Today I wanted to wrap up a few weeks looking at compassion and this is part of a bigger series on the Brahmavihāras, these sublime attitudes, four faces of love. And compassion is the face of love that meets suffering. That when a being presents a suffering or in some way, even if it's hidden, we attune to some suffering present, some pain, stress, dis-ease. Our heart has this movement of care.

It says, oh, dear being, I see your pain. I get it. I know what that's like. I wish for you to be free from that. And really, as I've reflected on this, we could think of our entire spiritual journey as a movement of compassion. And on some level, it starts with a recognition of what started the Buddhist spiritual journey, the first noble truth. There is suffering. We live in a world of aging, illness, death, association with what is displeasing, not getting what we want, having a mind that grasps and resists, living in a world where even where we get the things we like and we have a nice time, it fades.

And so when we really recognize all this, what the Buddha set out on his spiritual quest and what all of us have done in our own way is we seek some deeper refuge. And if you hadn't done this, you wouldn't be here. There's some exploration. what is it to live well? What is it to taste some deeper peace? It gets us to take up something like meditation.

And so we could think about it in a way. Buddhist meditation is really just learning how to be with suffering. And of course, the Buddha says, I teach suffering and the end of suffering. So it's not just all suffering. It's, well, there's an end. There's a lessening. And any of you who've meditated for any length of time know it's not just all daisies and roses when you sit with the mind.

The mind gets restless, lethargic, anxious, upset, irritated. Thoughts yank us this way and that. And the first movement of meditation is really just how do I meet that? How do I be present amidst the floods of suffering? And we can cloak meditation in all the insight language we like, but at the same time, it's really a movement of self-compassion. I care about myself enough. I want to find another way.

I want to learn how to meet my felt experience with presence, with equanimity, with care? And then by extension, will I share that with others? So I think of presenting compassion in this way, that the real central skill of compassion is just presence. How do I be present with this without getting caught up in the running away and the fixing and the overwhelm? How do I be present with this too?

And Pema Chodron had some great quote, forget the exact wording, but it's something like, when you've sat with your own darkness long enough and deep enough, well, then you can sit with other people in their darkness too. And so in the broader sense, compassion depends firstly on the ability to just recognize suffering is suffering. Oh, here it is. Now this is a moment of suffering. And two, to recognize a living being as a living being.

This might seem obvious, but how often do we see other living beings as these impersonal objects that are getting in the way of our happiness. This person's making all this noise. They're causing a ruckus. They're being rude. They're standing in front of me in line, whatever the thing is. And so to actually take in, wait a minute, this is a living being. Whether they're a human, they're an animal, they're an insect, they're a plant.

Sentient. This is a sentient living being. To start to see beings from this place of, I like the language of the sacred or precious. And so when we can recognize suffering as suffering, and we can recognize living beings as living beings, we're really in the current of compassion. Wait a minute. The Buddha has this great quote, just a very simple, timeless empathy. He says, the thing that is disliked by me is also disliked by others.

Since I dislike this thing, how could I inflict it on someone else? It's the type of thing you might read in a book for toddlers, like such timeless wisdom. Like, oh yeah, beings have feelings and they have ups and downs. And I don't want to inflate downs on them because I don't like downs. And some of the arc of practice that we've done in these past weeks, one is just a training in perception.

And this is what I've just been speaking to. This is a living being. This is a moment of suffering. Or as we did yesterday, this is a suffering. So we just really start to train in that perception. And the second part is to train in the movement of care. In classical language, we would call it training and intention. I don't wish for that. I don't wish that for them.

I wish for them to be well, to be free from the suffering. How do we train in this movement of care? Well, one, we could just do compassionate things. That's a pretty easy inroad. Or what we've done, and the benefit of this space, is we have the quiet of our own mind. We have our meditative practice. And so a way we train in that movement is, well, we bring to mind someone.

We could go through this sequence of bring to mind self, bring to mind a dear person, a relative stranger, a difficult person, or we could just bring to mind whoever. And firstly, we attune to, wait a minute, this is a living being, just like me. We see, oh, I see your suffering. I hold you with care and compassion. May you be free from pain. You just do a practice like this enough that movement of care starts to become very palpable, automatic.

It translates off the meditation cushion. You go into life and you're just you're attuned in that way and then another angle on this is just the vipassanā practice insight meditation when you learn to dismantle the obstacles to not get so caught in your own reactivity well what tends to flow naturally is care and compassion if i see another being and i'm not caught up in my own to-do list and my own concerns and what i'm mad about and happy about well there's so much bandwidth that opens up so much less clutter But then, oh, the compassion flows.

So to put that really simply, we attune to the perception. This is a suffering being. We strengthen the intention and movement of care, and we break down the obstacles, hidden or overt. I wanted to name something a little more specifically, that second step of strengthening the movement of care, and specifically just this part about doing.

If I were to say that someone is a really generous person, but they never gave anything, you might raise an eyebrow. How does that work? How could you be generous but never give? And in the same way, if someone were a compassionate person but never did anything compassionate, you again raise an eyebrow. It's like, well, how does that work? It doesn't is the short answer. And in these last few weeks together, I've been putting a lot more emphasis on the inner quality of compassion coming into that current of care.

And this is one because culturally, we're really good at doing. We don't need a lot of instruction how to do things. And yet our doing, it's like, where is it coming from? Is it coming from our own discomfort? Like, I got to get rid of this so I can be okay. I want to be the savior. Or is our doing coming from this more economist, grounded care and compassion?

And my sense is, in my own experience and what I've seen in others, is that the more we really build up this current of care from within, the doing tends to happen naturally. It just flows. And the simplest way it shows up, and those of you who've been meditating for a while know this, is just that heightened capacity to be present with people in difficulty. One of my early yoga teachers, he said something to me that really stuck with me.

He said, the more you do this practice, sort of awareness-based practice, he said, when tragedy strikes, you'll notice you start to become the most grounded person in the room. And that's really proven true for me to some degree at least. And so anyhow, when we can really cultivate that inner current of care, that heart of compassion, ability to be with suffering, to see beings as precious, as sacred, as worthy of care, we'll find our way to express that.

We find our way to know what's appropriate. It just starts with presence and maybe it builds to loving touch, loving words, loving acts of service, loving counsel, loving advice. It comes from what is appropriate, not just what we need to do to get rid of our own pain. And so the heart of care and the doing, they're interlinked, like being generous and giving, they go together. But if you start with the core, the second one follows.

And this bit on compassion, it's like a bridge in this whole series of the Brahmavihāras. I really like that expression, the four faces of love.

And there's something useful about doing a deep dive as we've done on each of the four faces. You really get its flavor. Loving kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, equanimity.

Really soak it in. Be like, oh, I get the subtle blocks. I get the easy pathways with that one. Loving kindness, just the general goodwill, compassion, the form that care takes, that goodwill takes when it meets suffering, appreciative joy, the form it takes when we meet beings in a good place. equanimity, the form it takes when we can't really help or we see some sort of recurring pain, just the ability to be grounded.

And ultimately, we can do these deep dives, go one by one, but in practice, in real life, eventually these really just begin to blend together. You know, a life of care, a life of love. It's not like, oh, this person, which category are they in now? Which one do I do? No, it's just our responsive heart, our caring heart. It meets different beings in different ways based on circumstances, and becomes very intuitive in that sense.

So yeah, I want to close the talk here, go into silence, and maybe just take a moment to reflect for you, what is the pathway to compassion, to the caring heart that most lands for you, that feels most accessible? Maybe even take just a couple minutes touching into that energy, and then we'll see you in a half hour.