This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Cycles of Suffering and Joy; Aspects of Love (3 of 5): Compassion. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
As I sit down, getting ready to teach here, I’m seeing all the chats that offer such wonderful greetings—both morning greetings and seasonal greetings—and it makes me feel very happy and delighted to be able to be here, sharing this time and sharing this purpose for which we’re gathered. Thank you for being here.
In the way that this week was going to unfold, with the different forms of love that get emphasized in Buddhism, on Monday I talked about anukampā1, the word I translate as “care.” Yesterday, mettā2, which I mostly translated as “friendliness.” And today, we have the word karuṇā3, which is normally translated as “compassion.” This is one of the inspiring and beautiful qualities of the heart, but it’s kind of a mixed thing because compassion arises, is born from the experience of suffering in this world. The idea is to hold them both: to hold the suffering of the world and then, maybe simultaneously, to hold a certain kind of profound sense of goodness within us, which is compassion—compassion free of fear, free of distress, free of feeling helpless or hopeless; compassion that can flow freely as the simple wish, the aspiration.
I love the word “aspiration” because it’s connected to the word for breath, “respiration,” in Latin. The simple and profound aspiration to wish others well, to wish that their suffering might end, that their suffering might dissolve or pass for them.
In my early years of doing Buddhist practice, it was not intentional that I sat with my own suffering. I knew I was practicing to come to an end of my suffering, but what I was taught to do was simply to be present for it, and then not try to fix it, not try to understand it, and not try to dissolve it or use an antidote, but just to be with it and to learn how to be with it really simply. The effect that had on me was that it tenderized me. It softened the edges of the suffering, softened the reactivities I had to suffering, softened the second arrow that was added on top of the first. That process of softening, of tenderizing, then started to not just be on the edges but started to penetrate into the suffering itself. That was what began to dissolve some of the big sufferings I brought with me to the Dharma.
There wasn’t a rapid end; there wasn’t some magic insight that suddenly made me free of suffering. But there was a thawing of it, a melting of suffering. Learning how to be present for suffering is, in fact, part of what the Dharma is. But how do we do it so it doesn’t undermine us? How do we do it so we don’t get depressed or feel like we’re suffering more? And how do we do it with faith and confidence that it’s actually very wholesome? There is a very wholesome way of tending, maybe in a friendly way, in a caring way, to our suffering.
One of those ways is, in fact, to meet suffering with compassion. To recognize in us that there is the desire to have it melt, to have it go away, to have it not be there—not out of aversion, not out of desperation, but rather something deeper than those in the heart. It’s the heart’s song. The heart sings compassion: “May I be free of suffering. May others be free of suffering.” In that way, it’s actually possible to connect compassion to a kind of a joy, or something really good within us, and have that also spread.
I’d like to offer you a form of practice that I call practicing the cycles of dukkha4 and sukha5. Just like there are water cycles or oxygen cycles in environmental studies, there are the cycles within us of dukkha and sukha, of suffering and happiness. They can coexist in a beautiful, important way. This is somewhat like Tonglen6 practice in Tibetan Buddhism, but the cycle goes in two different directions.
When we’re feeling our own suffering, then on the exhale, let it flow out of you—not into the world, but maybe up into space. Let it flow out of you. And then on the inhale, feel the happiness, feel some well-being, feel the joy or the goodness or the rightness of just being there to feel the suffering. So, feeling some kind of happiness as you breathe in, and then sending the suffering out as you breathe out. That’s one direction of the cycle.
The other is when you feel pretty stable and somewhat resolved in some of the deeper scars we might carry—because we don’t want to activate them more. There comes a time when sometimes we can do it the other way. This is more like Tonglen, where we actually imagine ourselves breathing in the suffering of the world. We receive it because it’s really helpful for people to know that others know their suffering, are witnessing their suffering, that they’re not alone in their suffering. And then on the exhale, to send out your joy into the world.
So, when it’s your own suffering, breathe in joy and happiness and exhale suffering out. When it’s the suffering of the world, breathe in that suffering and offer out to the world your joy and happiness. If you’d like to do this, if it feels appropriate for you, you can do it. I’m not going to lead you through it because I don’t want anyone to feel like they have to do it. But if you’d like, for this sitting today, you might try these two cycles of dukkha-sukha, sukha-dukkha.
Assume a meditation posture. Part of assuming a meditation posture is, in a subtle kind of way, organizing your body. You’re beginning to gather together all the different parts of your body so that they work together. Part of the reason to relax the body is because it helps that bringing it together, gathering it together into one organized, cooperative body.
Feeling the body more broadly is part of this gathering, organizing of the body. Taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. A lengthy exhale, and then breathing in deeply and exhaling fully. Feel your body to see if anything can be shifted in your posture so your body is more aligned, more in harmony with itself.
Then letting your breathing return to normal and centering yourself on your breathing, where the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out is like a gentle massage, or the gentle lapping of waves upon the shore.
And then, in this simple way, if you would like, if it feels right to you, you might practice the sukha-dukkha cycles. Breathing in, feeling joy; breathing out, sending out your suffering out of yourself. Or if the opposite is appropriate, breathing in suffering, sending out joy.
As we come to the end of this sitting, appreciate that while we meditate, when we feel suffering, when we have compassion, it’s not necessary to understand it. The way we’re present for it can be much simpler. We offer our presence to it. We offer to be present and are willing to be open and receive whatever it’s like to feel and sense and know suffering. But in not knowing it, understanding it, without judging it or making a story about it, it might make it easier not to be stuck in suffering or stuck in joy, but rather have it move through us. So it’s not exactly us, but it’s not not us. It’s just something that moves.
And as we end this sitting, that movement can be intentionally inclusive of all beings, wishing that somehow this practice we’re doing will serve, help us serve the world to reduce the amount of suffering the world has, to increase the amount of happiness and joy.
So without understanding, just letting it move. On the inhale, breathe in the suffering of the world, and on the exhale, breathe out whatever joy, well-being you have. Give it away. Don’t hold on to your own joy. Let it go out into the world in such a way, in such a generous way, that it generates more joy.
Breathing in the suffering of the world, breathing out, “May all beings be happy.”
Breathing in suffering and transforming it into, “May all beings be safe.”
Breathing in the suffering of the world and letting that inspire dedication, “May all beings live peacefully.”
Breathing in the suffering of the world and exhaling, “May all beings be free.”
Hello and welcome to this third talk on the aspects of love, the different forms of love or flavors of love or qualities of love. For me, I feel that the first one I talked about, the simple, sometimes quite humble care to offer, makes the others a lot easier. It makes the others less likely to be something we latch on to or get attached to. It’s just simple care that gets expressed as friendliness, or care that expresses compassion. The friendliness provides the compassion with a little bit of ease or openness, or maybe in some ways supports it from being too heavy.
Certainly, compassion can be heavy. It can be a big thing, can be overwhelming at times, but that’s because it’s not only compassion we feel. Compassion, in my understanding—I don’t want to make a claim for everyone, but my understanding is—compassion always has something light, something feeling a rightness to it. Even when there’s pain with the compassion, it’s all happening in a field within us, in a heart within us that feels it’s good. Given that there’s suffering, there’s a rightness, there’s a goodness to feel that pain.
Sometimes compassion is held up in Buddhism as the most important social emotion, and sometimes that can feel that way, or it can be that way when we realize the magnitude of suffering in this world. One of the ways to understand the magnitude is not to read the newspapers and see how big it is in Somalia and Gaza and Ukraine and around the world. Certainly, that’s huge. But to understand that in your own mind, a percentage of the way we think has stress in it, has suffering in it. And then we realize these ordinary ways of thinking that have some kind of tension built into them, unnecessary tension, unnecessary dukkha. If this is true for me, then it must be true that the level of suffering is so much vaster than I ever thought, that human beings carry with them. Every thought they have sometimes comes with stress, comes with fear, comes with aversion, comes with greed.
But to encounter the enormity of it all and have a humility or simplicity in it, to not be the savior of the world, not feel like we have to be responsible for fixing all the things, but to do something much more profound: to be there to witness the humanity of others who are suffering. To witness it and listen to it and be present.
One of the big moments for me with compassion was in the early 1980s. I was living in a monastery deep in the mountains, and we didn’t get news very often. But one day, a Time Magazine appeared, and I opened it up kind of randomly. There was a multi-page spread and discussion about the Israeli bombing of refugee camps in Beirut. I’d been to Beirut as a child, and I’d lived on the edge of the Mediterranean growing up, a good part of my growing up, right next to what was then Yugoslavia, in a town called Trieste in Italy. And so, to witness through these photographs the suffering of these refugees and how many of them died deeply moved me. One of the strongest feelings I had was that I had to go there. We had to bear witness. How important it is to bear witness and let people know that they’re known. Of course, we should do things as well, but that was such a big feeling. I wasn’t motivated to leave the monastery; the work I was doing there felt very important. But this strong urge was very clean.
I’ve learned in looking at compassion myself that it’s not always clean. It can be burdened. It can be entangled with “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts.” It can be entangled with an unnecessary burden of a sense of responsibility that I have to fix it, that I have a responsibility, that I’m somehow attached to it or reacting to it and adding levels of attachment that take the form of despair or discouragement, distress or fear or anger. When those movements of the heart involve increasing suffering, we’re actually causing harm to the suffering of the world. We’re adding to it. We’re adding to the distress. We’re not showing or meeting things with the alternative, a different way of doing it.
Some people have a lot of emphasis on empathy, how important empathy is. And I think, depending on what we mean by that word, empathy is really important. But if empathy is feeling what other people are feeling in an exactly one-to-one correspondence, I don’t think that’s necessarily healthy. If someone else is suffering, if I’m suffering, I don’t want someone else to suffer the same way I am, to feel my suffering and suffer the same way. What I’d like is for someone to recognize the suffering. Maybe something inside of them is moved, that they feel a certain ache, they feel a certain heaviness or seriousness, or they feel something that tells them, “Yes, this is a human being suffering. Yes, this is unfortunate. Yes, I have some sense of what you’re feeling. I know that you’re suffering,” but without taking it in myself. So if anything, other people’s suffering goes through me. I feel it and allow it to change me and motivate me and feel compassion, but it doesn’t stick in me. It doesn’t become more complicated.
A big part of Buddhist practice, mindfulness practice, is to disentangle compassion, disentangle love from all the ways we get stuck with it, all the ways we get caught in it and tighten around it, all the ways that we suffer because we love, we suffer because we have compassion, because somehow it’s gotten mixed up with other things. So to sit in mindfulness meditation is part of this disentangling, learning where the stress points are, where the tensions are, where the extra arrows are, where the belief systems are that are all added on top of this simplicity of compassion, so that compassion can shine.
When compassion becomes cleaner in that way, or comes simpler that way, then acting from the compassion is much less tiring than if we act out of compassion together with all the attachments and fears and entanglements we might have. So one of the great tasks of a human life is to clarify, clean out love, clean out care and compassion so it becomes clean and direct and simple.
And see it as part of it is not just the empathy to feel someone else’s suffering. The key component of the form of love that is compassion is, in fact, the desire, the wish, the aspiration that others do not suffer. And it’s good to act on that. Sometimes strong compassion is difficult because that aspiration, that wanting to support and help, has been bottled up. It has no outlet. We don’t know what to do.
There’s always something we can do. It might not be for the suffering we’ve encountered in the world, but maybe it’s local. One of the things that I do when I read about horrendous things in the world is that there’s too much of it for me to think that I’m going to make a difference. I can’t give enough donations to all these different places to help. But I take it in, and the aspiration to end suffering is stronger because of it. And then I try to do my work as a Buddhist teacher even locally, better. I’m more motivated to do what I do, and that’s where it’s channeled. For other people, it might be channeled into caring for their neighbors or having more care for their colleagues at work. It might be that they have a particular cause that we’re motivated to support. And so experiencing suffering elsewhere and feeling compassion, that aspiration to end suffering gets channeled even more into the cause we already have.
Compassion as a gift to the world. Compassion not as a drag—because it’s a drag if we’re caught in our attachments and it makes our life harder and more difficult and we’re overwhelmed. But to have the gift of compassion for this world, we know that the world needs it. And compassion can be a present. And if that’s too difficult or not clear, then being present becomes the present that we can offer. Being attentive, being present in a full way, may that be the present that you offer this world on this day that’s often for many people associated with giving presents.
So thank you very much. And I hope that you spend this day close to either care, friendliness, or compassion, as what is needed. And tomorrow we’ll do appreciative joy. Thank you.
Anukampā: A Pali word that translates to “care,” “sympathy,” or “compassion.” It conveys a sense of trembling with others in their suffering. ↩
Mettā: A Pali word often translated as “loving-kindness,” “friendliness,” or “goodwill.” It is the sincere wish for the well-being and happiness of all beings. ↩
Karuṇā: A Pali word for “compassion.” It is the wish for all beings to be free from suffering. It is one of the four “Brahmavihāras” or sublime states. ↩
Dukkha: A fundamental concept in Buddhism, a Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” “dissatisfaction,” or “unease.” ↩
Sukha: A Pali word that means “happiness,” “ease,” “pleasure,” or “bliss.” It is the opposite of dukkha. ↩
Tonglen: A Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice which means “giving and taking” or “sending and receiving.” Practitioners visualize taking in the suffering of others on the in-breath and sending out happiness and relief on the out-breath. ↩