Hi, everyone. Here is a summary of the Live session for Sunday, March 27: The theme was ‘The Buddha’s Heart Practices: Medicine for Difficult Times’.
I spoke about how we easily get tangled in difficult emotions and mind states when dealing with challenging situations or experiences—anger, judgment, blame, fear, overwhelm, disconnection, and more. These aversive reactions are not wrong, they simply cause us pain and suffering.
The Buddha’s heart practices of loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity point to a different and more helpful way to respond: when we befriend these difficult emotions and reactions, rather than making them ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’, they cease to cause us suffering and are pathway to the deepest freedom.
We can train ourselves to cultivate these heart qualities. As Sharon Salzberg writes, ‘Love and concern for all are not things some of us are born with and others are not. Rather, they are the results of what we do with our minds. We can choose to transform our minds so that they embody love, or we can allow them to develop habits and false concepts of separation.’
Some quotes and poems I shared include:
• On practicing compassion towards difficult people: ‘If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all our hostility.’ (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
• ‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’ (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
• On fear: ‘Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.’ (Hafiz, Persian lyric poet, died 1390)
• ‘We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.’ (William Butler Yeats)
• ‘The difference between misery and happiness depends on what we do with our attention.’ (Sharon Salzberg)
Two books I strongly recommend on loving-kindness and the other heart practices are:
• Sharon Salzberg, ‘Loving-kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness’
• Christina Feldman, ‘Boundless Heart: The Buddha’s Path of Kindness, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity’
Let me know if I missed anything. I’m planning on offering a four-hour mini-retreat/workshop on ‘the Buddha’s heart practices’ or ‘mindfulness and loving-kindness.’ Let me know if this is of interest to you in the summer or fall/autumn.
Have a good week and see you next Sunday at 9am eastern. Warmly, Hugh🙏🏻
