Community Blog

Compassion (Pali: karuna) is the second of the four Brahmavihara or Boundless States. Suffering is universal and not foreign to human experience. How we relate and respond is the very essence of our Buddhist mind/heart training. Often we recoil and armor the heart, believing that something has gone terribly wrong, or someone is to blame for this very human experience. Yet, the heart can be trained to respond with compassion, based on mutual resonance and natural connectedness in the face of loss and pain. Compassion is sensitivity, not grounded in pity, repulsion or fear, arising from the heart’s fearless inclusive capacity to recognize universal kinship and belonging, especially in suffering.

The gift of mindfulness practice is that in any moment of anxiety or fear, we are called to open our hearts, to have the courage to be with even our deepest, darkest fears. An old Hasidic story says teachings are placed on, not in, our hearts, so that when the heart breaks, the teachings fall in. We hear, reflect on and put into practice the teachings, so that in the turmoil of anxiety and fear, loving awareness, is our response—trusting that loving, compassionate, peaceful presence is what is most healing in the experience of the broken, anxious or fearful heart.

Metta (loving-kindness) is the ninth parami, or emanation of an awake being. What we call "love" is usually based on desire and attachment. This "love" is unreliable because it is usually based on grasping, conditioned on what we get from the “beloved.” At first, the attraction and even the grasping may feel exciting, obscuring the underlying suffering of grasping.

The eighth parami (quality of Buddhamind) is Resolve or Determination, the capacity to set a direction in life and pursue it with courageous energy and patience despite obstacles to its attainment. It is the unshakeable spirit in us that calls us to stick to our course with the kind of dedication the Buddha had on the night of his enlightenment, when he vowed not to arise from his seat until he came to see the cause of suffering in his own heart and in the world, and come to freedom from it.

As the Buddha lay dying, he said to his disciples, “Be a lamp unto yourself, be a light, let yourself shine.” With Truthfulness, the seventh parami (emanation of an awakened being), we vow to illuminate our lives through discovery and openness to the truth. To follow the path of meditation is to open our eyes and our hearts to see and sense clearly the naked truth of our lives in a new and open way.

Patience is the sixth Parami, or, emanation of the awakened being. Patience comes when we appreciate how it is to rest and wait, allowing that which arises to pass in its natural rhythm. From the TaoTeChing: “The wise … those who understand, have no mind to fight the Tao … but instead, rest in the rhythm of life and nature.”