This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Peaceful Love; Aspects of Love (5 of 5) Equanimous Love. 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.
This week, the overall teachings have been about different aspects or forms of love. So far, they can be primarily seen as relational forms of love. The first one, care, is caring for someone, including oneself. Friendly kindness is something we do in relationship to others, and maybe to ourselves at times. Compassion is in relationship to someone who’s suffering, maybe ourselves. And appreciative joy is the joy in relationship to other people’s joy, and maybe there’s a secondary appreciation of our own well-being.
The third one can be in relationship to other people, but to understand how it works, it’s best to see that we have a capacity as human beings to have a form of love, a form of warmhearted radiance, a form of inspired appreciation, delight, and goodness that fits into the category of what love is, but it does not need an object. It doesn’t have to exist in relationship to anybody or anything. It’s something that can just be.
Some people, when this kind of love arises, will assume that it’s love for the whole universe or that it’s impersonal—that it’s the love of the universe that we’re experiencing in ourselves. But in this early Buddhist tradition that I teach from, it just is in our hearts. It just is, and it’s enough. We don’t have to add anything more or any explanation for it.
It’s remarkable how much this kind of non-relational love comes together with peace. It’s a love that is very, very peaceful. And it’s not a betrayal of others; it’s not a rejection of others or a rejection of the importance of being in relationship to other people. If anything, it creates an amazingly significant foundation for the other forms of love. It provides us with a certain kind of freedom to love without needing for it to be in exchange, love without needing anything in return, love without it needing anything from anybody—even a body. Just love.
This love can be peaceful and equanimous because it’s not in relationship to anything. No matter what happens, it doesn’t matter to that love. That love doesn’t want or not want what is happening. It doesn’t reject and it doesn’t accept anything that happens. It just is, maybe feeling like it’s there to penetrate everything. So the mystery of love, the wonderful possibilities of love, include this one: love that has no object, that exists in itself.
So, to gently close your eyes or lower your gaze if you prefer. Feeling your body and adjusting your body a bit so your body is aligned. There’s maybe a feeling of physical harmony in the position of your hands, your arms, your legs, your back. A way in which your hands, your arms, your torso, your sitting bones, your legs, your head all cooperate to make a whole, in harmony, working together.
Here, in this whole, in this being, to take a deep breath, maybe imagining your breathing spreads to all parts of your body. And as you exhale, to relax the whole body.
Letting your breathing return to normal, but continue for two or three breaths to soften your body, a gentling of the body.
And then as you breathe in, to feel the activity of thinking, the thinking mind. Does it have any sensations associated with it of being activated, tense? Is there pressure or contraction, constriction? So feeling that on the inhale, and on the exhale, relaxing the thinking mind. Maybe imagining that your thoughts float away as the mind softens. Sometimes a softening mind can feel as if the mind becomes larger, more spacious.
And then, as you breathe in, to feel your heart center, to feel whatever center where your emotional life is active, however subtle it is, however big. Feel the place where your emotional life is centered—maybe the heart center, maybe the belly, maybe the face or the hands. Feeling it as you breathe in, and lovingly, kindly, relax and soften on the exhale. Maybe almost as if your emotions are like a gas that, when the lid is taken off, the gas spreads wide, no longer contained. It spreads outward. So your emotions soften, relax, spread.
And maybe there, in the emotional center or somewhere else, is there any—maybe subtle, not so subtle—feeling of tenderness, or warmth, kindness, or love, care? So you’re feeling the sensations of love, maybe as tenderness, maybe as gentleness, softness, and warmth. And as you breathe in, feel that spot. As you exhale, let it be free. Free of expectations, ideas of what it should or shouldn’t be. Let it exist there, free of yourself. A place of warmth or love that exists in and of itself, with no need for an object, no need to be in relationship to anything, including yourself.
And as you continue, maybe you can breathe with this kind of object-free love. And if it’s nice and supporting for you, you can very softly, like a very gentle wind, say the word “love” as you connect to this place. Just love.
Love without an object is similar to music traveling through the air before anybody hears it. It’s there, but not yet heard. The love is here, radiating outward, but not yet touching anyone.
And as we come to the end of this sitting, to see or to feel if there’s any degree of peacefulness in you, any place of peace, any place of ease, where just being alive is enough, quietly sitting, breathing. Maybe where love and peace cannot be separated too easily; they occur together.
Then staying close to the peace, staying close to a love which needs nothing to be any way different than what it is—just love—turn your mind now out into the world, to the people you’re likely to encounter today, have conversations with, to the people in your neighborhoods and places of work, and friends and strangers. See if you can gaze upon them with a peaceful love that needs nothing for yourself or even for them. For a couple of minutes now, just peaceful love in how you take in, gaze upon this wide world.
For a minute or so, trusting a love which is not about anything. It’s just love, peaceful love.
And then to get ready to end the meditation now, rising out of that love, perhaps aspiring, wishing for the welfare and happiness of everyone. May everyone be happy. May everyone be safe. May everyone be peaceful. May everyone be free.
And may your ability to appreciate, to value, to care for everyone be the foundation for how you relate to all beings today. May all beings benefit from how you live this day. Thank you.
Hello and welcome to this fifth talk on the different aspects of love, different forms of love. Today’s topic is the fourth of the Brahmavihāras1, the Divine Abodes. The fourth is usually just called equanimity, upekkhā2 in Pāli3. Many people can’t quite understand—often people can’t understand—that equanimity can be a form of love, because equanimity might be closely related to indifference, to not caring. But in fact, this equanimity, this Brahmavihāra, definitely comes with care. It definitely comes without indifference, not aloofness or passivity, but rather it’s with a realism. It’s love that has a realistic assessment of the situation.
So it’s love with wisdom. And one of the ways that this manifests itself is to recognize that sometimes we cannot help someone. You can have all the compassion in the world, you can have all the kindness in the world, but people are going to suffer. They can make the choices they do that are going to make their life hard for them. And so, rather than despairing, rather than giving up love, there is a love that still remains, which is equanimous. That is, it doesn’t get caught in despair, doesn’t get caught in anger, doesn’t get caught in “I should, I should, I should be able to do something,” and kind of taking responsibility for someone else. But realize everyone has a certain degree of self-responsibility. The dignity of allowing people to have their autonomy to make their own choices is one of the great forms of freedom we give to people. People who don’t have autonomy feel somehow stuck and feel oppressed. And so, sooner or later, we have to allow people to make their own choices.
The equanimity of this love can be present and warmhearted to people while not being somehow dispirited by the challenge of the person you’re with. With this kind of equanimity, love is a love that can accompany people. We’re not rejecting people; we’re still there with them. And we still offer our care, we offer our kindness, we offer our presence. And maybe our presence is enough—that we’re there with our love.
Maybe this is where it’s a love that’s not dependent on anything in the world itself. It’s not dependent on the person getting better, not dependent on the person making right choices. It doesn’t depend on anything. It’s a love which is stronger than the vagaries of change. It’s stronger than all the different possible directions and ways that things can unfold. Love is there.
It’s related to a form of peace. I think of this equanimous love as being a peaceful love, a love which is not ruffled by what’s happening in the world. And it’s very difficult, this kind of equanimity. It’s considered a very… it comes with a lot of practice. Because with mindfulness practice, we’re slowly learning how to separate out all the impurities, the dross, the dust that’s in the way of our love. There can be kindness that we offer, but we want something in return. We want to be appreciated for our kindness. We want to be thanked. We want to be recognized as a kind person, get a badge for how kind we are.
I remember the first time that I was seeking to be kind to a young woman, it was because I was attracted to her. And so I was trying to act really kind to make an impression. And when I finished that conversation and left, I felt I was a little bit sickened with myself. So there’s a lot of extra stuff that came into it.
Same thing with compassion. Sometimes the acts of compassion are more about trying to take care of our own discomfort and make our own discomfort go away than it is caring for someone else. Appreciative joy can be complicated. Sometimes there could be joy and appreciation, but maybe there’s an over-identification with the other person, so we’re kind of allowing our happiness to be dependent on the happiness of someone else.
And so equanimity is when these things have been kind of cleared out. And there’s very little ego, very little self-centered desire, self-centered aversion. There’s no self in the picture of this kind of objectless love. It’s just love that’s there in a peaceful way. And to see it as a strength—I kind of think of it as an impersonal strength. It’s personal in that it arises from you in a certain kind of way, but it’s not personal in the sense that it’s not something you construct or choose or do. It’s something you tap into, something you allow, something you can feel, and then let it be there, let it be with a situation.
This is invaluable because it allows us to love in difficult situations, and some situations certainly call on it. And sometimes it’s the best thing we can do. This form of equanimity, this Brahmavihāra, is sometimes called grandmotherly love, grandparents’ love. I’ve been a new parent, and as a new parent, you know, every little thing was a drama and concern. “Should we call the doctor?” or something. But the grandparents, my kids’ grandparents, took everything much more equanimously. They had raised kids, they’d been around little kids. They knew that when a kid fell on the playground and scraped their knee, that this didn’t mean calling 911. This just meant to be calm and loving and caring and be present for the kid in a non-anxious way, to stay equanimous. The kid doesn’t feel like the situation has gotten out of hand because the parent now is losing it. The kid feels like, “Oh, there’s stability, there’s a known world, there’s a safe world here.” And what’s happened here is in the realm of the safe world. What’s happened to me is painful, but I’m being cared for by someone who’s calm and present and certainly cares about me, but offers to kiss the knee and is not activated, not anxious, not alarmed by it.
So this grandparent love… sometimes we don’t need to be alarmed. Sometimes we don’t need to be caught up in what it means to us personally. We can just show up with love and see what happens, and see what emerges. And sometimes that’s what’s mostly needed. Many people don’t need to be fixed, and they don’t need us to fix them. Many people need to be loved, need to be cared for, need to be in the presence of someone who is willing to see them with clarity but with a simplicity of love, maybe a love that doesn’t need anything in return.
And maybe sometimes that might seem a little passive, because many people want an exchange. They want something to happen. They want to know, they want to get praised, they want to have something in return. So it can be a little bit awkward for some people. But generally, I think that if you stay present in a caring way and engage in the conversation, I think that you’ll win them over, or you’ll demonstrate something powerful for them.
So, the love of equanimity. And one of the phrases that’s used for this kind of love is, “The choices you make are your own, and I still love you.”
So may we love everyone, and may we know the appropriate love in the different circumstances we’re in. I think of care as being the foundation from which the other four grow. I’ve heard people who believe that equanimity is the foundation, that equanimous love is the foundation for the other three Brahmavihāras, that the other three arise out of this more fundamental love of equanimity. So however it is, your way is the right way if you’re loving in any one of these five different ways.
May the end of this year be one that keeps you close to your capacity for care, kindness, compassion, appreciation, and equanimity, so that you can begin this next year having that be one of the primary characteristics of how you go through the year. May this next year be one of love.
I offer you these wishes for the new year because I won’t be here next week. I’m having a little vacation time with my family. Next week, Kim Allen will be here. So you’re very fortunate to have Kim, a wonderful teacher with tremendous care in how she teaches, and intelligence and kindness. So she is wonderful to follow up with, and she’ll guide you into the new year. I’ll be back the following week.
And what the plan is for the beginning of the year is… in the last few years, I’ve been giving a long series of basic meditation instructions. I did the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta4, I did the Ānāpānasati Sutta5 for a whole period of time—the four foundations of mindfulness, the mindfulness of breathing. And what I’d like to do this next beginning of the year is to do instructions on concentration practice, on samādhi6. Samādhi and mindfulness—I’ll talk about this—I don’t see them as being two separate paths, but they work together. But it is useful sometimes to just kind of focus on the samādhi aspect of it. So that’s what I’ll do, and we’ll do it slowly over these days and weeks. So hopefully you’ll follow along well enough and get some benefit from this very important topic.
Finally, if I may mention, if any of you are interested in supporting IMC and IRC, there is an end-of-the-year letter that I wrote. You’ll find a link to it that you can cut and paste on the YouTube channel for this presentation, and also on IMC’s website on the donate page. So thank you everyone for your support and for your kindness and for your participation here for this last year. I find it phenomenally wonderful that we have this time together and that we’ll go forward into the new year. So thank you very much.
Brahmavihāras: The “divine abodes” or “four immeasurables” in Buddhism. They are four virtues and meditation practices: mettā (loving-kindness), karuṇā (compassion), muditā (appreciative joy), and upekkhā (equanimity). ↩
Upekkhā: A Pāli word for equanimity, one of the four Brahmavihāras. It refers to a balanced, impartial, and peaceful state of mind that is not swayed by gain or loss, honor or dishonor, praise or blame. ↩
Pāli: An ancient Prakrit language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the sacred language of Theravāda Buddhism. ↩
Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta: A key discourse from the Pāli Canon that provides the foundational teachings on mindfulness meditation, outlining the “Four Foundations of Mindfulness” (mindfulness of the body, feelings, mind, and dhammas). ↩
Ānāpānasati Sutta: A discourse from the Pāli Canon focused on the practice of mindfulness of breathing (ānāpānasati) as a path to concentration and insight. ↩
Samādhi: A Pāli word often translated as “concentration” or “unification of mind.” It refers to a state of deep meditative absorption where the mind becomes still, focused, and unified. ↩