Welcome back from our short Summer vacation.  I trust you enjoyed the beautiful weather we have had and that the activities in which you engaged were supportive of your inner peace and happiness.

The transition from Summer to Autumn is a reminder of the instruction that “beginning again” is the essence of our meditation—each time the mind gets lost in the past or the future, in fear, anxiety or fantasy, we remember to come back to the present moment, and in doing so, we see the simplicity and depth of the practice.  In being mindful of the moment—starting with walking, sitting, cleaning, showering, reading poetry, the mind is less distracted.  As our mindfulness grows, we can be mindful internally of thoughts and emotions as they arise and ultimately, mindful externally of the lawful unfolding of life.

Of course, we sometimes hear about “staying with the moment” or “returning to the moment” as a rigid injunction.  If it is taken as such, you may lose the art of living in a free flowing way.  Rather, we can commit to beginning again, each time the mind “forgets” and flits.  In this simple movement of beginning again, we learn to be more focused and grounded.  Thus, the habit of the roaming mind gives way to a more centered way of being where concentration develops, allowing mindfulness without desire, aversion, judgments, likes and dislikes to be developed, with deepening inner silence or equanimity.  Remembering that we can begin again reminds us to be alert and sensitive to what is happening around us, to know things just as they are.  In seeing thus, we truly begin again.

 

“It’s not the perfect, but the imperfect who have need of love.”
—Oscar Wilde

A common misapprehension about meditation is that its aim is to attain a peaceful uninterrupted state of bliss and luminosity.  When we meditate, especially in initial stages of practice, what we often experience are emotions that may feel unbearable, or even wrong.  Instead of bliss and light, we may encounter restlessness, aversion, low energy and difficult emotions.  These may arise with physical manifestations—tightened throat or heart, burning sensations, shallow breathing…. It may feel natural to want to constrain, suppress, stop these all too familiar marks of our fear, anxiety, yes, imperfection.

Discomfort and unpleasantness are part of the process.  Putting away idealizations about what is acceptable or unacceptable, recognizing and setting aside habitual reactions, we see the endless struggle with discomfort. Letting emotions be, we pay loving attention to them rather than pushing them away.  Loving attention to the breath, thoughts, emotions and stories shifts our relationship out of struggle.  This is the key moment in meditation—when we  simply pause, let go of reactivity and establish intimacy with what is true, even if scary.

Much simpler than trying to change it, we accept the constricted heart and hold it with kindness.  It is not necessarily that anxiety will disappear or uncomfortable images or thoughts won’t arise.  Our willingness to receive anxiety with kindness will gradually loosen its grip so that we can see it more clearly as the vulnerable in us that needs our love.  Meeting difficulty with curiosity and goodwill, we see clearly.  The love itself is transformational.

The gift of mindfulness practice is that in any moment of anxiety or fear, we are called to open our hearts, to know we have the courage to be with even our deepest, darkest fears.  An old Hasidic story says that the 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, into which we train our hearts, is our response—trusting that loving, compassionate, peaceful presence is what is most healing in the experience of the broken, anxious or fearful heart.

I am called by this reflection to recommend highly to you a teaching by Akincano, a gracious and insightful teacher, at New York Insight this coming weekend, which he describes  (I summarize) as “Brahmavihara:  The boundless mind — Dimensions of Universal Empathy” . . . a direct experience that is universal, timeless and transcultural: Love, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity, capacities of every human heart … literally at the heart of human experience….”

Brahmavihara teachings and practice train the heart into feeling life fully, intuitively sensing how to reach out and touch our own and others’ hearts from the clarity and caring of our boundless mind/heart.  These Brahmaviharas encourage intuitive wisdom and loving presence in the face of the joys and sorrows all humans know. We learn how to allow the teachings to fall into our heart and trust what we find there.  Look into this event and look into opening your heart so the teachings can fall in.

Practice is not limited to sitting meditation.  In the Chan tradition, it is taught that the “Silent Illumination” evoked by practice can cover all our activities so that life does not become stressful as soon as we arise from the cushion. This is heart advice for “Silent Illumination” while working. The principles are the same for all activity:

We can practice the illumination of meditation while putting body and mind to whatever task is at hand, applying the best methods appropriate for the task.  Being single-minded and with best effort, our work can be completed with a stable and relaxed mind.

Silence manifests when we let go aversions, attachment and prejudice in activity.  Illumination manifests when the activity is clearly understood, and focus is on the present moment.

Approach the work with a plan that takes into account past and future, and in executing, focus on the present, clearly knowing.  Carry out your work with an even and ordinary mind, knowing pleasantness and unpleasantness and noting feelings of like or dislike, good or bad, and discursive thoughts. Maintain clear awareness with mindfulness of the body and its sensations, the whole body-mind and the environment (without being influenced by it).  On completion, reflect on whether changes are needed, whether the job was done well and how you can do better in the future.

Knowing where and how to be is silence; very clearly knowing while engaged, is illumination. Respond according to circumstances, happiness, peace and harmony arise—at work, with friends, family or alone.

Practice Silent Illumination wholeheartedly in all circumstances. Enjoy!

What is the best response to our share of the joy and pain of the world?  Are we tossed by the winds, inclining to exuberance when things go our way or to depression when they don’t?  What evokes appropriate and balanced response?

Upekkha (equanimity) is the fourth Brahmavihara (best home, divine abode), sometimes translated as “looking over” or having a wide view that imbues the heart with clarity and wisdom. The training of equanimity cultivates a balanced responsive heart in the midst of the vicissitudes of life, described by the Buddha as the “Eight Worldly Winds”: gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disrepute.

Like the mountain that remains unwavering while subject to sun, wind, rain and snow, the heart of equanimity experiences changes in the realms of form, feeling, and mind, yet remains unshakably stable.  How? Through opening to circumstances and returning to this moment, however painful, pleasant or neutral, to let it into our heart and greet it with wisdom.

Equanimity is not weak, insensitive, indifferent or apathetic. It builds inner strength of a connected, soft, fluid heart from which response to conditions is appropriate—the force that allows people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King to powerfully affect the world.

Don’t wait for the worldly winds to knock you over.  Cultivate equanimity now.  With consistent practice in meditation, gently and repeatedly letting go of reactivity and identification with ideas, perceptions, feelings, fears and even body, all temporary and ephemeral, the heart trains itself in equanimity.  Appropriate response naturally arises.

 

Everyone’s life is, by nature, continually vulnerable to pain.  Remembering this is the gateway tomudita (often translated as appreciative joy or joy for the joy of others), the third of the fourBrahmaviharas (Boundless or Supreme States).

Our mental habit may be to think happiness is a limited resource, believing that the more anyone else has, the less there is for “me.”  This may begin with comparing ourselves with what others have attained materially or spiritually. Yet, thinking that gains of others mean losses for us promotes self-centeredness and exaggerates our feeling of separation and isolation and diminishes our own joy.

The practice of mudita may be the most challenging of all of the brahmavihara practices, because our mental reactions of comparing, judging, envy, greed, and demeaning can feel so “natural.”  Though public discourse often reinforces this, we can go against the stream—let go of guilt about our own happiness or feeling threatened about its loss, employ mind states of delight, gratitude and compassion to help diminish the suffering of attachment and aversion and open the heart to joy.

Celebrating and wishing for the happiness of others, the amount of happiness in the universe or indeed, our own, is boundless.  As the Dalai Lama advises, if our happiness is linked to the happiness of others, it multiplies our chance of happiness and connectedness by 9 billion!

Go ahead—gladden the mind—rejoice in your own goodness, generosity and caring and promote the happiness of all.  Open your heart to the  omnipresent wellspring of joy.

Compassion (Pali: karuna), the second of the four Brahmaviharas (Divine or Supreme states), is the spontaneous response of the heart of metta to suffering it encounters.  Etymologically, “com” is “with” and “passion” is “suffering.”  We are WITH the suffering, not above it with pity or rejecting it in fear.  Compassionate response is based on the dignity, integrity and well being we know belongs to every creature, including ourselves, our feeling of mutual resonance and natural connectedness in the face of the universal experience of loss and pain.

The ground for compassion is practicing sensitivity toward ourselves, giving rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into love and respect for all beings. Compassion for ourselves allows us to extend warmth, sensitivity and openness to the sorrows around us in a sincere and genuine way, arising from wisdom that the heart has a fearless healing capacity to embrace, touch, and relate to all things, no matter how difficult.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called this the “spiritual warrior’s tender heart of sadness”. He said: “…This sadness doesn’t come from being mistreated. You don’t feel sad because someone has insulted you or because you feel impoverished. Rather, this experience of sadness is unconditioned. It occurs because your heart is completely open, exposed. It is the pure raw heart…. Even if a mosquito lands on it, you feel so touched…. It is this tender heart of a warrior that has the power to heal the world.”

Can you bring that healing tender raw heart to all experience?

 

What do we usually consider love to be? We conventionally “love” based on desire and attachment—unreliable because it is fundamentally about grasping—one of the roots of suffering. This “love” is conditioned on what returns to us. Love with attachment or mixed with expectation, by definition, contains unskillful mind states. At first, the attraction and grasping can feel exciting, which veils the underlying suffering.

There is another kind of love—that of metta, the first of the four Brahma Viharas or “Divine Abodes.” My favorite translation of “Metta” (among many) is “loving friendliness.” There is a simplicity, inclusivity and purity of metta not shared by conditional love:  the basic wish for all beings, without exception, to be happy—without grasping, bargaining, or condition. The Buddha pointed to the universality of metta in teaching it as an antidote to fear.  We include all beings in our sincere good wishes. There is nobody, no thing, no being that is outside of the domain of our good will. This feeling of loving-kindness is a wonderful refuge, a steady sense of patient, fully inclusive connection, warmth, radiance and abundant generosity of heart, independent of conditions, no one left out.

Metta can be practiced. You can start by heeding the advice of an ancient text in the training of metta—to first reflect on the disadvantages of hatred and the advantages of patience, and in so doing, begin to establish goodwill in your heart for yourself, beings whom you favor and favor you, those whom you overlook and those who are difficult.  Is this steady, patient connection touching all life possible for you?

 

Maya Angelou said, “The ache for home lives in all of us—the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”  Loving-kindness (metta), Compassion (karuna), Sympathetic Joy (mudita), Equanimity (upekkha). In Pali, the language of the Buddhist scriptures, these four are known asBrahmaviharas—Divine (Brahma) abodes (vihara) or more commonly, high or sublime states of mind/heart—safe home.

These four attitudes are ubiquitous in the teachings because they are key to establishing internally sublime relationship to the external world and living beings (that includes ourselves!).  They provide, a way of relating to all beings that is deeply aligned with, and rooted in, our practice. These states of heart/mind remove tension, are great peace-makers in social conflict and healers of wounds suffered in our life path. Approaching life in this way, social barriers are leveled, foundations for harmonious communities are established, generosity naturally awakens, joy and hope are revived, and human connection is established and cultivated.

They are called abodes because in developing them, they become the mind’s dwelling-place where we feel at home.  These Divine Abodes should not remain merely places of rare and short visits, soon forgotten. Rather, they can become the constant safe place of our mind/heart, our refuge—our minds thoroughly saturated by them. They are then our inseparable companions, our default setting, whereby we are constantly mindful of them in all our common activities.

In the coming weeks, we will take them up, one by one, see the deep potential for establishing our Divine and safe home.