We've been on a long series of the Brahmavihāras, the four faces of love, loving kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, equanimity. Lately have been looking at compassion. And today I wanted to reflect a little bit on my primary Buddhist teacher, meditation teacher, Sayadaw U Tejaniya, and his expression of compassion.

And he's not exactly the most warm, fuzzy guy. He presents, really, if you think about those four faces of love, he really presents with quite a lot of equanimity. And in that, there's a depth of welcoming and allowing non-reaction.

And you can see this, spending a lot of time with him, seeing him do a lot of group interviews, meet with people. He could really hold quite a lot of people's suffering, their pushback, they're not following instructions, they're screwing around, and really just not get caught up in that. Just, okay, well, people are going to be people. Just conditions unfolding. And so the way I saw it, he had quite a lot of love underneath that.

And in some ways, we could think of this as when the mind is not clear, or the mind is not full of afflictive forces. It's not full of craving, aversion, delusion, the relatives of those states like anxiety, despair, frustration, sorrow, anger, and the mind is clear, well, the way it responds is with one of those faces of love. And so a lot of the Vipassanā practice he taught was really about, can I learn how to not be under the sway of those afflictive forces?

And so for him, often it would present as equanimity, that this memory, One day we were, I don't even remember what we were doing, maybe having a meal or on some outing. And he turned to me somewhat out of the blue, a bit contemplative, soft-spoken, as if I were just the recipient of his thought process and he wanted to share it with someone and I was the person who was there.

And he said, if I just followed my preferences, I would go be a forest meditator, a hermit in a quiet monastery. said, not so much talking, but all of this teaching, running this monastery, seeing all these yogis, he said, I do this out of compassion. And that was really it. There wasn't a conversation. For some reason, he just wanted to share that. And I reflected it may have been one of the only times I actually heard him use the word compassion, which is interesting because as he's describing it, so much of his life energy revolved around teaching, around helping out, running this big monastery.

Thousands of people would roll through over the course of a year. And so even though in a particular moment of time, he didn't present as this warm, fuzzy beacon of what we think of as love, at the same time, the deep motivation that fueled his life was compassion. I'm making my core life choices out of care for others. I don't want them to suffer. And so I help out in this way.

Similarly, this wasn't really public knowledge in the sense that he didn't put up a big sign and say, hey, everyone, look at me and what I'm about to do. But the monastery we were at, probably because he did these retreats in Europe and the US and other parts of Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore and whatnot, his monastery was very well supported. It had a lot of resources relative to other monasteries in Myanmar.

And so periodically, he would take trips to poorer regions of the country and give the access to poorer monasteries, food, money, materials. One time over breakfast, he said something like, hey, today we're going over to this town such and such by the Irrawaddy River. They had a big flood, lots of suffering. We're going to go make an offering. He said, you, come. So I'm like, okay. So he brought a small handful of monks and lay people and just quietly offered a whole slew of resources to this poor community who just suffered this real atrocity, their village flooded.

It's like, oh, just another expression of this deep well of compassion. I had another moment on that more personal level and been with him maybe six months or so.

And I had these really intense old memories coming up, just a lot of shame, a lot of pain, and just tremors, uncontrollable shaking for like an hour longer, wanting to crawl out of my own skin. Maybe you've had something of the sort at some point. And so I went to him. He has these open office hours in the morning where you can, anyone can come in and speak with him.

And I said, Saida, so a lot of shame is coming up. I'm having a hard time with it. And he looked at me just kind of neutral faced. And he said, so you know how to practice just an object, not a problem. And I had this deer in the headlights look on my face. You know, I kind of, uh, well, it's really hard. And then his whole face softened.

And he said, oh yeah, sometimes it's like this. What to do? And then we had a nice chat on that level of compassion. I felt like he saw me in my pain and listened and really just stressed patience. It's like, yeah, there isn't a magic bullet. Patience. Practice works, but patience. And I think of that interaction as somewhat something of the perfect descriptor of how compassion worked for him.

One, just the fact that he had open office hours that any of the couple hundred people at the monastery could just come in. He'd talk to anyone. So this is just an expression of that depth of compassion and making myself available to anyone. And his initial presentation was that face of love that was really deeply trodden, that face of equanimity. It's like, yeah, things happen. It's just part of life.

Just see it. Not a big deal. That was really what he held down in his own being. The face of love was just this ability to meet anything with a depth of equanimity and non-reaction. But then amidst clear pain, it's like, oh, that face of love transforms from equanimity into compassion, to hold you in your pain, to see you in your pain. And, you know, so sharing these stories of U Tejaniya, I come back to something I talked about in some of the meta talks we did a couple months ago, the analogy of the river, and that it's as if all of us have this river of love flowing within us, just as part of our human wiring.

We can call this river care, compassion, loving kindness, love, joy, any of these faces of love. And yet there are dams that block the flow of that river. These dams, in Buddhist parlance, are called the three afflictions, craving, aversion, delusion. Maybe they're relatives, anxiety, despair, anger, confusion, and so on. but we go through life and these dams start to build themselves. They block the flow of our natural love and care.

And so a big thrust of vipassanā practice or mindfulness meditation is really about learning to see the afflictions and to learn how to not get entangled with them. It's like, oh, that's resistance. Oh, I see a resistance. I don't need to follow you. Oh, and then the mind kind of opens up. That natural river of love starts to flow. If any of you have ever done a meditation retreat, something like vipassanā insight meditation, what you'll know is that after spending a number of days really dropped in to just being mindful, being present, like unentangling yourself from the noise of your own mind, when you leave that space, you just feel such a well of care.

You see another being, you're like, oh dear being, I see you. And even if you didn't do any formal loving kindness or compassion practice, the fact that the mind is less entangled, less caught up in its own noise, that river flows. And so many of you have had that experience. You know that there's a lot of truth to what I'm speaking to, to this analogy. And this was really U Tejaniya's angle.

He didn't formally teach or practice loving kindness or compassion in a formal way. Rather, he really held down like, we're completely dismantling the dam. That's kind of what he was teaching. And the primary face of love that then presents from that is equanimity. It's not that the love and the compassion aren't there, they're bundled up within it. And so I think for myself, you know, all of them are good things to cultivate.

You could just go all in on vipassanā, the love and compassion are there. But I think of doing these practices like loving kindness meditation, compassion meditation, or even just nurturing them along as we've been these last months, it's sort of like increasing the intensity of the river. It's like, okay, the dam is the dam. but let me increase the volume, the flow of the river, that maybe it actually just overpowers the dam just because the love and the compassion are so strong.

It's not like there's a right way to do it. Like, let me work on the dam. Let me work on the river. Yeah. All the flows lead to the same place. And so this is a good thing to do, to really actively nurture along a heart of compassion, a heart of loving kindness. But some of what I, why I'm bringing this up today, it can sometimes start to seem like it's just a lot to do.

Like, oh, I got to do this method, do this perception, do this contemplation. And can we really just soften the sense of like, there's a bunch to do. The river of love exists within all of us. And so maybe today you could do a formal meditation of love or compassion, but maybe you could just drop into a very simple presence. Just what is it to be here, to relax, to observe, to allow, to unentangle the mind in a really simple way and trust that that simple, unentangled presence leads naturally to a depth of love and compassion in our lives.

So we'll pause here. We'll see you in a little bit.