This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Attention and Love; The Divine Abodes: (3 of 5) Compassion. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
So, welcome folks. Welcome to you all. It’s nice to see your names. I have a different Zoom backdrop today; I’m at the mothership in Redwood City, IMC. And happy to be here. I did not deliberately position my head above the Buddha, which is a no-no, but that’s the angle we’ve got going. Anyway, let us practice.
Settling. Settling the way we’ve always done settling, as if for the first time.
Just letting your attention drop first into your chest, the heart center. The expansion and contraction of your lungs.
And dropping down again to your belly. My head and my heart feel so run through by space, but my belly I associate with the Earth—groundedness, stability, gravity. Just keeping contact with the Earth.
Breathing in such a way that each breath connects you more deeply to the Earth, to the Earth element, to a sense of groundedness, rootedness.
We pay attention, in part, to discover what we love, to discover our love. To let the subtlety and refinement, the attunement and sensitivity of our attention, reveal our love and care, what actually matters to us, moment by moment.
We don’t insist upon answering the question, “Where is my love? What do I love?” We are just very patient, offering our attention, letting the poignancy of having been born just come to us in its own time. That sometime, in due time, the necessity of love dawns unmistakably.
From the groundedness of our belly, begin to fill out our body with the heart energy. The heart trembling in the face of all phenomena—sensitive, flexible, very strong because it’s flexible. It becomes very natural to wish ourselves well.
How can you express care for yourself, care for your life, with your attention in this moment?
As we become grounded and open, just one drop of love flavors everything. Hatred becomes a kind of fever dream, easy to put down. “I will not betray my heart, my love. It hurts too much.” Whatever job hatred is supposed to do, something else can do it better. So we breathe, we feel our love.
Okay, good to sit with you.
So, dukkha1, usually rendered as suffering, is everywhere and obvious, but also kind of shocking. From the Majjhima Nikāya2, the Buddha says, “This Dhamma I have reached is deep, hard to see, difficult to awaken to, quiet and excellent, not confined by thought, subtle, sensed by the wise.” Dukkha, in other words, is both easy and hard to see. When there’s some hard moment, there’s some part of us that can barely believe it. You know, “How could it have unfolded this way? How could the universe do this?”
Hala Alyan, an artist and psychologist, wrote this kind of grief poem where she included the lines that the patients who come to me swarmed with misery and astonishment, their hearts like newborns after the first needle. Dukkha can feel like that. And the question, “How should I love? How do I respond to this?”—that never gets fully answered. People who think they know how to love, who think they’ve answered the question “How should I love?”—they stop growing. “How do I love?” is not a question, it’s a koan.
The Buddha asks us to comprehend suffering. And the act of comprehending highlights the necessity of love. If we actually get close enough to perceiving suffering, you don’t need to be told about the necessity of love; it becomes self-evident. Because you can sense that there’s no way to meet the intensity of the human condition without crumbling or clinging unless we steep ourselves in love. And the alternatives to love really are something like hate or apathy, nihilism. And so it’s sort of like, yeah, there’s some details to be worked out, but the path is very clear.
So today: compassion. Love in the face of dukkha. The wish that it be alleviated. And it’s a love infused with wisdom. Part of compassion is coming to a more nuanced understanding of our suffering. So often we misdiagnose our pain, our suffering, and we tend to embrace single-cause models. You know, “It’s this, it’s that person, that thing, that tangle, that pain.” But the truth is almost always more complex. So part of compassion is actually appreciating paṭiccasamuppāda3, the dependent arising—that there are very complex causal webs that bring suffering to our heart. If we get too simple, if we make the wrong diagnosis, it sets us out on the course of the wrong treatment approach. And so we are developing wisdom, a nuanced understanding of the nature of our own suffering. So often we want to control our suffering rather than understand it. And compassion makes us patient in our understanding.
For many, the kind of gateway to compassion is mingled with grief, with loss, with the changing of all things, with anicca4. And Kathryn Schulz is so articulate on this. I like to quote her. She writes, reflecting on the death of her father:
This is the essential, avaricious nature of loss. It encompasses without distinction the trivial and the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone. We often ignore its true scope if we can, but for a while after my father died, I could not stop seeing the world as it really is, marked everywhere by the evidence of past losses and the imminence of future ones. This was not because his death was a tragedy—my father died peacefully at 74, attended throughout his final weeks by those he loved most. It was because his death was not a tragedy. What shocked me was that something so sad could be the normal, necessary way of things.
In its aftermath, each individual life seemed to contain too much heartbreak for its fleeting duration. History, which I had always loved even in its silences and mysteries, seemed like little more than a record of loss on an epic scale, especially where it could offer no record at all. The world itself seemed ephemeral: glaciers and species and ecosystems vanishing, the pace of change as swift as in a time-lapse, as if those of us alive today had been permitted to see it from the harrowing perspective of eternity. Everything felt fragile, everything felt vulnerable. The idea of loss pressed in all around me, like a hidden order to existence that emerged only in the presence of grief.
We take that in, and what is there to do other than to love wisely, love knowing change?
Compassion is not an enmeshed love. It’s not emotional contagion. My conditioning around love is a kind of enmeshed model, you might say. Like, “Your pain is my pain is your pain.” Love and space are somehow in tension, rather than space affording room for love, for a compassion that feels sustainable. And so I found that certain kinds of suffering, the suffering of loved ones, can spin me in a distinctive way, where my words masquerade as compassion but are actually an expression of my own intolerance of their pain and the impact it has on my heart.
And that makes sense. As children, the suffering of a parent or caretaker is not an opportunity for compassion; it’s an existential threat. Our safety depends entirely on their power. And maybe those early formative experiences encode some sense of fear in the face of the suffering of the other. But we remember compassion is not an insistence that someone change. And it’s not even an insistence that someone stop suffering. It’s love in the face of suffering. We’re distilling out some of the compulsivity, our own intolerances.
Compassion is not empathy. Affective empathy, kind of emotional empathy, is feeling the inner emotional life of the other. And that’s maybe a component of compassion, but that’s not… compassion, the dimension of love, is central. If compassion entails a willingness to grieve, that cannot be the last word of our compassion. Grief cannot be the last word of our compassion. There is this sense of a love that actually holds it.
Compassion is not a demand. It’s maybe… sometimes it feels like a prayer directed to who knows what, but a kind of quiet prayer, not a demand. And it’s incredibly intimate because pity allows some space, you know? But compassion… you’re truly undefended in the face of their suffering. And sometimes the insistence that their suffering is relieved is merely another defense, another way of blunting the full impact. Sometimes the advice-giving that we extend is merely another way to blunt the full impact, the intimacy of meeting suffering together with love.
And to let suffering in deeply, one must trust love deeply. One must trust that the last word of pain is love. And as we’ll get to, I think in these realms, one must also trust the other brahmavihāras5—upekkhā6, equanimity.
Thich Nhat Hanh says true love never makes you suffer. But that means that love needs a lot of wisdom infused into it. That love needs to come from a place of real deep refinement in ourselves. As we practice, we start to release our own pain, and the pain of the world ceases to resonate with our wounds, but instead with our heart. When the pain of the world resonates with our wounds, there’s a kind of intolerable desperation around compassion and intolerance to suffering. When it resonates with our heart, our love becomes steady, patient, knowing. The more free we become, the more potent our compassion becomes. It is an emanation of our love rather than our fear.
So I offer this for your consideration. And I appreciate the chance to reflect on these things with you. And we’ll be back tomorrow. Joy. Okay.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a foundational concept in Buddhism, referring to the inherent suffering in all conditioned existence. ↩
Majjhima Nikāya: The “Middle-length Discourses,” a collection of Buddhist scriptures in the Sutta Piṭaka of the Pāli Canon. The original transcript said “maim andaya.” ↩
Paṭiccasamuppāda: A Pali term for “Dependent Origination” or “Dependent Arising.” It is a core Buddhist doctrine describing the chain of causation that leads to suffering and the cycle of rebirth. ↩
Anicca: A Pali word meaning “impermanence.” It is one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism, along with dukkha (suffering) and anattā (not-self). ↩
Brahmavihāras: The “divine abodes” or “four immeasurables” in Buddhism. They are four sublime states of mind to be cultivated: mettā (loving-kindness), karuṇā (compassion), muditā (sympathetic joy), and upekkhā (equanimity). ↩
Upekkhā: A Pali word for “equanimity.” It is a state of mental balance and impartiality, free from attachment and aversion. It is the fourth of the four brahmavihāras. ↩