, immerse yourself deep into this place of radical simplicity. Gently, in a quiet voice, or maybe nonverbally—not even having the word "love"—right on your exhale, touch into the deepest, quietest, simplest love that depends on nothing. It just is there within you.

In the place within where there's the greatest quiet, stillness, and softness, is there anything like a gentle glow of love, or mettā^[2], that doesn't need an object, doesn't need a person? The love that just is. Gently breathe with it. Enter into it with your breathing, and let the pleasure of it spread through your body.

A place of quiet deep inside that doesn't need to reach out to anything, that maybe is uninclined to get activated or reactive to anything, and is not susceptible to being disturbed by anything. Coming here, feeling deeply, tenderly. A place where love is equanimous, peaceful, needing nothing, wanting nothing.

And from there, gazing upon the world with eyes that also don't want anything or need anything. Eyes that love. Not afraid. Not reactive. As if the greatest medicine is to gaze on the world from this profound, quiet place of love. Gazing upon the world.

Calmly, peacefully, bring into mind the people of your life, around you in your communities, and out across the land. As if for these few seconds, nothing is needed except the gift of simple, non-transactional love. Love that just loves for no reason. Even love that spreads and expands out through the world.

And to end this sitting, to give some dedication, some aspiration to come out of that love with its calm, peaceful way: May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may the miracle of love have a chance to work on this world. Simple love that asks for nothing in return. Just love. Thank you.

Dharmette: Love (70) Intro to Upekkha Samadhi

Hello and welcome to this first talk of the week. We are continuing, and in some ways coming close to the culmination of, this many-month series on love, where this week the topic is the samādhi^[3] of equanimous love, or upekkhā samādhi^[4]. To introduce this form of love that is equanimous and non-reactive, to have started off there six months ago might have been a huge step, a challenging step, one that maybe there would have been resistance to or a lack of understanding. But now, after all these months, those of you who have followed along have maybe come to a deeper and deeper appreciation of your capacity to love. You have learned how to love, how to have a warm, tender, caring heart that radiates appreciation, respect, kindness, safety, goodness, and generosity into the world.

To begin this practice of samādhi—dipping deeply and being immersed in this state, this orientation of equanimous love—is to begin by really appreciating and valuing the good fortune of your capacity to love in whatever way that is. Even if the way you love is very quiet and subtle, maybe nuanced, or if it's loud and strong and your heart is just bursting with it. As long as it feels like it doesn't need anything or want anything, it's not dependent. It's not transactional. It can exist peacefully by itself independent of what happens around us. We can sit in chaos all around, but there's this refuge deep inside. This place of safety deep inside that, from time to time, we dip into and fill ourselves with. We allow that to be the full and only thing we are about for those minutes of samādhi.

We value it because it is the culmination, the fulfillment, or the greatest simplicity of the first three Brahmavihāras^[5] of loving-kindness, compassion, and sympathetic, appreciative joy. We really value how profound it is to not make things worse, to not get reactive, and to really allow ourselves the chance to stay close to the deepest place of integrity—of peaceful integrity, integrous peace. Just stay here where the love, the radiance, and the warmth are undisturbed. Don't disturb it.

We know how to have a sense of balance and strength here: just equanimous, balanced, and stable. We know the stability from which this love doesn't get shaken. And we have wisdom. We have a lot of wisdom for how love can be wise and how love is beneficial, useful, and maybe even revolutionary for us. We are bringing that to bear here, so that when we start focusing on this samādhi, we are willing to put aside all these reactive concerns—all these things that stand in the way—because we have the wisdom now to say it's okay to put them aside. It's okay not to be involved. We are not rejecting the world. You're not betraying the big issues of your life, but you're actually doing the opposite. You're settling into some of the deepest, fullest places of peace, well-being, and love that we have.

Learning how to stay there non-reactively, learning how to stay there equanimously, peacefully, and allowing yourself to be there is a phenomenal gift we give ourselves. It's a phenomenal gift we give the world. So much can happen doing nothing but loving. A love that doesn't need anything, and isn't afraid of anything. Just love, just warmth, just kindness, deep respect, appreciation, and generosity. All these things are there in the constellation of what we call love. But it's simple, simple, simple, simple.

To be able to give ourselves over to it is what samādhi is about—to feel good. Yes, it's good. Yes, it's okay. Part of love is, in fact, this word "okay." It's okay to just be. It's okay to just be present in this simple way. It's okay to not get caught in the fear, not get caught in the anger, not get caught up in the desires. It's okay to go below them, dip deeper and deeper into that place so that you can allow this natural capacity, this fortunate capacity for love, to grow and to flower to become more itself.

Why interfere with the natural growth, the natural expansion of some of the most profound things we have? Because there are important things to be afraid of. There are important things to be angry about. There are important things to want to get and to have. Sometimes we sacrifice so much because of our reactivity, our desires, our fears, our identities, and the ways we take things personally. I don't want to dismiss those outright, saying that we should never be that way, but not all the time. Just like you don't want to be brushing your teeth all day long—you'd miss out on a lot of your life—you don't want to be afraid all the time, angry all the time, resentful all the time, or complaining all the time. Desiring, wanting, getting, fixing, solving all the time. Entertaining, escaping all the time.

Maybe sometimes you have to have the wisdom to know when, but sometimes you have better things to do. In meditation, time-wise, this is not a big part of your life, but for here, trust deeply and have a deep faith that for these few minutes you can give yourself over to not being reactive. Just be at the center of it all in this place of equanimous love, where we begin to feel and sense in a deep way without thinking we have to do anything about anything. Because maybe there's something more profound than doing something, and that more profound thing is love.

These next four days we'll focus more deeply on this and do guided meditation on the samādhi of upekkhā samādhi. We'll start tomorrow doing this in relationship to a neutral person—someone who you don't have particular reasons to like or dislike, or be for or against. There's no history that makes it complicated. Maybe you don't know the person's name, but they are someone in your general life.

Consider for the next 24 hours a couple of people—maybe two or three people you can think of like this—and spend the day just feeling and sensing, thinking about them as human beings. They were born, learned to walk, started to be able to feed themselves, went to school, went through puberty, and had all kinds of things that they went through with family, with friends, maybe alone, maybe with company. Sufferings and joys. They are a full human being. See if you can have some tenderness, some care, something in your mind and heart that smiles thinking about this neutral person. In a sense, they maybe won't be so neutral anymore, but you still have no reason to be for or against them—no history, nothing. Just spend time thinking about this person in preparation for tomorrow.

Thank you all very much, and may you stay close to the simplest love that you know. Thank you.