This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Appreciation; Aspects of Love (4 of 5) Appreciative Joy. 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.
Hello, my friends, and welcome to our meditation. I’m feeling pretty appreciative and delighted to be here, and to be here in a relatively healthy way after having a short cold, maybe a short flu. It feels kind of special to be sitting here.
The theme for today, for the dharmette1 talk, will be appreciative joy. To talk about appreciation and joy briefly, we have this amazing capacity for attention and awareness. Attention often comes along with our preoccupations, with our ruminations, with our primary concerns, with our fear. When it does so, awareness acts like a magnifying glass. If we bring our attention to something which we’re challenged by, something we find is difficult or unfortunate, all this extra stuff that comes with awareness makes it bigger for us, and it can loom really big. Then we miss out on the bigger picture of what’s happening.
Meditation is meant to settle the preoccupations, the fears, the biases, the selectivity by which attention is used, to help us see the bigger picture of the moment. In doing that, it’s helpful to counter the negativity bias that many people have, to from time to time take time to appreciate all the good that you have, appreciate what is right, maybe just in this present moment. Even if much in your life is difficult, to be preoccupied with that, for the mind and the heart to be caught in that all the time, is not healthy for us. It’s good to take a break. It’s good to step away to get a bigger picture, to realize there’s more to life than the challenges we have.
From time to time, it’s good to appreciate what is good in life: the sunlight, the warmth, that we have food to eat, that we have a roof over our head. Many people don’t have these basic, simple things. So now, as we’re sitting here, the goodness, the appreciation for the opportunity to meditate, the opportunity to meditate in community, the opportunity to enter into your meditation posture. There’s something very invaluable, something very powerful for me to step into my meditation posture, a posture that I’ve assumed now for 50 years. The associations, the familiarity is quite wonderful, and that I have been able to have this posture that is so meaningful for me brings me a lot of joy.
It brings me a lot of joy that I have a practice of mindfulness that frees me from suffering, frees me from the preoccupation with it, frees me from the added fear, added rumination. It frees me from that magnifying glass that tends to highlight the difficulties, so I live in them thinking they’re most of what’s happening. Mostly what’s happening in the present moment for most of us is good. Mostly what’s happening for most of us are things that are working. Many of our biological functions that keep us alive, if you’re alive, they’re working, even if some of them are challenged. Most of our mental functions allow us to be aware and recognize what’s happening as it’s happening. A lot is working in the brain, in the mind, even if some things are a little bit wonky.
To know that there are these teachings for finding our peace is phenomenal. We’re lucky to have them. So, to sit with appreciation, not so much spending a lot of time thinking about it, but just enough thinking about appreciation that something in you begins to smile. Maybe it’s your mouth, maybe it’s your heart, maybe it’s somewhere in your whole torso, maybe it’s in your eyes. To appreciate the goodness that’s here, the good fortune that’s brought us to this moment, these moments, even if wider moments of the day are not so fortunate. Doing this appreciation can allow something to settle. That’s the hope. Some kind of tension we carry can be put to rest for a few minutes.
So, assuming a meditation posture, maybe find a posture today that has a minimum amount of pain or discomfort. Find one that is comfortable for you, so it’s easier to appreciate being in a body, the body that becomes the home or the temple for meditation.
Gently closing your eyes.
And as you breathe in, you are participating in a phenomenal global process of the oxygen cycles. We’re doing our part to create carbon dioxide that the trees and plants can use, so they make oxygen so we may live. We can’t just take and take and take. We participate in this cycle of giving and taking in so many ways. Our life is a process of giving and taking, receiving and giving. And now as we breathe, we’re participating in a wider process than just our own life, but which keeps our life going.
Taking a few long, deep breaths, relaxing on the exhale.
And letting your breathing return to normal.
And see if you can now listen quietly, feel in a deep, sensitive way to a place inside where all things are good. Is there a place deep inside, below the level of your thoughts and preoccupations, past and future, just here now? Maybe in your breathing, maybe in your heart, maybe in a back corner of the heart. Maybe somewhere else in your torso, maybe low down at the base of your spine, the length of your spine.
And if there is a place of goodness, of peace or quiet or calm, breathe with it. Breathe with appreciation. Breathe with gratitude.
And maybe with a small smile on your lips, breathe with joy.
If you can give yourself over fully to the rhythm of breathing, breathing in and breathing out, it can become as if joy is what animates the breathing. A joy that comes when we give ourselves fully to one thing in a relaxed, soft way.
And then as we come to the end of this sitting, to reflect a little bit how easy it is to be self-centered, how easy it is to see the world as a field of opposition, me versus you, you or me. But coming out of meditation, there’s no orientation for this. It’s all, in a certain way, a cooperative field where we’re all kin, all working together.
I think one of the advantages of coming out of a less centered place through meditation is to be able to appreciate others. Not just care for them, not just wish them well, but appreciate what’s going well, to celebrate with them when they’re celebrating, to reflect back what’s good when what they do is good. The ability to share in the delight, in the success and well-being and goodness of others is one of the great joys of life. And people appreciate being appreciated. People appreciate being recognized. In a certain way, we promote the good by appreciating the good.
May it be, as we come out of meditation today, that we consider going into the world of our family and friends, neighbors, strangers, people in stores, places of work, ready to appreciate them. Maybe having spent some time reflecting about the people who do good things, are helpful, supportive, who do a good job, makes it easier for everyone else, whatever it might be.
May we appreciate the happiness of others. May we appreciate the way others care for people. May we appreciate the integrity and honesty with which people live that helps others to feel comfortable with them. May we appreciate how others help people who are suffering. And may that appreciation of others bring us delight. May it be inspiration for us. May it continue to awaken what is good in our own hearts.
May all beings be happy. Thank you.
So hello, my friends, and welcome to this fourth talk on the aspects of love. I feel pretty fortunate to be able to talk on this topic; it brings me joy.
The first day was anukampā2, which I translated as care, and it’s a care that is deeply connected to respect for others. I like to think of it as a respect where we see everyone as kin. Maybe we’re not directly family, but we’re kin, we’re related, we’re part of a global family. And that kinship then leads us to want to be friendly, inclines us to be friendly to however we meet. Why would anybody be an enemy? Why would anybody be someone who we would not be happy to see? Just happy to see people, maybe that’s what friendliness is. And to offer some of our happiness to them in the way we say hello, or maybe that’s all it is.
And then when people suffer, to want to help, to be motivated to see their suffering end. They’re kin, of course we want it to end. So if we can, we may do something. If we can’t, then we are a witness, we recognize, we help people not feel so alone, we accompany.
And then today, it’s when people are having success, when people are doing good things, when people are happy themselves, when things are going well for them. We don’t want to end up being envious or jealous, but rather, when we’re kin, this openness, this respect, we’re happy to see people. When people are having success, we feel joy, we feel happiness. To feel that happiness, to take time for that, to not overlook it, to not race beyond it, but to appreciate.
In Buddhism, there’s a whole meditation practice on appreciative joy, where we just kind of focus on the well-being that other people have. May that well-being continue. May that well-being fill me with inspiration, with joy. May this well-being of others spread out through the world. So, different ways of kind of highlighting, but the idea is to take the feeling of appreciation, of joy, and let it radiate. And that takes time. You have to pause a little bit, not just kind of rush on with the conversation to something else. Someone tells you that they’re really happy, and you say, “Oh, I’m so happy for that, but you know, I’m really challenged with my car. My car is not behaving properly.” You’ve kind of changed the subject to something it wasn’t necessary to talk about right away. But to stay and linger, to appreciate, make room for that.
Sometimes it’s invaluable for people to really feel they were heard, really feel like you’re there for them, that you make space for them. “Tell me more. This is so good that you graduated from high school. This must be really great that you accomplished this. Tell me more.”
This idea of appreciative joy, joy in the joy of others, can be cultivated and developed. In the process of all these forms of love, they can coexist with their kind of opposites, with the things that interfere with them. Part of the value of practicing them or bringing them up and reflecting on them and letting them be a guide through our day is that it sometimes can highlight the opposite, highlight the things that interfere with these things. So what, for you, interferes with appreciative joy in the joy of others?
I mentioned envy or jealousy, which can be quite strong and quite a strong current in some people’s lives. In mindfulness practice, we wouldn’t berate ourselves for that or criticize ourselves for that, but we do something more important, and that is we would study it. We would take a good look at that. What’s that about? What are the emotions that come along with jealousy and envy? What’s the sense of self? What’s the belief system that’s operating? Can we sit and just feel that for a while, accompany ourselves in those feelings? Because accompaniment is so powerful. Accompaniment lets something settle.
What else gets in the way of appreciative joy? It might be your own desires, your own preoccupations, that you want to get what you want and you don’t have time to take other people into account. It could be fear. It could be fear that if you take in and appreciate others, take in their joy, that it makes you susceptible to be taken advantage of, or people want more from you, or something might happen. Or maybe it highlights your own unhappiness, because if you really recognize happiness in others, then you feel worse about your own and how your life is difficult.
I’d like to propose the opposite: that appreciating the joy in others can be an inspiration for us, food for us, to be able to then practice with our own difficulties. So appreciative joy is not meant to be a distraction from our own suffering, from our own difficulties, but rather to create the ambience in which it’s easier to focus on our own, to be present for our own, to give a wider context for it.
In some ways, that appreciative joy to others is probably not going to make you Pollyannaish. Because in Buddhist practice, what comes up clearly is an emphasis on suffering, but not to drown ourselves in suffering, but to find freedom from suffering. So in this emphasis on suffering, I don’t think you have to worry about being Pollyannaish. If others are suffering, then you don’t want to paint it over with joy and make them kind of see things on the bright side, for other people or even for yourself, as a way of ignoring the difficulties that are going on. But when things are going good, when things are delightful for people, that they’re happy, share that happiness, accompany that happiness, take time to take it in. Just take time to say, “Wow, that’s great,” in a way that brings a smile to your face, in a way that brings you to light.
It’s phenomenal how great this appreciative joy can be in us. And sometimes it can feel that you’re the one who’s benefiting from it more than the other person. Maybe it sets free something inside, a flow of joy, of delight, of happiness, because you’ve become an open channel for these wonderful feelings. Sometimes people who are doing meditation on appreciative joy will feel a wonderful vibrating feeling of joy and delight that courses through them when the appreciating joy is so strong.
So, appreciative joy. During this holiday time, there’s a lot of joy in seeing each other and being together with each other. Share in that joy, delight in that joy, celebrate that joy, toast that joy. On the holidays also, there’s many people who suffer more, that people feel left out or lonely or something. So that also should get our care and our love, appreciating them, and not to rub it in for them by emphasizing the joy when they’re not having it. Maybe then we emphasize calm attention, calm, loving, compassionate attention.
The care we have for others is something that’s morphing and shifting and changing. Sometimes it’s compassion, sometimes it’s friendliness, loving-kindness, sometimes it’s appreciative joy. One of the great joys, one of the great aspects of this practice, is the fluidity by which we can shift and change, move between them. There’s a way that to allow each of these to have their own time, and maybe even become strong, allows us to let it fade away as we move into a different circumstance and another one is needed. We can be friendly with someone for a while, we go to another place and we have compassion, we shift. We go someplace else to be with someone else and they’re joyful, and we then kind of shift with it, we morph, we meet the circumstance. Not because we’re rejecting or being disloyal to the people who were suffering when we feel joy, but rather we’re just, in a sense, loyal or present for how it is now, and each time being appropriate for this circumstance, not carrying past circumstances with us.
So this fluidity between these different states—care, kindness, compassion, and appreciative joy—the more we’re fluid, the more we’re not stuck in any one of them, the more these can live in our lives in a wonderful way, feeding us in a way that they’re always available. And much more available than people avail themselves of. These are treasures. The Buddha called the Brahma-viharas3 a practitioner’s wealth. So if you want to be wealthy, these are the real wealth, is to have these wonderful qualities.
So then tomorrow, we’ll finish with equanimous love. In the meantime, may you look for opportunities today to either privately in yourself, so no one knows, or out loud, to appreciate the goodness, the joy, the success of other people. Make that a theme. See what happens if you accompany or open, recognize people for their joy and their happiness. And may it bring you joy. May you be delighted by all the success and goodness that there is in this world. For all the terrible news we get, I suspect there’s more goodness every day than what is difficult and painful. Thank you very much.
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.
Hello, my friends, and welcome to our meditation. I’m feeling pretty appreciative and delighted to be here, and to be here in a relatively healthy way after having a short cold, maybe a short flu. It feels kind of special to be sitting here.
The theme for today, for the dharmette1 talk, will be appreciative joy. To talk about appreciation and joy briefly, we have this amazing capacity for attention and awareness. Attention often comes along with our preoccupations, with our ruminations, with our primary concerns, with our fear. When it does so, awareness acts like a magnifying glass. If we bring our attention to something which we’re challenged by, something we find is difficult or unfortunate, all this extra stuff that comes with awareness makes it bigger for us, and it can loom really big. Then we miss out on the bigger picture of what’s happening.
Meditation is meant to settle the preoccupations, the fears, the biases, the selectivity by which attention is used, to help us see the bigger picture of the moment. In doing that, it’s helpful to counter the negativity bias that many people have, to from time to time take time to appreciate all the good that you have, appreciate what is right, maybe just in this present moment. Even if much in your life is difficult, to be preoccupied with that, for the mind and the heart to be caught in that all the time, is not healthy for us. It’s good to take a break. It’s good to step away to get a bigger picture, to realize there’s more to life than the challenges we have.
From time to time, it’s good to appreciate what is good in life: the sunlight, the warmth, that we have food to eat, that we have a roof over our head. Many people don’t have these basic, simple things. So now, as we’re sitting here, the goodness, the appreciation for the opportunity to meditate, the opportunity to meditate in community, the opportunity to enter into your meditation posture. There’s something very invaluable, something very powerful for me to step into my meditation posture, a posture that I’ve assumed now for 50 years. The associations, the familiarity is quite wonderful, and that I have been able to have this posture that is so meaningful for me brings me a lot of joy.
It brings me a lot of joy that I have a practice of mindfulness that frees me from suffering, frees me from the preoccupation with it, frees me from the added fear, added rumination. It frees me from that magnifying glass that tends to highlight the difficulties, so I live in them thinking they’re most of what’s happening. Mostly what’s happening in the present moment for most of us is good. Mostly what’s happening for most of us are things that are working. Many of our biological functions that keep us alive, if you’re alive, they’re working, even if some of them are challenged. Most of our mental functions allow us to be aware and recognize what’s happening as it’s happening. A lot is working in the brain, in the mind, even if some things are a little bit wonky.
To know that there are these teachings for finding our peace is phenomenal. We’re lucky to have them. So, to sit with appreciation, not so much spending a lot of time thinking about it, but just enough thinking about appreciation that something in you begins to smile. Maybe it’s your mouth, maybe it’s your heart, maybe it’s somewhere in your whole torso, maybe it’s in your eyes. To appreciate the goodness that’s here, the good fortune that’s brought us to this moment, these moments, even if wider moments of the day are not so fortunate. Doing this appreciation can allow something to settle. That’s the hope. Some kind of tension we carry can be put to rest for a few minutes.
So, assuming a meditation posture, maybe find a posture today that has a minimum amount of pain or discomfort. Find one that is comfortable for you, so it’s easier to appreciate being in a body, the body that becomes the home or the temple for meditation.
Gently closing your eyes.
And as you breathe in, you are participating in a phenomenal global process of the oxygen cycles. We’re doing our part to create carbon dioxide that the trees and plants can use, so they make oxygen so we may live. We can’t just take and take and take. We participate in this cycle of giving and taking in so many ways. Our life is a process of giving and taking, receiving and giving. And now as we breathe, we’re participating in a wider process than just our own life, but which keeps our life going.
Taking a few long, deep breaths, relaxing on the exhale.
And letting your breathing return to normal.
And see if you can now listen quietly, feel in a deep, sensitive way to a place inside where all things are good. Is there a place deep inside, below the level of your thoughts and preoccupations, past and future, just here now? Maybe in your breathing, maybe in your heart, maybe in a back corner of the heart. Maybe somewhere else in your torso, maybe low down at the base of your spine, the length of your spine.
And if there is a place of goodness, of peace or quiet or calm, breathe with it. Breathe with appreciation. Breathe with gratitude.
And maybe with a small smile on your lips, breathe with joy.
If you can give yourself over fully to the rhythm of breathing, breathing in and breathing out, it can become as if joy is what animates the breathing. A joy that comes when we give ourselves fully to one thing in a relaxed, soft way.
And then as we come to the end of this sitting, to reflect a little bit how easy it is to be self-centered, how easy it is to see the world as a field of opposition, me versus you, you or me. But coming out of meditation, there’s no orientation for this. It’s all, in a certain way, a cooperative field where we’re all kin, all working together.
I think one of the advantages of coming out of a less centered place through meditation is to be able to appreciate others. Not just care for them, not just wish them well, but appreciate what’s going well, to celebrate with them when they’re celebrating, to reflect back what’s good when what they do is good. The ability to share in the delight, in the success and well-being and goodness of others is one of the great joys of life. And people appreciate being appreciated. People appreciate being recognized. In a certain way, we promote the good by appreciating the good.
May it be, as we come out of meditation today, that we consider going into the world of our family and friends, neighbors, strangers, people in stores, places of work, ready to appreciate them. Maybe having spent some time reflecting about the people who do good things, are helpful, supportive, who do a good job, makes it easier for everyone else, whatever it might be.
May we appreciate the happiness of others. May we appreciate the way others care for people. May we appreciate the integrity and honesty with which people live that helps others to feel comfortable with them. May we appreciate how others help people who are suffering. And may that appreciation of others bring us delight. May it be inspiration for us. May it continue to awaken what is good in our own hearts.
May all beings be happy. Thank you.
So hello, my friends, and welcome to this fourth talk on the aspects of love. I feel pretty fortunate to be able to talk on this topic; it brings me joy.
The first day was anukampā2, which I translated as care, and it’s a care that is deeply connected to respect for others. I like to think of it as a respect where we see everyone as kin. Maybe we’re not directly family, but we’re kin, we’re related, we’re part of a global family. And that kinship then leads us to want to be friendly, inclines us to be friendly to however we meet. Why would anybody be an enemy? Why would anybody be someone who we would not be happy to see? Just happy to see people, maybe that’s what friendliness is. And to offer some of our happiness to them in the way we say hello, or maybe that’s all it is.
And then when people suffer, to want to help, to be motivated to see their suffering end. They’re kin, of course we want it to end. So if we can, we may do something. If we can’t, then we are a witness, we recognize, we help people not feel so alone, we accompany.
And then today, it’s when people are having success, when people are doing good things, when people are happy themselves, when things are going well for them. We don’t want to end up being envious or jealous, but rather, when we’re kin, this openness, this respect, we’re happy to see people. When people are having success, we feel joy, we feel happiness. To feel that happiness, to take time for that, to not overlook it, to not race beyond it, but to appreciate.
In Buddhism, there’s a whole meditation practice on appreciative joy, where we just kind of focus on the well-being that other people have. May that well-being continue. May that well-being fill me with inspiration, with joy. May this well-being of others spread out through the world. So, different ways of kind of highlighting, but the idea is to take the feeling of appreciation, of joy, and let it radiate. And that takes time. You have to pause a little bit, not just kind of rush on with the conversation to something else. Someone tells you that they’re really happy, and you say, “Oh, I’m so happy for that, but you know, I’m really challenged with my car. My car is not behaving properly.” You’ve kind of changed the subject to something it wasn’t necessary to talk about right away. But to stay and linger, to appreciate, make room for that.
Sometimes it’s invaluable for people to really feel they were heard, really feel like you’re there for them, that you make space for them. “Tell me more. This is so good that you graduated from high school. This must be really great that you accomplished this. Tell me more.”
This idea of appreciative joy, joy in the joy of others, can be cultivated and developed. In the process of all these forms of love, they can coexist with their kind of opposites, with the things that interfere with them. Part of the value of practicing them or bringing them up and reflecting on them and letting them be a guide through our day is that it sometimes can highlight the opposite, highlight the things that interfere with these things. So what, for you, interferes with appreciative joy in the joy of others?
I mentioned envy or jealousy, which can be quite strong and quite a strong current in some people’s lives. In mindfulness practice, we wouldn’t berate ourselves for that or criticize ourselves for that, but we do something more important, and that is we would study it. We would take a good look at that. What’s that about? What are the emotions that come along with jealousy and envy? What’s the sense of self? What’s the belief system that’s operating? Can we sit and just feel that for a while, accompany ourselves in those feelings? Because accompaniment is so powerful. Accompaniment lets something settle.
What else gets in the way of appreciative joy? It might be your own desires, your own preoccupations, that you want to get what you want and you don’t have time to take other people into account. It could be fear. It could be fear that if you take in and appreciate others, take in their joy, that it makes you susceptible to be taken advantage of, or people want more from you, or something might happen. Or maybe it highlights your own unhappiness, because if you really recognize happiness in others, then you feel worse about your own and how your life is difficult.
I’d like to propose the opposite: that appreciating the joy in others can be an inspiration for us, food for us, to be able to then practice with our own difficulties. So appreciative joy is not meant to be a distraction from our own suffering, from our own difficulties, but rather to create the ambience in which it’s easier to focus on our own, to be present for our own, to give a wider context for it.
In some ways, that appreciative joy to others is probably not going to make you Pollyannaish. Because in Buddhist practice, what comes up clearly is an emphasis on suffering, but not to drown ourselves in suffering, but to find freedom from suffering. So in this emphasis on suffering, I don’t think you have to worry about being Pollyannaish. If others are suffering, then you don’t want to paint it over with joy and make them kind of see things on the bright side, for other people or even for yourself, as a way of ignoring the difficulties that are going on. But when things are going good, when things are delightful for people, that they’re happy, share that happiness, accompany that happiness, take time to take it in. Just take time to say, “Wow, that’s great,” in a way that brings a smile to your face, in a way that brings you to light.
It’s phenomenal how great this appreciative joy can be in us. And sometimes it can feel that you’re the one who’s benefiting from it more than the other person. Maybe it sets free something inside, a flow of joy, of delight, of happiness, because you’ve become an open channel for these wonderful feelings. Sometimes people who are doing meditation on appreciative joy will feel a wonderful vibrating feeling of joy and delight that courses through them when the appreciating joy is so strong.
So, appreciative joy. During this holiday time, there’s a lot of joy in seeing each other and being together with each other. Share in that joy, delight in that joy, celebrate that joy, toast that joy. On the holidays also, there’s many people who suffer more, that people feel left out or lonely or something. So that also should get our care and our love, appreciating them, and not to rub it in for them by emphasizing the joy when they’re not having it. Maybe then we emphasize calm attention, calm, loving, compassionate attention.
The care we have for others is something that’s morphing and shifting and changing. Sometimes it’s compassion, sometimes it’s friendliness, loving-kindness, sometimes it’s appreciative joy. One of the great joys, one of the great aspects of this practice, is the fluidity by which we can shift and change, move between them. There’s a way that to allow each of these to have their own time, and maybe even become strong, allows us to let it fade away as we move into a different circumstance and another one is needed. We can be friendly with someone for a while, we go to another place and we have compassion, we shift. We go someplace else to be with someone else and they’re joyful, and we then kind of shift with it, we morph, we meet the circumstance. Not because we’re rejecting or being disloyal to the people who were suffering when we feel joy, but rather we’re just, in a sense, loyal or present for how it is now, and each time being appropriate for this circumstance, not carrying past circumstances with us.
So this fluidity between these different states—care, kindness, compassion, and appreciative joy—the more we’re fluid, the more we’re not stuck in any one of them, the more these can live in our lives in a wonderful way, feeding us in a way that they’re always available. And much more available than people avail themselves of. These are treasures. The Buddha called the Brahma-viharas3 a practitioner’s wealth. So if you want to be wealthy, these are the real wealth, is to have these wonderful qualities.
So then tomorrow, we’ll finish with equanimous love. In the meantime, may you look for opportunities today to either privately in yourself, so no one knows, or out loud, to appreciate the goodness, the joy, the success of other people. Make that a theme. See what happens if you accompany or open, recognize people for their joy and their happiness. And may it bring you joy. May you be delighted by all the success and goodness that there is in this world. For all the terrible news we get, I suspect there’s more goodness every day than what is difficult and painful. Thank you very much.
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.
Hello my friends, and welcome to our meditation. I’m feeling pretty appreciative and delighted to be here, and to be here in a relatively healthy way after having a short cold, maybe a short flu. It feels kind of special to be sitting here.
The theme for today, for the dharmette talk, will be appreciative joy. To talk about appreciation and joy briefly, we have this amazing capacity for attention and awareness. Attention often comes along with our preoccupations, with our ruminations, with our primary concerns, with our fear. When it does so, awareness acts like a magnifying glass. If we bring our attention to something which we’re challenged by, something we find is difficult or unfortunate, all this extra stuff that comes with awareness makes it bigger for us, and it can loom really big. We then miss out on the bigger picture of what’s happening.
Meditation is meant to settle the preoccupations, the fears, the biases, the selectivity by which attention is used, to help us see the bigger picture of the moment. In doing that, it’s helpful to counter the negativity bias that many people have, to from time to time take time to appreciate all the good that you have, appreciate what is right, maybe just in this present moment. Even if much in your life is difficult, to be preoccupied with that, for the mind and the heart to be caught in that all the time, is not healthy for us. It’s good to take a break. It’s good to step away to get a bigger picture, to realize there’s more to life than the challenges we have.
From time to time, it’s good to appreciate what is good in life: the sunlight, the warmth, that we have food to eat, that we have a roof over our head. Many people don’t have these basic, simple things. So now, as we’re sitting here, the goodness, the appreciation for the opportunity to meditate, the opportunity to meditate in community, the opportunity to enter into your meditation posture. There’s something very invaluable, something very powerful for me to step into my meditation posture, a posture that I’ve assumed now for 50 years. The associations, the familiarity is quite wonderful, and that I have been able to have this posture that is so meaningful for me brings me a lot of joy.
It brings me a lot of joy that I have a practice of mindfulness that frees me from suffering, frees me from the preoccupation with it, frees me from the added fear, added rumination. It frees me from that magnifying glass that tends to highlight the difficulties, so I live in them thinking they’re most of what’s happening. Mostly what’s happening in the present moment for most of us is good. Mostly what’s happening for most of us are things that are working. Many of our biological functions that keep us alive, if you’re alive, they’re working, even if some of them are challenged. Most of our mental functions allow us to be aware and recognize what’s happening as it’s happening. A lot is working in the brain, in the mind, even if some things are a little bit wonky. And to know that there are these teachings for finding our peace is phenomenal. We’re lucky to have them.
So, to sit with appreciation, not so much spending a lot of time thinking about it, but just enough thinking about appreciation that something in you begins to smile. Maybe it’s your mouth, maybe it’s your heart, maybe it’s somewhere in your whole torso, maybe it’s in your eyes. To appreciate the goodness that’s here, the good fortune that’s brought us to this moment, these moments, even if wider moments of the day are not so fortunate. Doing this appreciation can allow something to settle. That’s the hope. Some kind of tension we carry can be put to rest for a few minutes.
Assuming a meditation posture, maybe find a posture today that has a minimum amount of pain or discomfort. Find one that is comfortable for you, so it’s easier to appreciate being in a body, the body that becomes the home or the temple for meditation.
Gently closing your eyes.
And as you breathe in, you are participating in a phenomenal global process of the oxygen cycles. We’re doing our part to create carbon dioxide that the trees and plants can use, so they make oxygen so we may live. We can’t just take and take and take. We participate in this cycle of giving and taking in so many ways. Our life is a process of giving and taking, receiving and giving. And now as we breathe, we’re participating in a wider process than just our own life, but which keeps our life going.
Taking a few long, deep breaths, relaxing on the exhale.
And letting your breathing return to normal.
See if you can now listen quietly, feel in a deep, sensitive way to a place inside where all things are good. Is there a place deep inside, below the level of your thoughts and preoccupations, past and future, just here now? Maybe in your breathing, maybe in your heart, maybe in a back corner of the heart, maybe somewhere else in your torso, maybe low down at the base of your spine, the length of your spine.
And if there is a place of goodness, of peace or quiet or calm, breathe with it. Breathe with appreciation. Breathe with gratitude. And maybe with a small smile on your lips, breathe with joy.
If you can give yourself over fully to the rhythm of breathing, breathing in and breathing out, it can become as if joy is what animates the breathing. A joy that comes when we give ourselves fully to one thing in a relaxed, soft way.
And then as we come to the end of this sitting, to reflect a little bit how easy it is to be self-centered, how easy it is to see the world as a field of opposition, me versus you, you or me. But coming out of meditation, there’s no orientation for this. It’s all, in a certain way, a cooperative field where we’re all kin, all working together.
I think one of the advantages of coming out of a less centered place through meditation is to be able to appreciate others, not just care for them, not just wish them well, but appreciate what’s going well, to celebrate with them when they’re celebrating, to reflect back what’s good when what they do is good. The ability to share in the delight, in the success and well-being and goodness of others is one of the great joys of life. And people appreciate being appreciated. People appreciate being recognized. In a certain way, we promote the good by appreciating the good.
And may it be, as we come out of meditation today, that we consider going into the world of our family and friends, neighbors, strangers, people in stores, places of work, ready to appreciate them. Maybe having spent some time reflecting about the people who do good things, are helpful, supportive, who do a good job, makes it easier for everyone else, whatever it might be.
May we appreciate the happiness of others. May we appreciate the way others care for people. May we appreciate the integrity and honesty with which people live that helps others to feel comfortable with them. May we appreciate how others help people who are suffering. And may that appreciation of others bring us delight. May it be inspiration for us. May it continue to awaken what is good in our own hearts.
May all beings be happy.
Thank you for your practice.
Hello my friends, and welcome to this fourth talk on the aspects of love. I feel pretty fortunate to be able to talk on this topic; it brings me joy.
The first day was Anukampā1, which I translated as care, and it’s a care that is deeply connected to respect for others. I like to think of it as a respect where we see everyone as kin. Maybe we’re not directly family, but we’re kin, we’re related, we’re part of a global family. And that kinship then leads us to want to be friendly, inclines us to be friendly to however we meet. Why would anybody be an enemy? Why would anybody be someone who we would not be happy to see? Just happy to see people, maybe that’s what friendliness is. And to offer some of our happiness to them in the way we say hello, maybe that’s all it is.
And then when people suffer, to want to help, to be motivated to see their suffering end. They’re kin, of course we want it to end. So if we can, we may do something. If we can’t, then we are a witness, we recognize, we help people not feel so alone. We accompany.
And then today, it’s when people are having success, when people are doing good things, when people are happy themselves, when things are going well for them. We don’t want to end up being envious or jealous, but rather, when we’re kin, this openness, this respect, we’re happy to see people having success. We feel joy, we feel happiness. To feel that happiness, to take time for that, to not overlook it, to not race beyond it, but to appreciate.
In Buddhism, there’s a whole meditation practice on appreciative joy, where we just focus on the well-being that other people have. May that well-being continue. May that well-being fill me with inspiration, with joy. May this well-being of others spread out through the world. There are different ways of highlighting it, but the idea is to take the feeling of appreciation, of joy, and let it radiate. That takes time. You have to pause a little bit, not just rush on with the conversation to something else. Someone tells you that they’re really happy, and you say, “Oh, I’m so happy for that, but you know, I’m really challenged with my car. My car is not behaving properly.” You’ve changed the subject to something it wasn’t necessary to talk about right away. But to stay and linger, to appreciate, make room for that.
Sometimes it’s invaluable for people to really feel they were heard, really feel like you’re there for them, that you make space for them. “Tell me more. This is so good that you graduated from high school. This must be really great that you accomplished this. Tell me more.”
This idea of appreciative joy, joy in the joy of others, can be cultivated and developed. In the process of all these forms of love, they can coexist with their opposites, the things that interfere with them. Part of the value of practicing them, or bringing them up and reflecting on them and letting them be a guide through our day, is that it sometimes can highlight the opposite, highlight the things that interfere with these things. So what, for you, interferes with appreciative joy in the joy of others?
I mentioned envy or jealousy, which can be quite a strong current in some people’s lives. In mindfulness practice, we wouldn’t berate ourselves for that or criticize ourselves for that, but we do something more important: we would study it. We would take a good look at that. What’s that about? What are the emotions that come along with jealousy and envy? What’s the sense of self? What’s the belief system that’s operating? Can we sit and just feel that for a while, accompany ourselves in those feelings? Because accompaniment is so powerful. It allows something to settle.
What else gets in the way of appreciative joy? It might be your own desires, your own preoccupations, that you want to get what you want and you don’t have time to take other people into account. It could be fear. It could be fear that if you take in and appreciate others, take in their joy, it makes you susceptible to be taken advantage of, or people will want more from you, or something might happen. Or maybe it highlights your own unhappiness, because if you really recognize happiness in others, then you feel worse about your own and how your life is difficult.
I’d like to propose the opposite: that appreciating the joy in others can be an inspiration for us, food for us to be able to then practice with our own difficulties. So appreciative joy is not meant to be a distraction from our own suffering, from our own difficulties, but rather to create the ambience in which it’s easier to focus on our own, to be present for our own, to give a wider context for it.
In some ways, that appreciative joy to others is probably not going to make you Pollyannaish. In Buddhist practice, what comes up clearly is an emphasis on suffering, but not to drown ourselves in suffering, but to find freedom from suffering. So in this emphasis on suffering, I don’t think you have to worry about being Pollyannaish. If others are suffering, then you don’t want to paint it over with joy and make them see things on the bright side, for other people or even for yourself, as a way of ignoring the difficulties that are going on. But when things are going good, when things are delightful for people, when they’re happy, share that happiness, accompany that happiness, take time to take it in. Just take time to say, “Wow, that’s great,” in a way that brings a smile to your face, in a way that brings you to light.
It’s phenomenal how great this appreciative joy can be in us. Sometimes it can feel that you’re the one who’s benefiting from it more than the other person. Maybe it sets free something inside, a flow of joy, of delight, of happiness, because you’ve become an open channel for these wonderful feelings. Sometimes people who are doing meditation on appreciative joy will feel a wonderful vibrating feeling of joy and delight that courses through them when the appreciating joy is so strong.
During this holiday time, there’s a lot of joy in seeing each other and being together with each other. Share in that joy, delight in that joy, celebrate that joy, toast that joy. On the holidays also, there are many people who suffer more, who feel left out or lonely or something. So that also should get our care and our love, appreciating them, and not to rub it in for them by emphasizing the joy when they’re not having it. Maybe then we emphasize calm, loving, compassionate attention.
The care we have for others is something that’s morphing and shifting and changing. Sometimes it’s compassion, sometimes it’s friendliness, loving-kindness, sometimes it’s appreciative joy. One of the great joys, one of the great aspects of this practice, is the fluidity by which we can shift and change, move between them. There’s a way that to allow each of these to have their own time, and maybe even become strong, allows us to let it fade away as we move into a different circumstance and another one is needed. We can be friendly with someone for a while, we go to another place and we have compassion, we shift. We go someplace else to be with someone else and they’re joyful, and we then shift with it. We morph, we meet the circumstance, not because we’re rejecting or being disloyal to the people who were suffering when we feel joy, but rather we’re just, in a sense, loyal or present for how it is now, and each time being appropriate for this circumstance, not carrying past circumstances with us.
So this fluidity between these different states—care, kindness, compassion, and appreciative joy—the more we’re fluid, the more we’re not stuck in any one of them, the more these can live in our lives in a wonderful way, feeding us in a way that they’re always available. And they are much more available than people avail themselves of. These are treasures. The Buddha called the Brahmaviharas2 a practitioner’s wealth. So if you want to be wealthy, this is the real wealth: to have these wonderful qualities.
Tomorrow we’ll finish with equanimous love. In the meantime, may you look for opportunities today to either privately in yourself, so no one knows, or out loud, to appreciate the goodness, the joy, the success of other people. Make that a theme. See what happens if you accompany or open to, recognize people for their joy and their happiness. And may it bring you joy. May you be delighted by all the success and goodness that there is in this world. For all the terrible news we get, I suspect there’s more goodness every day than what is difficult and painful.
Thank you very much.
Anukampā: A Pali word meaning “compassion,” “sympathy,” or “care.” It is one of the expressions of love discussed in this series of talks. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
Brahmaviharas: The “divine abodes” or “four immeasurables” in Buddhism. They are four sublime states of mind to be cultivated: loving-kindness (mettā), compassion (karuṇā), appreciative joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā). ↩ ↩2 ↩3
Brahma-viharas: The four “divine abodes” or “sublime states” in Buddhism: loving-kindness (mettā), compassion (karuṇā), appreciative joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā).This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Appreciation; Aspects of Love (4 of 5) Appreciative Joy. It likely contains inaccuracies. ↩ ↩2