Live Session Summary, Sunday, November 12, 2023: It was good to be with you for our Live session. In today’s session we continued the discussion of how the Buddha’s teachings can support us in these difficult times, focusing on the role the Buddha’s heart practices—loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity.
Here are some of the main themes, quotes, and poems I shared:
I began by sharing the simile used in Buddhism of the ‘two wings of the bird’: Just as a bird needs two wings to fly, so our practice requires two wings—the wing of wisdom (awareness, understanding, insight) and the wing of compassion (kindness, care, love, connection). I reviewed briefly our discussion from two weeks ago on the role of practices of awareness (the first ‘wing’) in helping us let go of the clinging and aversion that we can easily be caught up in during these times. I shared these quotes:
“Wisdom tells me I’m nothing. Love tells me I’m everything. And between the two my life flows.” (Sri Nisargadata, 20th Century Indian spiritual teacher)
“Anything unconscious dissolves when you shine the light of consciousness on it.” (Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now)
“You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection—you cannot cope with the future.” (Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now)
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” (Blaise Pascal, French mathematician and philosopher, 1623-1662)
I highlighted the role that the ‘heart practices’ can play in providing support, particularly when we find ourselves swept up in fear, anger, debilitating grief, powerlessness, despair, self-judgment, guilt, and many other challenging emotions and mind states. The four heart practices are described by Insight meditation teacher Gil Fronsdal as ‘four faces of love’—one overarching quality of kindness and friendliness that takes on different forms depending on the circumstances and conditions we meet.
We focused on three of the four heart practices—loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity—as particularly powerful supports for these times.
At the heart of these teachings is the understanding that these are not qualities that we either have or don’t have, but rather, qualities that we can cultivate through the diligent practice of inclining our mind towards compassion, kindness, and care for all beings. Sharon Salzberg shared this perspective:
• “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.” (Salzberg, Loving-Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness)
Loving-kindness invites us to meet all beings—without exception—with understanding and kindness. Christina Feldman expressed this intention and commitment as “cultivating an attitudinal commitment of friendliness towards all beings and all experience.” (Feldman, Boundless Heart)
Compassion is the quality that arises when an open heart meets suffering. It’s been described as ‘the quivering of the heart in the face of suffering.” Compassion incorporates two central responses: 1) empathy—caring for the suffering of another (or oneself); and 2) the wish to alleviate the suffering. We begin by acknowledging our own or another’s suffering:
• “The first step in developing true compassion is being able to recognize, to open to, and to acknowledge that pain and sorrow exist. Everywhere, absolutely everywhere, in one way or another, beings are suffering.” (Salzberg, Loving Kindness)
• “Compassion in its deepest sense is immeasurable. It embraces the most difficult people in our lives, the most brutal people in the world. Compassion is concerned with meeting suffering and uprooting the causes of suffering: the greed, hatred, and confusion that scars the lives and hearts of too many in this world.” (Feldman, Boundless Heart)
We finished by discussing the quality and practice of equanimity, which is the invitation to meet all experience without clinging to what’s pleasant or resisting or pulling away from what is difficult or unpleasant. The Buddha spoke of ‘eight worldly winds’ that are an inevitable part of our human existence:
• “Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, success and failure are the eight worldly winds. They ceaselessly change. As a mountain is unshaken by the wind, so the heart of a wise person is steady amidst all the changes on this earth.” (Lokavipatti Sutta: ‘The Failings of the World’)
I emphasized that equanimity is not indifference to suffering, or aloofness, or not caring. With equanimity, our heart remains open and caring, but without clinging or resistance. T.S. Eliot in his poem ‘Ash Wednesday’ said, “Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.” Caring without clinging.
I shared a quote from ‘The Mind of Absolute Trust’ by the 3rd Zen Patriarch, Tsin Tsin Ming:
“The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart….
If you wish to see the truth
then hold no opinions for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind.”
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I finished the meditation with the poem ‘School Prayer’ by Diane Ackerman.
This is a longer summary. I hope the review and quotes are helpful to you. Have a peaceful week and see you next Sunday, November 19 at 9am Eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻
