This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Self-acceptance; The Divine Abodes: (4 of 5) Sympathetic Joy. 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 all. Good morning to most of you. Some folks requested an opportunity to connect with each other, so we decided to just offer a short Zoom session where you can have breakout groups or say hello to each other with some faces. That will be tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. Pacific, and I put the link in the YouTube description. It’s also posted at matthewbrensilver.org on the first page. You’ll see the link to the Zoom, and that’s just an opportunity to connect with some faces and be together. So, tomorrow at 8:00 a.m., totally optional, of course. Thanks, Cindy, for facilitating that. I’ll be there and can answer any questions or something, but it’s really kind of Sangha-focused. Okay, welcome. Welcome, Salt Spring, that’s a nice island. All right, let’s meditate.
Just enjoying the stillness.
Pouring your awareness into your body, making your body bright, vibrant with awareness.
A sense of deep kindness towards all conditioning, the uncountable, unknowable forces that have birthed this moment and its joy and sorrow.
Ordinarily, we focus on the effects of that which we seem to have controlled, others seem to have controlled. We focus on that which is conscious, but there are so many forces that have come to shape this moment that we cannot even see.
But we can bow to our conditioning. As an animal with an evolutionary history, as an Earthling with a home.
Maybe this is a way of saying we come to forgive history. Not condone, but open our heart to the ways the past is present. All the forces that have shaped what we call “me,” “my life.”
All the things you like and dislike about who you are. We just stop picking and choosing and just say, “Okay, my life.”
And then there’s compassion for your suffering, there’s joy for your good fortune. There’s equanimity for the nearly complete hopelessness that defines any life. And there’s a lot of kindness, tenderness for what we call “me,” “my life.” Just appreciate your life in this way as we begin our practice.
Forever we’ve been categorizing, sorting out what is acceptable and what is unacceptable about ourselves. What aspects of our conditioning are acceptable, what’s unacceptable. What feelings are acceptable, which are unacceptable.
Just end all of that right now. And you may still want to change, you may want to appreciate skillful and unskillful, but that comes out of a kind of radical “yes” to all of our conditioning. In other words, it comes out of acceptance. Change comes from acceptance.
But don’t accept yourself so as to change yourself. Just say yes to everything that’s always inspired a no. Okay, here I am.
The end of shame.
Don’t be annoying with yourself, nitpicking. It’s wise, loving in the face of conditioning. And it’s all conditioning.
Just putting down all the annoying behavioral modification programs you run on yourself. The carrot and the stick. Just stop running the game on yourself for just these moments. Open your heart to the totality of what you are. We’ll figure out the details later.
Maybe it feels natural to say something in our minds like, “May I be happy. May I be safe, protected. May I be at peace.”
I don’t know where that meditation came from, but somewhere in there. This hasn’t been a super systematic guiding of meditation practice, to be honest, but today we got on some kind of metta, self-acceptance train. Anyway, we find our way with practice. I don’t know what’s going to come up in me each morning.
So, mudita.1 Usually rendered as sympathetic joy, kind of delighting in the wealth, the love in the face of good fortune, the welfare of others. And it’s kind of known as a little bit of a tricky one because you can’t force joy. Mudita is not supposed to be like those childhood pictures, the family photo where the children are commanded to smile, and you can just see the weird, awkward preoccupation and complicity with the prevailing authorities. Just smile. I have a lot of childhood photos like that when I’m not protesting being photographed—a lot of forced smiles. And this is not that.
With kindness and compassion, the physiological kind of reality of those states is more easily evoked than joy. It can feel like not pretending, you know, to get into compassion, get into kindness. Mudita can be a little bit more tricky, and so we don’t have to pretend. We take our time with the physiology. Often, it’s about putting down other burdens, and then we’re freed up for joy.
The suttas2 characterize it as an antidote to resentment, which is interesting. Mudita, joy, as an antidote to resentment. We see so much resentment, so little capacity to delight in the welfare of others. So from the Anguttara Nikaya,3 there’s no way that when mudita has been developed, pursued, made a vehicle, given a grounding, steadied, and consolidated, that resentment will still keep overpowering the mind.
My colleague, Tu-Anh from Seattle,4 is kind of the queen of mudita. She sometimes just goes off with mudita; that’s her favorite. She’s relentless. I remember one time, I think I’ll read a piece from her, where we were co-teaching online, and I think this was 2021, so deep in the pandemic. And I don’t know, she just went off. I remember my face was aching, literally aching, because she just kept going for like an hour or something.
Anyway, so she says—I just transcribed what she said:
We’ve come to my favorite, favorite moment in all of Dharma. I don’t know when I opened this Pandora’s Box. It’s not the way I grew up with this energy. I don’t know anywhere in my life I would have said, “Oh yeah, joy is what I would call life.” I grew up in a very difficult childhood, spent the bulk of my life poor, on welfare. Joy would not be the underlying feature of experience I would point out. But somewhere in Dharma, I stumbled upon this mudita. It’s been a game-changer.
So let me see if I can try to help you see where I’m pointing to. There’s a great difference between mudita and the kind of worldly joy that we could try to access regularly in our lives. I imagine that each one of us on this call—there are 56 of us—we all get two joys, two moments of joy in our lives. That’s all you get, two opportunities of joy. And if you’re like me, we’ve already used them up. So there’s no joy for the rest of the year. You’ve already had it.
So the only way you get to access a level of joy has to come from someone else. If I start telling you about joy I have, because you’re human, you’ll feel it. If I begin to cry, you’ll feel that. If I tell you about some sadness, some difficulty in my life, you’ll feel that. And likewise, I realized I could feel the joy of another person, and there would never be a day or a moment that I would not feel joy. Never. It’s not possible. There are like billions of people on the earth, and at any given moment, somebody somewhere is experiencing joy. And all I have to do is be willing to tap into that joy and feel it with them.
My granddaughter is four years old. She’s learning about jokes, and she starts laughing. She’ll say something like, “And then they said, ‘Go away!’” and she starts laughing uproariously. [Laughter] And I’m laughing, and that’s not even funny, but I’m laughing because she’s laughing so hard, like she’s told some great joke. It’s just another way of experiencing the human condition. We’re so interconnected.
So, joy is important. It’s important to find ways of putting down our pain, even when that pain can’t be resolved. And it feels irresponsible to do that. How can I leave these loose ends of my life unresolved? Joy is a kind of illegitimate… can’t risk it. But it’s important. Sometimes it can feel like joy is a way of cheating on your grief, a kind of emotional adultery of some kind. But no, they’re all compatible. And part of the Dharma is that it makes our emotional life more and more supple, such that the trace of the last moment becomes less and less. A moment of joy followed by a moment of grief, followed by humor, and none of the prior states kind of leave a trace. We can just be available for the full range of our emotional life.
Sometimes it’s easier to talk about removing, deconstructing the obstacles to joy rather than creating joy. And so what obstructs mudita? Ownership, possessiveness, comparing mind, envy. The reflex of ego is to incorporate all goodness into itself, kind of like an amoeba. I think I remember that, like an amoeba just incorporating some food into itself. That same way, my ego tolerates no goodness outside itself. It must appropriate everything, everyone’s joy, appropriate our own spiritual practice, the fruits of that. And so we have to snap out of self-view to truly enjoy another’s happiness.
Now, I’m not suggesting that mudita is like a public policy, meaning that we overlook all conditions that might engender envy—the disparities of health and wealth, which are unsustainable. This is not a public policy; this is about the heart of the practitioner.
So, the essayist Joseph Epstein, quoting, said of the seven deadly sins of lust, gluttony, greed, laziness, wrath, pride, and envy, “Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.” It’s really not. Envy is usually about two people, jealousy usually about three, a triangle. And you know, some of this may have evolutionary benefit, right? But we should not deify the mechanisms of evolution. Evolution doesn’t care about our freedom, even a little. You know, we’re here because we’re the sufferers, in a sense.
This is from evolutionary psychology:
Despite the manifold unhappiness that jealousy creates, jealousy has a crystalline functional logic, precise purposes, and supreme sensibility. It exists today in modern humans because those in the evolutionary past who were indifferent to the sexual contact that their mates had with others lost the evolutionary contest to those who became jealous. As the descendants of successful ancestors, modern humans carry with them passions that led to their forebears’ success. The legacy of this success is a dangerous passion that creates unhappiness, but the unhappiness motivated adaptive action over human evolutionary history.
It’s jealousy and then envy. Envy shows us where we’re identified. Envy illuminates the sacred cows of our ego, and wherever we’re identified, it impairs love. Identification impairs love. In a sense, envy highlights the insanity of egoic life. It just doesn’t work. It’s painful.
Matthieu Ricard:
In every instance, envy is the product of a wound to self-importance and the fruit of an illusion. What can other people’s happiness possibly deprive us of? Nothing, of course. Only the ego can be wounded by it and feel its pain. These are the results of our having forgotten our innermost potential for affection and peace.
The more sufficient we feel, the more we affirm the kind of tender acceptance that I was alluding to in the sit, the more sufficient we feel, the more freed up we are to delight radically in the well-being of others. We become more fluid inside, and that fluidity makes the well-being, the success, the excellence of others not a threat to our own egoic fragility, but just a source of delight. There’s no comparison in it at all. It’s just partaking in goodness. And so the delight of others becomes totally unthreatening. So much joy, so much joy. I see, I know my nickname is Captain Buzzkill, and I talk relentlessly about suffering, but it’s in the service of joy.
Okay, I offer this for your consideration. We’ll gather back tomorrow at the same time. And if you wish to join for a social half hour, the link’s in the description and on my website, just my full name.org, brensilver.org. Okay, thank you all.
Mudita: A Pali word meaning sympathetic or appreciative joy; the pleasure that comes from delighting in other people’s well-being. ↩
Sutta: A discourse or sermon, especially one attributed to the Buddha. ↩
Anguttara Nikaya: A collection of the Buddha’s discourses in the Pali Canon, organized by numerical themes. ↩
Tu-Anh from Seattle: Original transcript said “Salah Seattle.” Corrected based on context and common collaborators with the speaker. Tu-Anh is a known Dharma teacher in the Seattle area. ↩