Brahma Vihara Introduction

This is an introduction to the Brahma Viharas. This Pali word translates to “divine abodes” or divine abiding. To abide in our lives in a holy way, doesn’t that sound great!?
So traditionally the four Brahma Viharas are loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. And I would love to make these come alive for us, that’s my intention, but in some way, we have to take a backward step. The first practice is loving kindness and in my experience, it starts with ourselves.

Transcript

So today I'm introducing the Brahma Viharas.

And this Pali word translates to divine abodes or divine abiding,

To abide in our life in a holy way.

To abide in our life in a holy way.

Doesn't that sound great?

So traditionally the four Brahma Viharas are loving kindness or metta,

The sutta that I just read to you,

Compassion,

Joy,

And equanimity.

And I would really love to make these come alive for us.

That's my intention.

But in some way we have to take a backwards step.

The first practice is loving kindness.

And I just shared with you the metta sutta,

The loving kindness sutta from the Zen tradition.

And in the chat,

I have put the metta sutta from the Theravada tradition,

From the insight tradition.

And we'll go through that at the end of practice.

So if you want to just be in this conversation,

Or if you want to jump ahead,

It's entirely up to you.

But it's there in the chat.

And the way that I understand the metta sutta,

It really,

Really starts with ourselves.

And so that's the backwards step that feels necessary for us to manifest this loving kindness in the world.

And the way it's manifested for me in working directly with my experience is with honesty and being authentic,

Accepting myself as I am.

And this sounds like,

Okay,

I can do that.

But it's actually not a very easy practice.

It's ongoing,

Accepting myself as I am.

So the traditional phrase is,

May I be filled with loving kindness.

You know,

That's a traditional sort of metta phrase that we offer ourselves.

May I be filled with loving kindness.

And of the many,

Many years that I've practiced,

That phrase has pretty continuously landed flat for me.

Like,

What does that mean?

Filled with loving kindness.

My path has been more like,

May I accept myself as I am.

May I accept myself as I am.

May I accept others as they are.

When I first came to practice,

As many of you know,

I was a Zen student.

And most of my teachers didn't teach loving kindness or the Brahma Viharas.

They didn't teach about equanimity or joy.

It was mostly mindfulness practice.

And in some ways,

That's a really fierce practice.

And I offer mindfulness practice as the primary practice that we do together.

Because I was so deeply influenced by just that practice alone.

So I didn't get from my teachers in the beginning that loving kindness was kind of an integral part of this path.

And it is.

And it is.

But getting real,

Being honest with myself,

Seeing clearly,

And then investigating,

Looking at what I see.

This is how I started to include all the different dimensions of myself.

There's freedom that comes with that.

When we're not in the space of being honest with that,

When we're not trying to pretend or be something other than we are,

We're more able to live in our wholeness.

And that's how loving kindness comes into it.

That's how it becomes alive for us.

When we're able to live in our wholeness.

The psychologist Gabor Mate defines true healing as a natural movement towards wholeness.

And I really have experienced that my practice has been that.

So it's really in that domain that I can offer you authentic teaching around loving kindness,

Opening to the truth of my own life,

The past and the present as honestly and authentically as I can,

Is this natural movement towards wholeness.

And that's the loving kindness practice that I can offer today.

Seeing where have I caused harm?

And what harm has been caused to me?

Honestly looking and seeing the impact of harm.

And we have that the capacity to do that,

To recognize what's going on within us.

And we have the capacity to do that without judging and interpret interpreting what it means.

The challenge really is in developing the capacity to bear witness without adding our habit of judging and evaluating what we're seeing.

That's the habit,

Right?

So the very word vipassana means to see clearly.

This is vipassana practice that we do.

And it also can be understood as to to feel directly or even to listen deeply.

It's a real clean contact with the truth.

And having a really clean contact with truth,

What is true,

Has loving kindness and care right in it.

Right in it.

I've shared over the years in many different settings,

This fantastic image from Joseph Campbell,

The mythologist.

And it's a circle and through the circle,

Through the middle of the circle is a line.

And the line,

What's below the line,

Below the line is what we're unconscious of.

And what's above the line is what we're conscious of.

And to the degree to which we're not aware of patterns or strong emotions and strong beliefs,

What's below the line,

To the degree that we haven't directly contacted them,

They rule us.

What's below the line,

If we haven't seen it,

They affect how we make decisions.

It affects how we relate to others.

To the degree that we're not conscious of our strong emotions and beliefs and values,

They control our experience.

So our practice,

Vipassana,

Is to bring what's below the line and start to shine awareness and bring that into awareness.

And when we do that,

Our whole sense of being becomes more enlarged.

We're moving towards wholeness.

We start to inhabit our natural wholeness.

In our natural wholeness,

There is wisdom and there is love that's already there.

It's us.

It's just not accessible all the time when it's living below the line,

When it's not seen.

We are the loving kindness that we're seeking.

And there's this belief in Buddhism that we're all always in process and all processes have within them this movement towards liberation,

Towards freedom,

Towards being at peace in our life,

At ease in our life.

So every moment that we awaken to these patterns,

That we bring what's below the line into consciousness,

We're actually creating the conditions for more freedom so that loving kindness lives authentically within us.

So using this Joseph Campbell's circle of awareness,

If we start looking at what's below the line and we add our habitual judgment,

This is bad,

This is wrong,

This needs fixing,

It's not freeing.

It just deepens our tendency to go below the line in shame and judgment.

So what makes it transformational is we start getting that what's below the line isn't personal.

And the phrase that one of my teachers uses and has taught me to use,

I think it's kind of a metaphrase personally,

It rings true for me,

And that is,

You are not your fault.

You are not your fault.

What you see below the line is part of our evolutionary inheritance.

We're shining the light on the fear and the aggression that's in our nervous system and has been passed down from generation to generation.

It's not just our fear and our pain.

It's the pain of our ancestors.

It's the fear of our ancestors.

It's all of our fears.

We can't judge what we find below the line.

We're just shining awareness on these patterns.

And get this,

It's within all of us,

Okay?

It's all of us.

That's how we can look with more clarity and gentleness.

It's not just me.

It's not just you.

It's everyone.

It's everyone.

So kind of a different spin on loving kindness,

Yeah?

You are not your fault.

May I accept myself as I am.

May I accept others as they are.

So I invite you now to look at the Metta Sutta that's in the chat.

And I'll just read a little bit of it.

It's quite long,

But it's for you to print out if you'd like.

It says,

This is what should be done by one who is skilled in goodness.

So we're developing skills of goodness by doing our practice each day.

Who knows the path of peace?

We're also in the cultivation of this.

Let us be able and upright,

Straightforward,

Gentle in speech,

Humble and not conceited.

I think our minds continually remind us to be humble and not conceited.

Contented and easily satisfied,

Unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways.

Peaceful and calm,

Wise and skillful,

Not proud and demanding in nature.

So these are just characteristics of what happens to us as we practice.

This is how we transform.

Wishing in gladness and in safety,

May all beings be at ease,

Starting with ourselves.

And then it characterizes beings,

Weak or strong,

Omitting none,

The great,

The mighty,

The seen,

The unseen,

Near and far away,

Those born and to be born.

May everyone be at ease.

So when we start to see not just my pain,

Not just my fear,

It's all of us.

May all of us may all of us see one another as we are.

Let none deceive another or despise any being in any state.

Then we go back to the Dhammapada.

Hatred never ends with hatred,

But by love alone is healed.

Wishing no harm upon another.

And I love this.

And Jack Kornfield really illustrated this early in my practice,

Even as a mother protects her life with her only child.

So a boundless heart should cherish all beings.

So then we start to see,

Wow,

This is kind of an impossible vow.

I am to love all beings in the same way that I cherish my child.

Wow.

So this is an aspirational vow,

Radiating kindness across the world,

Spreading upward to the skies,

Downward to the depths,

Onward unbounded,

Freed from hatred and ill will.

Well,

This is a work in progress,

Isn't it?

Whether standing or walking,

Seated or lying down.

So all of our life,

Keeping in mind,

We are connected.

Your pain is my pain.

My pain is your pain.

This is said to be the sublime abiding.

And I assert that the sublime abiding is to see your pain is my pain.

My pain is your pain.

We are all in this together.

So we have to put aside our fixed views.

And this is how we have everlasting peace.

This is how we release our duality between life and death.

It's an impossible vow in some ways.

And so we start with ourselves.

We start with ourselves.

Honestly,

Authentically,

We look.

So thank you for your kind attention this morning.

I have a few minutes to take some comments.