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Guided Meditation: Care

Oh, good morning everyone, and welcome to IMC. Especially those of you for whom maybe this is one of the first times you've come together, and maybe even with so many people in a room like this. But maybe particularly to come to meditate and to be in community this way. So, welcome.

Welcome to everyone who's here on YouTube watching. I want to reassure you that even though there are people here and I'm looking at them a little bit and paying attention to them—it's a little bit more natural to do that when you have a room of people—I haven't forgotten about you all on YouTube. I have my laptop open here to try to track the chats, and I certainly appreciate the greetings that come in.

Many years ago, I read about when one of the great American saints died: Mr. Rogers. I read an article about him, and it said that he was invited to the Emmys—I guess that's where they give awards for TV shows. So, it's a big gala event in Los Angeles, I think, and all these big celebrities show up. He got up to give his little speech and he said, "You know, everybody here probably is here because someone cared for you, believed in you at some point in your life. Let's take a minute to be silent and remember the people who believed in us and cared for and supported us, that are partly responsible for us being here."

The article said that the TV producers panicked, because what do you do with a minute of silence on TV? So they just used the time to scan the audience, and people were crying. Just that simple question, and to be cared for.

I bring it up here this morning because it's possible to care for oneself and to make this assignment of self-care. Rather than saying self-compassion or self-love—which is certainly wonderful and important—care is a little more basic and maybe a little bit more accessible for us. We can care for ourselves, and it's possible to care for someone we don't like. For the neighbor down the street who we've always had difficulty with because they represent everything that's challenging in your life—if you find them on the sidewalk with a broken leg, suddenly you care. You take care of things and maybe get them to the hospital. But then you come back and you care for their cat because the person is not there. Someone has to care for the cat. And it isn't exactly compassion, it's just basic care. You maybe take in their mail or do different things. There is a basic care that goes into just caring for people.

So maybe as we sit today, we can sit with—if you're inclined or if it's easy enough—sit with care for yourself. What would that look like? What would it look like to take a posture and be with your breathing? No matter what arises for you as you meditate, even if this little exercise evokes the opposite or some challenge, even then, what would it mean? What would it be like to sit quietly, peacefully caring in a way that's not complicated? Some way that perhaps is settling and quieting and intimate, and kind of supports a cozy way of being here. With that, we'll sit quietly for these next 30 minutes, and then go from there.

[Meditation Period]

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, take a few moments to consider what care we have for others in the world around us. Our communities, friends, family. And maybe consider how this path of meditation, that releases us from our attachments and our preoccupations, is a way that allows our care to flow more freely.

May it be that this meditation today leads to a greater caring. Care, kindness, loving concern for the world. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings everywhere be free.

From Compassion to Care

So, I'll tell you what my main purpose or hope for this talk is up front, and then I'll give the talk to support that. That is for you to reflect on your life, review your life—like your autobiography—through the lens of caregiving emotions and feelings. Emotions like kindness, compassion, love, and care itself (which is a whole thing I'll talk about).

It's interesting to look at your own life and understand it in new ways and see it under new perspectives. It can be quite freeing or opening. Sometimes, understanding one's life story even from a new perspective sets the foundation for further growth, even growth in the Dharma^[1]. It's not that it's maybe that interesting for everyone else, but you could, for example, probably tell your life story from the perspective of your hair. If you're old enough, there's been a lot of history about how you've been with your hair. That would make a story.

But what about your life story from the perspective of care? In that regard, I'd like to talk a little bit about my own, maybe as an example of this kind of way of thinking and orientation. It brings together some of the different things I've been thinking about lately, so it's topical for me to give a talk on this.

I don't think I gave a lot of thought to caregiving feelings, emotions, or motivations until I had been a Zen student for a while. Then I reviewed my life up to that point and saw there were probably some influences on me. The big one that I associated with being compassionate, or the value of compassion, was my mother. I grew up a little bit in Italy, and it seemed like in Italy she was regularly stopping for strangers who were in car crashes. That seemed to be a regular thing to encounter, and she even bought a big first aid kit so she'd be ready to help people and support people who were in car accidents. She would pull over and stop if she saw something like that. That had a big impact on me. She would have this caregiving instinct for strangers and help them out. I didn't realize at the time that it had an influence on me, but I think it kind of went in by osmosis somehow and had an impact.

I also remember my father, and a little later when I was working for the Zen Center. I was a brand new student there, working at the bakery. These were two circumstances where my father made a donation to some nonprofit—I think it was to Save the Children—and I thought, "Wow, people do this thing, why would you do that?" Then, when I was at the Zen Center, they used to have a bakery called Tassajara Bakery over on Cole Street in San Francisco. I used to work there, and one day I was up in the office, and the person who ran the bakery, a Zen priest, was sitting at his table. For some reason, I was sitting next to him, and he got a letter from a local association—the Cole Street Association or something—asking for a donation. He asked me, "How much should we give?" I kind of probably didn't say anything. I thought, "What, you give money?" He said, "Well, I think we'll do fifty dollars." In 1979, that was a lot. This idea that you would do such things was novel for me, even though I saw it a little bit growing up as well. But it had a big impact; it went in deeply. "Oh, this is an interesting way of living."

Then, when I started my first Buddhist practice, I suffered a lot. At least the way I understood myself was that at the Zen Center, there were very few instructions on mindfulness, or none at all. There were no instructions for mindfulness of emotions or mindfulness of your suffering. The instruction was just to sit there, upright, unmoving, and just keep showing up for the present moment in an uncomplicated way. Just be there, be there, be there. I didn't have any thought I should do anything different, so that's what I was told, and so that's what I did.

What it meant was I sat with a lot of suffering. It had an impact on me to sit with a lot of suffering and just breathe, and not react, and not get caught up in stories and reactivity to it. Just feel it and be with it. I felt quite lucky that I didn't have a lot of instructions on what to do with it, because then the simplicity of suffering could somehow become a tenderizer for the heart. Something shifted and changed, and I don't know if the suffering decreased so much, but it started to work on me. This idea that suffering can work on you, or has a chance to work on you if you're not trying to solve it, fix it, and get away from it, but just be with it.

I didn't have a lot of psychological understanding either about all this, and I was pretty naive in many ways about my own suffering. But then I started recognizing suffering and compassion in other people. I started recognizing compassionate objects. There was a statue at the San Francisco Zen Center—it's still there—positioned so that when you would come out of meditation in the morning, you'd walk right up against it before you had to make a right turn. It's about five feet tall, a sinewy, narrow thing that spirals up a little bit. I would see this as the embodiment of compassion, as like Kuan Yin^[2], the bodhisattva of compassion. I'd go over there and see this.

Many years later, I discovered that the artist thought it was of a flame going up, and it probably looks more like a flame than what most people think of as compassion. But I also started feeling compassion in the wind when it breathed against my cheek. I started collecting photographs of Kuan Yin, and I started drawing them. I think what was happening was that I needed more compassion, and I was also beginning to feel something like compassion arising in me from all this sitting with suffering. So I was tuned into it around me to receive it.

But some of the tuning in, I was projecting onto the situation. I remember telling someone, "That person is so compassionate," and they'd look at me like, "You've got to be kidding." I don't know what I was picking up, but the fact that I was seeing it in the statue meant I really needed it, so I was finding it and getting it. I don't know how enlightened I got in Zen, but I became compassionate, and that made a huge difference for me. I'm so grateful for it.

At some point, I decided to become a Zen priest, and it was kind of a culmination of that. Back then, I was ordained as a Zen monk, and then three months later they changed the name to a priest, and I said, "What? What did I just sign up for?" I got a whole different feeling of what it was about. I'm happy with the word priest, I don't mind it, but technically I still am one. The reason to become a monk was in fact to respond to the suffering of the world. Slowly over time, especially in the monastic Zen life, something began to settle and open up. It seemed like it was inherent in me—not even "me," almost like an inherent responsivity to suffering around me. It wasn't like I chose to respond to it, but it was just, "That's what you do. That's what happens."

It took this form that I became a Zen monk because I thought the deepest, fullest way I knew to address human suffering was through Buddhism. I didn't know anything else, and I felt I would be dissatisfied if I did any other kind of care for the world. I had other ideas in mind; I was supposed to go to graduate school. But I felt I had to, for who I am. I didn't want that dissatisfaction or that sense of incompleteness I felt if I didn't try to address the suffering of the world in the deepest way I knew how. It wasn't like I was thinking of becoming a teacher. I thought I would have a little city storefront or something where I had a zendo, a meditation hall, and I'd just have a key. I'd keep it clean, open it up, and people would come in and leave. Who knew that I'd spend a year and a half just opening it up in the end?

Being ordained, the idea was that compassion was my motivating force in life. That's how I saw it for myself. For years, I still felt that was the case, but slowly something began shifting, and I was always late to understand the shift; it was only in retrospect. At some point, I left the Zen Center to practice Vipassana^[3], first in Asia and then here in this country. Clearly, something shifted in the meditation, because meditation no longer became about suffering and compassion.

As things were shifting, I became more and more acutely aware of how much suffering there is in the world. But what was really meaningful to recognize was that because I was practicing so much, there became more room in me to recognize the suffering—more space for me not to take it personally or for it to irritate my own suffering like salt in the wound. There was a greater capacity to be with people's suffering and pain and not wilt because of it or be burdened by it. This openness was a lovely thing to have.

Then I went to practice in Asia, and there was a dramatic shift that happened there, where my own suffering was no longer the salient issue. The practice opened up in a new way, and then something different happened to me. This was also a surprise. I came back to practice in the United States at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Massachusetts. I did a three-month retreat. It was the first time practicing with Western teachers, and to my surprise, they started doing loving-kindness meditation. The first time I did a guided loving-kindness meditation, I thought, "Oh, this is great. This is nice," kind of surprised. But they kept doing it.

For the kind of Zen student I was, you don't talk to people when they're meditating! Zen is more stoic and stern, you get to the truth directly, nothing sentimental. I'm not saying that's what Zen is about, but that's how I took it in. So I did what a reasonable person would do: when the teachers would show up and do this guided loving-kindness meditation, I would just tune them out.

But at some point during that three-month retreat, this wonderful feeling of clarity, kindness, and goodness started to well up inside of me. One day they came to do the guided loving-kindness meditation, and I thought, "Oh! That's what they're talking about!" Then I had my own reference for it. It wasn't insincere, it wasn't trying to make something happen. When they did it, I just tapped into that and built on what was already there.

What happened in my practice and in my life was that, while I still called it compassion (I didn't know any better), I realized I was more motivated day-to-day by an overall mood of kindness. Earlier, there was a deep underlying mood of compassion, but as it shifted to kindness as the underlying mood, I realized that compassion—as wonderful and profound as it is—involved a more activated internal state for me. Kindness turned out to be a simpler, less complicated state. I want to be careful not to disrespect or devalue the importance of compassion, but I noticed this shift. Even though I still thought I was motivated by compassion, over time I realized it was a whole different sentiment. It was simpler, and sometimes it would morph into compassion, but kindness, friendliness, or goodwill became the expression of what was happening to me in practice. That felt like the mood or where I was coming from.

That went along fine for a while, and then at some point in the last 15 years or so—I have all these decades I can review, so it's a slow process, not a three-day thing, but a decades-long process of really simmering in the Dharma—I started noticing a peacefulness associated with whatever caregiving, compassion, kindness, or goodwill I was involved in. There was a peacefulness where there was very little inclination to cling to anything, to react to anything, to be caught in anything, or to define myself with it.

When I was a new teacher, 30 years ago, before meeting with people one-on-one, I thought I had to give them something. I couldn't just have them show up and not have done something useful for them. I felt I had to show something for myself as a teacher. It's a little crazy to have that attitude, but natural enough in the beginning of a new role. But then this peacefulness settled in. I certainly wanted to support people and meet them and respond to them best I could, but that extra attachment, the need to do something, started to go away.

Sometimes I felt people didn't like it, because some people are highly aroused around issues of justice, politics, or even one-on-one suffering. They want you to worry for them; they want you to be alarmed. That's often the language of how we know we care for each other—if we're angry or upset. Sometimes I could feel the tension in situations where the expectation of how I was supposed to be didn't match this peacefulness I had. Some people might have thought I was aloof. I was worried I'd be seen that way, but in fact, I wasn't. I was giving my life over to try to support people in all kinds of ways.

It was interesting to discover this peacefulness, this non-attachment as a reference point for it all. Sometimes my inner lawyers would come up and tell me, "Gil, you're supposed to be a little more upset here, or a little more attached." I had to navigate that and wonder about it, but I still wanted to care for people.

Then I started studying the Pali canon^[4], the teachings of the Buddha, much more. My deeper study of these early teachings really started about 12 or 13 years ago. A few years ago, I was interested in what the Buddha had to say about compassion, partly because it was so important for me. I knew the word for compassion is Karuṇā^[5]. It turns out the Buddha, in these early texts, has very little to say about it! The only thing he says about it has to do with how it's related to meditation practice—how in meditation you would have boundless Karuṇā. He doesn't even define what it is, so we don't even know for sure that it's supposed to be translated into English as compassion.

But it's not so obvious, because translators sometimes translate another word as compassion. In the old days, when I read that, I used to think, "Oh, that's Karuṇā." But it turns out that Karuṇā is not the word or concept that involves everyday caregiving. The word for that is Anukampā^[6]. In all the circumstances where the Buddha is offering some kind of care to someone else, he's using this word Anukampā. I translate it as "care." Some people translate it as compassion, and occasionally you see it translated as sympathy.

The Buddha spent 45 years teaching out of Anukampā. So it seems like a very important emotion, because it's the basis of why the Buddha taught. If someone asked the Buddha to come and teach for them, or come to their house for a meal, they would ask, "Can you please do so out of Anukampā for me?"

The reason why this word means something different than compassion is the way it's talked about in the suttas. It is always in relationship to caring for the welfare and happiness of others. It's never talked about explicitly regarding suffering—where you want people to be alleviated and freed from their suffering. It can include that, for sure, but it is not limited to suffering. It's a broad caregiving feeling. It's also used in the ancient literature for much more ordinary, simple kinds of care. Childcare providers have care for their children. Teachers outside of Buddhism have Anukampā for their students. Parents have care for their children.

What is it now? Yesterday, I talked to a friend of mine who has stage four cancer and is starting treatment. He's spending a lot of time in hospitals. I asked him, "Would you prefer that all these people who are caring for you—the nurses, the doctors—have compassion for you, or have care for you?" He said right away, "Oh, I prefer they have care." Exactly. I didn't ask him why, but there's something very different with compassion. I based my life on compassion, so I don't want to disrespect or diminish its value, but it's a particular kind of caregiving. If a friend of mine and I spent the day together, and every moment we were together they were expressing their compassion for me, I would start stepping further and further away, like, "Give me a break." But if it was a continual feeling of, "Oh, this person cares for me," I wouldn't feel troubled by it. I wouldn't feel like it's a burden.

There's a very different feeling to care than to compassion. To overemphasize compassion as the primary way to be with people maybe misses something. This care involves caring for people's welfare and happiness. You can have that kind of care for someone who is not suffering. The Buddha met practitioners who were deep in meditation, filled with joy and happiness, and he would care for them by offering further teachings so they could go further into a greater happiness than they were already feeling.

I like the word "care" so much as a translation for Anukampā because it's a humble word. It has a double meaning in English: to care for something is to value it, to appreciate it. Care also means to offer—like medical care, spiritual care, childcare, or elder care. It's a very common word. My friend in the hospital said, "These nurses who are taking care of me, they're inspiring by how much care they have. They care for everyone. You watch them, and there's so much care in what they're doing." I don't think they're having compassion for all of us, but they're just going around doing a fantastic job caring for people.

It's possible to care for people who you don't love. Love and compassion are a high bar sometimes. Care is a lower bar. It's just a basic ordinary human activity to care, if you allow yourself to be a basic ordinary human being without preoccupations and attachments.

Finally, in the suttas, they don't talk much about what motivates Anukampā. It's kind of just assumed that people have it. When some of the Buddha's disciples became fully enlightened, he told them to go forth into the world for the welfare and benefit of others, out of care for the world. He just expected it. But there are a few places in the suttas where this word for care is closely connected to the human capacity to have respect, to honor, to esteem, or to venerate other people. This idea of respect and veneration are strong words, but some people in the West talk about appreciating the sacredness of other people, the divine in everyone. Anukampā doesn't come from suffering; it comes from a place of deep respect and veneration. There's something very honor-worthy about each person we meet. You can do that for people you don't like, people whose behavior is distasteful. That basic care can still exist.

When I started reading about Anukampā, I recognized that this concept speaks to this more recent change I've had: this peacefulness around caregiving. I'm finding that what I'm living from now is this very simple care defined by non-attachment and non-clinging. It's a simple, ordinary thing. It can morph into compassion or friendliness, but it has a simplicity, ordinariness, and sweetness to it. Loving-kindness seems like a more activated state. There's nothing wrong with being activated, but if compassion is more activated than kindness, and kindness is more activated than Anukampā, then it's helpful to be able to go about life without always having to evoke or gear yourself up. If your requirement is to always be kind or compassionate, you have to figure out, "How do I do that now?"

Finding this non-attachment in relationship to caregiving, and finding it resonating with Anukampā, has been really inspiring for me. If the lawyers in my mind were arguing about whether it's okay to care for people without being attached, it's like I got the expert witness to take the stand and make the case that yes, it's okay.

I told my personal story with the hope of inspiring you to think of your story. Maybe you can find someone to tell it to; maybe the telling of it is your discovery process. What's been your relationship to care? Did you have no examples of it growing up? Was your primary background the absence of it? Has anything shifted and changed? What were the influences on you as you went through your life? What have you learned over your lifetime about your care, kindness, or friendliness? Where have you received it, been nourished by it, or influenced by it?

Whatever your story is, let's respect it, honor it, and venerate it. See it as a stepping stone for further growth. The more clarity you have about it, maybe you're ready to find something more, or let it evolve into new ways that wouldn't have evolved if you hadn't seen clearly what it is.

Those are my thoughts for today.

Q&A

We have a couple of minutes if any of you would like to ask a question or make a comment. You're welcome to do so.

Question from YouTube: Is peacefulness similar to equanimity?

Gil Fronsdal: It overlaps a little bit, but I think of them as different. I think of peacefulness as less complicated than equanimity.

Audience Member: I was thinking about empathy. It's not quite as intense as compassion, and it's a way of feeling into another person's state. That might be closer to caring for someone.

Gil Fronsdal: It could well be. There's another word in Pali that is sometimes translated as sympathy, and that often goes together with care—they're a pair. So empathy and care are closely related.

Maybe one more?

Audience Member: Something I've been struggling with, particularly in the events of the last two years or so, is exercising compassion for people where the root of their suffering seems to be something I fundamentally disagree with. Like, their suffering is due to not being able to engage in their own selfishness, for example. With so much polarization and discourse around that, it's extremely fatiguing for me. I feel the answer to it seems to be having compassion for those people instead of responding with more anger, but I'm not sure how to go about that.

Gil Fronsdal: I think it's completely reasonable to not have compassion for some of the reasons people suffer. But underneath that, there is some kind of suffering, and it's what underlies it that you can maybe connect to.

For example, if I'm crying and really upset, and you ask, "Gil, what's wrong? What happened?" and I say, "I just didn't win the California lottery today," you'd probably just shrug your shoulders. That wouldn't elicit a lot of compassion. But if you listen to me more deeply, you might say, "Why is Gil interested in the California lottery? Maybe he's really insecure." Then I can maybe feel for his insecurity. Is this idea relevant for you?

Audience Member: I do think so, yeah.

Gil Fronsdal: So, kind of go listen deeper than the surface.

My friends, thank you for being here, and for those of you online. Helen and Peter are the hosts for the discussion group that happens after the Dharma talks. If you go on the IMC website under "What's New" or on the calendar, you can see the Zoom link to discuss the talk a little bit and just hang out with the community.

Thank you all very much.