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The Sublime States of Loving Kindness and Compassion

The immeasurables, the Brahma-vihāras^[1], or the sublime states of mind. For those of you who might not be familiar with what they are, I'll just list them as I begin here. They all emerge out of a quality of love.

The first one is referred to as loving-kindness, or mettā^[2], and this is a quality of love that's characterized by a sense of appreciation, goodwill, friendliness, or well-wishing. It's a beautiful, beautiful quality.

The second quality is compassion, or karuṇā^[3] in Pali. This is an expression of love that's aware of suffering and is embedded with the wish to alleviate suffering, to mitigate it in some way, whatever way is possible for us.

The third quality is a quality of taking delight in the good fortune of other people, a quality that's sometimes referred to as empathetic joy or sympathetic joy (muditā^[4]). It's a quality where you feel happy for someone else's happiness, and it's absent of any kind of self-referential focus back on yourself. So, I'm really happy for your happiness, and I don't have a thought bubble that says, "Why the heck did that happen for me?" It's a really beautiful quality. It doesn't get as much airtime as some of the other ones.

And then the fourth quality is a quality of love that's expressed in a feeling of acceptance or equanimity (upekkhā^[5]). When love meets acceptance, one feels this sense of equanimity.

These qualities don't exist independent of one another. When mettā is there, loving-kindness is there; so is compassion, so is sympathetic joy, and so is equanimity. I've had discussions with friends and colleagues who say, "Oh, you can't have compassion without equanimity." You need equanimity in order to have compassion. Well, I'm not sure that's true, but it is true that you can't have compassion without equanimity, but you can have equanimity without compassion. Compassion is a quality that is a response to suffering, always and only a response to suffering.

Life is full of challenges and suffering, right? But it's not just about suffering. There are moments in life that are filled with happiness, joy, ease, well-being, and so on and so forth. One can feel a quality of equanimity in those states, as well as the quality of equanimity with suffering. These four mind states are called sublime because when we touch them, the mind tends to be settled, free, and unhindered.

I'll say a little bit more about this as I go along, but each of these mind states represents an intentional way of directing our awareness. They're characterized by an intent that has a quality of being exalted and uplifted. It has a quality of feeling spacious and boundless. The key that I'm going to point to here is that these states exist when there's freedom from a sense of obvious, or even implicit, ill-will.

You can't have a quality of loving-kindness at the same time that you're holding ill-will or aversion. You can't touch compassion when you're harboring ill-will. Sometimes we harbor ill-will and don't even realize that the ill-will is affecting us, or that we are even being touched by it.

So many people think that we have to work hard to create kindness, to be compassionate, but we don't create these sublime states. Whether we're talking about compassion or loving-kindness, what we do is access them. Life is full of the ebb and flow of challenges, conditions, and circumstances that trigger us and affect us. These states will arise and pass away in response to the circumstances and conditions in which we find ourselves.

We don't create a compassionate response when we're suffering, but we access a compassionate response based on our willingness to relate to ourselves and to other people in a healthy, balanced way. We have to have some quality of ease, settledness, and unhinderedness in order to be able to even recognize when we touch these states.

How would you know when you were feeling a quality of loving-kindness? It's a rhetorical question; I'm going to answer it myself. I'm going to put it out there because when I learned the practice of loving-kindness myself, it was taught to me originally like many people. I thought that loving-kindness was a practice where you said nice phrases to yourself, and then you felt a certain way, and you kept saying the phrases, and the phrases would help you touch the quality. That's a perfectly legitimate way to learn to practice these states. But it took me a while to realize it wasn't the phrases that was the loving-kindness or the compassion. It's the actual feeling that we touch within ourselves, that is awakened within ourselves, that we then label loving-kindness or compassion.

Those states are very unique, and they feel a certain way. Just like when we are angry about something, anger feels a certain way. When we're feeling at ease and happy about something, happiness feels a certain way. Emotions feel a certain way. They're all normal, it's all completely human. It's just that when we don't recognize what the emotion is, or what the mind state is, or what the attitude is, we can get seduced by it and fooled by it.

If we know that we're angry, it's one thing to be angry and know that you're angry. It's a completely different thing to be angry and be completely consumed by anger. The awareness of the quality gives you some sense of presence and a way to adjust to the moment of challenge. It doesn't mean that we're not going to tip over into the anger, but we know what's happening. Then, with time, we begin to recognize, "Oh, here comes anger," or, "This is anger, this is the point of being hooked." We can either go down the rabbit hole, or we can just allow the anger to move through us, to flow through us.

Where I'm going to go with this talk is: how do we meet these moments and allow nature to run its course and not be drawn into it? When we are drawn into it, we can't access these sublime states.

What I was trying to point to is that loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity feel very distinctively one way or another, just as anger feels one way, happiness feels another way, and jealousy feels another way. When we begin to recognize these feelings, they actually help us know what's going on.

If compassion arises, we become aware of it because we've become aware that we're suffering, or that we're witnessing suffering. When we're delighting in something, feeling happiness for somebody else's good fortune, we know this quality that we're touching. When we know the quality, we can begin to cultivate it. We can begin to rest in it. We can begin to know what it actually feels like, and then we can appreciate how allowing it lets it come to full fruition.

Our access to these states is based on our willingness to relate to ourselves and to other beings in a healthy way. But when we are honest and look, we see that we have limitations, and that these limitations actually shape our experience in direct and immediate ways.

For instance, on a good day, in a low-pressure situation, you might find that you're fine with the people in your life, your partners, your friends, your co-workers. Everything is fine, nothing disturbs you. It's a good day, and there's not much pressure. On another day, we might find that we're doing well and getting some positive attention, so we can like ourselves, we can respect ourselves. It's easy to do that.

Those states are normal, but they create boundaries within which we can feel good and alive and receptive when it's a low-pressure day and our partners aren't irritating us. But outside of that boundary, we don't feel comfortable at all, and we might find that we automatically default to lashing out, withdrawing, or shutting down.

Within those boundaries, if we can see what those limitations are, we can see how they affect us in immediate, direct ways. We try to escape from feelings of hurt or being left out, or when we encounter some disappointment or failure. We shut down our feelings of sensitivity. We just don't want to feel that. We place our attention elsewhere; we try to escape that.

These sublime states, these heavenly abodes, they're not just about being nice to other people or feeling concern for other people. They are about freeing ourselves from these kinds of deadening reactions that are familiar and habitual. On a good day, I feel great, and on a not-so-good day, I just don't want to be bothered.

These deadening reactions are so familiar, they seem as natural as the inner voice with which we talk to ourselves all the time, driving and forcing ourselves to think that we need to be perfect, or certainly better than we are. We would never talk to other people in this way. Most of us wouldn't. These kinds of reactions are also very normal, just as normal as feeling anger or happiness. We just need to learn what they actually feel like.

When we can learn to be kind to ourselves, or to extend goodwill in a more consistent and conscious way independent of our circumstances, we're able to free ourselves from states of anxiousness, anxiety, bitterness, cynicism, or depression.

These difficult states stem from our being unable to release anger, fear, or grief in our life. They're born out of aversion, out of ill-will. They're born out of resisting our experience and wishing that it was other than the way it actually is, preferring it to be other than the way it actually is.

One of the definitions I give to students in my compassion courses for suffering (dukkha^[6]) is: any moment in time that is other than the way we prefer it to be is a moment of suffering. Think about it. Any moment in time when things are different than the way you want them to be, there's resistance, and that resistance creates contraction and contention. That is a moment of suffering.

There's big suffering, and there's little suffering. There's the suffering created by coming to IMC and not being able to find a parking spot, and then there's the suffering created by massive, important, big things in life. But any moment that we're in contention with our direct experience and wanting it to be other than the way it is, is a moment of suffering.

These difficult states arise out of resistance, out of ill-will, out of aversion. Hatred, spite, and abuse are all expressions of ill-will. Even the act of belittling someone in your mind—replaying an argument that you had—even that act is an act of violence. The prejudice that justifies the violence in our inner world is based on the bias that other people really don't matter. When we think ill like that, we're actually part of the problem, we're not part of the solution.

It's a high bar to think that we're not going to have these thoughts from time to time. But when you consider the amount of time that we can waste ruminating on things, playing old arguments over in our heads, and strategizing how we're going to regain control of a situation that we feel like we've lost control of, all of that churning and rumination—how can we expect to touch compassion when all of that is going on? We're so out of balance, we don't even recognize that we're out of balance.

It's a little bit like walking on a balance beam. We have perfect balance, everything feels fine and safe, and then something triggers us and, bloop, off we go. Then there's this figurative desperation to get back up on the balance beam to find our balance again.

People will say, "Oh, if I could just be more compassionate." Well, how can you be compassionate? How can you feel loving-kindness when you're in a state of turmoil, a state of distress, or a state of unbalance? It's realistic to see that you're in a state of unbalance and what's actually needed is compassion. To actually see it allows you to be with the experience, so it can flow through you, healing can happen, and you can come back into a kind of homeostasis.

The kind of thinking that justifies violence doesn't only hurt the people that you're thinking ill of, it hurts you, the thinker. If we don't use these qualities of kindness, benevolence, and compassion to acknowledge that we're hurting, or that a hurt state exists, and allow these qualities to help us heal from it, we're forced to manage those feelings. If we don't let them be touched by these beautiful qualities that allow a natural type of healing to occur, we have to somehow find our way back up onto the balance beam, and it's not a very comfortable situation to find ourselves in. We find ourselves in situations like that all too often.

What do we do to manage these situations? We shrug them off. We blame others: "Why did he do that?", "Why did she say that?" Or we beat ourselves up. We just assume that somehow we shouldn't expect anything better, or that we don't deserve anything better.

The good news is that we can learn how to cultivate access to these sublime states by recognizing when they awaken in us, by recognizing what they feel like and what effect they have on our immediate and direct experience. When we know what's happening, when we know how to recognize it, we can see what effect it has.

When you're feeling loving-kindness, you're feeling a really beautiful quality of friendliness, a beautiful quality of well-wishing. How do we know this quality of loving-kindness, and what helps us touch it? What helps us awaken to it?

I would say that appreciation is one of the things that helps us touch and recognize the quality of loving-kindness. When you're actually appreciating something about yourself or about someone else, the quality of appreciation is free from the quality of aversion or ill-will. You can't have ill-will and appreciation at the same time. You can have a moment of appreciation and then a moment of ill-will, but you can't have them together. To recognize that appreciation is to put yourself in touch with the quality of loving-kindness.

I'm going to give you a really nice example. I live in a little garden cottage, and my neighbor has a dog, and this dog has come over to my little cottage and moved in. This dog loves me. I never had a dog that loved me before. This dog loves me, and all I have to do is think of this dog... [Laughter] I see the smiles on everyone's faces because you all have dogs that love you. This feeling of delight, this appreciation, is the feeling of loving-kindness. It's not the dog; the dog is the trigger that awakens it.

His name is Mason. I was meditating the other day. Mason comes in, he lies down. He knows that it's time to meditate, right? So he lies down there, and he's such a good dog. He's a big dog. He lies down, and I was meditating for an hour. Well, at about 55 minutes, Mason decided he had had enough.

He's such a nice dog, though. He gets up quietly. He's so dignified. He gets up quietly, and he just quietly moves around like, "Okay, wake up, I want to go out." I'm sitting there, I won't move. I won't move. So he walks behind me and he sits down again, and then he rustles around again. I still wouldn't move for him. He comes behind me and, with his nose, he nudges me under the arm. I sit there quietly, I won't move. So he rests his nose on my shoulder, and with a heavy sigh, he goes... [Laughter]. How could you not love a dog like that? That's loving-kindness. Mason just gave it to you. That's loving-kindness.

That quality exists in a space that feels spacious. Recognizing what they feel like is really key and really important.

These sublime states are innate. We all know what loving-kindness feels like, we can all touch it, and we all know what compassion feels like. We can touch it when the heart is open and can be fully with whatever our experience is in any given moment, whether our experience is the experience I just shared with you, or whether we're feeling hurt. It's an opening and an uncontrived energy that allows it to heal, just as the body would heal a bruise or a wound. You just allow the body to take care of itself.

We all know what it's like to feel hurt. We've all been hurt from time to time. The sense of hurt is a natural effect from the triggers and challenges that we all have to contend with in our lives. But the hurt feeling can redress itself when we can stay open and allow ourselves to be with it. When we allow the process of healing to just occur in a natural way, and when we can't be with our experience, what happens is that we cut the healing short.

What does this shortcut look like? If we were triggered or hurt by someone, and we are unable to recognize what's happened and be with it, we might lash out. We might criticize our feeling of hurt as something to be ashamed of, a sign of weakness or foolishness. Or we might shut down and not acknowledge that we're hurt. We may make some decision that to be sensitive is too dangerous because it makes us feel vulnerable, and we don't want to feel vulnerable. So instead of being triggered by something and having a short, temporary retraction, we get a long-term contraction. We train ourselves to respond by shutting down or lashing out.

The practices of kindness and compassion don't rest upon manufacturing emotional states. They're based upon ways of adjusting our impressions and responding to our experiences that allow natural relational health to come forth.

I want to really emphasize here that the cultivation of loving-kindness isn't about imposing some ideal of liking or loving everybody all the time. That's a really high bar. Rather, it's a practice of meeting the moment with freedom from aversion, freedom from ill-will.

If there's one thing I'd like you to get out of this talk this morning, it's that those states exist free from ill-will. If you can begin to appreciate that those states are free from ill-will, you can begin to get a sense of what freedom tastes like. When we're told, "If something's troubling you, let it go," what does letting go mean, and how the heck do you do it?

When you're really enjoying this story about Mason, that state is free from ill-will. To recognize the absence of ill-will, the absence of that which disturbs us and takes us off our balance beam—that appreciation, that awareness, allows it to grow. It allows it to be cultivated, because now you know what's happening. And when we can see what's happening, everything changes. And of course, how do we see what's happening? Through the cultivation of mindfulness (sati^[7]).

When we're triggered, we might still feel the pain of losing contact with something pleasant, or we might feel like we're being touched by something unpleasant. Yet, with patience, a friendly attitude, practice, and kindness, we can learn to curtail an automatic contraction into a negative mind state, going into bitterness or depression. We can learn to support ourselves by feeling what we're actually feeling.

Let's talk about compassion here. When we're feeling hurt, for instance, if we can feel what we're feeling and simply let it flow through us, we can feel the resonance of the hurt, but we don't get damaged by it. In other words, our relationship to it becomes equanimous^[8]. We're not resisting it. We're seeing what's happening, we're acknowledging it. That's the really important thing: we know what's happening, and we know that it has to run its course.

When we're triggered by something, really triggered, and the nervous system takes over, and we try to suppress that, we generally make things worse. "I shouldn't be excited, I shouldn't be afraid, I shouldn't be angry." We make things worse. The nervous system just takes over. To think that we're not human beings and not subject to that is naive.

But when we recognize that we can be with that feeling and know that we're not going to die, that it's going to flow through us if we could just not clamp onto it and attach to it, we can begin to establish and recognize a mind state that's not affected by ill-will. You can feel pain and not feel ill-will. You can feel pain and not be in resistance to it.

In the teaching about the two arrows^[9], there's pain and then there's suffering. There's the first arrow, and then there's the second arrow. This is how it actually manifests. You can be with something that feels challenging and not be seduced by it. You can just let it flow through you.

It's not easy. It takes practice. But with a willingness and a growing clarity of what is actually occurring for you, you can allow whatever is happening to flow through and not be affected by ill-will. Then you can reflect on and linger in that state you've touched, that moment of freedom, and bring attention to it. By doing so, you bring attention to the state of essential okayness or stability, and then it begins to amplify. This is how you cultivate loving-kindness. This is how you cultivate compassion.

To wrap this up: mindfulness is at the beginning, at the middle, and at the end of the entire process, because none of this is possible if we can't see and recognize what is happening.

Those are some of my thoughts this morning. We are a minute or so over time, so I'm not going to ask for questions, but I will stick around for a moment or two if anyone has questions. Thank you for your attention, and I hope that you can live in a state of Mason-ness.