Cultivating A Compassionate Heart

Compassion is a wholesome mindstate that is available both in meditation and in our daily life. In developing compassion, we awaken to our connection with all beings. This mediation and talk explore how we can recognize compassion as our true nature and learn to cultivate it here and now.

Transcript

I'm going to speak a little bit about compassion today and as usual I'm going to start with a meditation.

This time this is a practice that's called Tang Lin if anyone is familiar with it.

It's actually a Tibetan meditation practice and it literally means sending out and receiving.

So,

You can just find a way to sit comfortably,

Settle in,

You might check the alignment of your spine.

And you can bring your whole body into its natural alignment.

Gently release any obvious areas of tension and if you feel comfortable you can close your eyes.

You can start with a few full deep breaths.

On the in breath,

Fill your lungs.

Feel the chest expand.

And on the out breath,

Relax,

Release.

Just a few full deep breaths.

Let the breath be natural and easy now.

Resting attention on as you breathe in.

Just being present to breathing in.

As you breathe out,

Be present to breathing out.

Feel your natural goodness with the motion of the breath.

In breath you can breathe in that natural light of goodness.

On the out breath,

You can breathe out your desire to overcome whatever pain or suffering might exist.

Now you can call to mind some suffering to which you would like to direct your compassion.

It could be your own suffering or that of someone that you care about.

You might find more than one comes to mind but just pick one for now and feel into whatever suffering that might be.

You can simply open to it without any drama or story attached but just what the experience might be.

As you breathe in,

Allow it to flow into your body,

Around your heart.

And if it's the suffering of another,

Feel it for a moment as your own.

And as you breathe out,

Let the suffering be released into the open space that's there.

This vastness of awareness.

And with each exhale,

Each release,

You can silently give words to that care that you extend.

You'll be released from your suffering.

I feel your suffering and I care for you.

May your happiness return.

You can continue this way for several rounds of breath,

Breathing in the feelings of suffering for yourself or for one you love.

With the out breath,

Releasing the suffering into this warm,

Caring embrace.

With this movement,

The awareness becomes the open heart of compassion.

Receiving,

Embracing whatever suffers.

Now you can gently set down the suffering,

Depart with your well wishes and you can come gently back.

Share some thoughts with you.

I encourage you to turn your camera on if you like.

You can see each other.

I like to start with a thought experiment which is,

What would it be like if you couldn't feel compassion?

Or you couldn't really feel the pain of others.

It would have no effect on you whatsoever.

Somehow there are these solid walls between you and everybody else and something terrible happens and it has no effect on you whatsoever.

You just watch it like a casual observer.

And just think for a moment what a strange world that would be.

And then continuing this experiment,

You can pretend that living in that world,

Then all of a sudden for the first time you were to feel compassion.

That all of a sudden when you saw someone else's suffering that something in your heart moved,

You experienced something.

And just how weird that would be.

How strange if you had never felt this before.

That somehow like the pain or suffering of someone else was affecting you in this direct way.

Neuroscientists are studying something that's called mirror neurons.

So they're brain cells and they're activated when you observe someone doing something that you might do yourself.

And so what the scientists say is that this recreates or mirrors the same feeling that you would have if you were to be experiencing this.

And that the same parts of your brain light up when you're watching someone else do that thing that would light up when you do it yourself.

And of course this is not novel.

You can just think of watching a horror movie and our innocent protagonists on some dark stormy night decides that after hearing some sound in the damp basement,

They're going to go down and take a look and just make sure everything is okay.

And you feel as they open that basement door whatever that person in the movie is supposed to be feeling.

So what does this point to all of these things?

It points to a connectedness in our species.

Margaret Mead said this,

When did civilization begin?

When there was evidence of the first femur bone that was healed.

That meant that the person who had broken a leg was nursed back to health by another person not because they would benefit but because of empathy.

That's when civilization began.

I recall in the homeless shelter and soup kitchen where I used to work right out of college one day there was enormous mountain of a man who came in and you could feel that he was seething with anger to the point where people were just making space for him.

There was an older woman who was a volunteer who had a very bright smile and a buoyant manner and she came up to him and she was going to show him where to sit down to eat and he turned on her and said,

Shouted really,

Why are you being so nice?

And there was like a silence that fell in the soup kitchen because it looked like he was almost about to strike her.

And she paused for a moment and put her forearm next to his forearm and pointed to it and said because we're the same species and he was kind of dumbstruck trying to figure this out and then he thought about it and it seemed to make sense to him and then he sat down and he had his meal.

So what does this all have to do with meditation?

I would say that when we open ourselves to this spaciousness that we can experience in meditation and those spaces between the thoughts or the experiences that there can be this thinning or diminishing of this strong sense of self,

Of me and mind and a loosening to the clinging in experience and in that environment then I think we start to experience much more than directly this connection or this,

I'm going to use a word,

Interbeing that actually was coined by Thich Nhat Hanh and I'm going to read to you his description of interbeing.

He says,

I was looking for an English word to describe our deep interconnection with someone else.

I like the word togetherness but I finally came up with the word interbeing.

The verb to be can be misleading because we cannot be by ourselves alone.

To be is always to interbe.

If we combine the prefix inter with the verb to be we have a new word,

Interbe.

And the action of interbeing reflects reality much more accurately.

We inter are with one another and with all life.

So I'd like to spend the last few minutes just talking about this.

How do we do this?

What is the practice?

How can we cultivate this wholesome state of mind?

And I have a few suggestions.

The first is the simple practice which is very much like the practice that we experience in the meditation is when you feel suffering arise and it could be your own suffering,

It could be suffering of someone else,

That you just take a moment and you rest back into that feeling.

And you don't rush to judge or to plan or to problem solve.

What you do just as in the meditation,

You hold what's there.

So you open the heart and you then can connect with this feeling of compassion which has this element of being vast and has a capacity really to hold whatever is there,

To hold that suffering.

And then in that moment and this need not take a long time,

You can send that compassion,

You can send it out and you can use very simple phrases,

Whatever is comfortable for you,

I see your suffering or I care for you or may you be well.

And in most cases you can do nothing at that moment or maybe it's the suffering of someone far away but in sending the compassion out to them in that way you can kind of unfreeze things for a moment.

Next one is you can just let that thought cross your mind,

Should I be available in some way to this suffering?

Maybe you need to do something,

Maybe you don't.

And you can at least allow that question in.

I remember reading Scott Simon,

The NPR host,

He had this practice which I've adopted which is he keeps a stack of cards and envelopes,

Like message cards and envelopes close to his desk and when he hears about something where he wants to reach out to someone,

He picks up the card and he writes a note to them,

Old-fashioned note and puts it in the envelope and sends it.

So I've adopted this myself and I can tell you there are many times I hesitate because I feel like first of all no one sends cards anymore,

You don't know how people will take it.

But there's that feeling of awkwardness sometimes or just like not being quite comfortable but usually I go with my first impression,

I feel that impulse,

I just go ahead and pick up a card,

I write a couple lines and I put it in the envelope and I'll just say a number of times people have gotten back to me and just said,

That was just so touching what you did.

I'll also say that this question,

Just that question about should I make myself available can be true also for strangers.

I know probably like some others of you,

I struggled for years with homeless people in DC when we used to go into the office,

I took the metro every day and should you give to a homeless person and even if you do,

These days almost no one carries cash anymore,

Right?

And then if it's winter and you've got your coat on,

You can't find your wallet and so I decided to just always,

Before I left the house,

Put a few dollars in my pocket and just make the decision,

Like these dollars actually belong to whatever homeless people I'm going to encounter today and so then,

And put them in a pocket like if it's cold in my outer jacket pocket and so then it's no problem whatsoever.

Now I get out of the metro,

Someone asks me for a dollar,

I give them a dollar because I figure like,

Hey,

It's your dollar,

I already figured that out,

It's your dollar,

Here it is.

And in that way,

The generosity just becomes so much easier if you make room for it.

Next one,

My list.

When you open your heart to suffering,

Then naturally too,

The question of why can arise.

And I have a very clear memory when I was a very young kid and I,

In a magazine,

It must have been an article about a famine in Africa maybe and I just remember this photo,

It was a large,

Broad,

Healthy white palm and in that palm was placed a small malnourished,

Withered black palm,

It's just a black and white photograph.

And as a young kid,

I looked at that photo and I just thought,

Like this is so wrong,

Like there's something so wrong about this,

A world where that reality exists.

I didn't know how to express that or anything.

But that question why,

Even today I remember this image,

That question why then stuck with me.

Alright,

I'll do one or two more.

Next,

The company you keep,

The Buddha has a famous phrase,

He said,

If you want wisdom,

Associate with the wise.

And I remember as a young attorney,

Another colleague,

Young colleague of mine,

We were both watching this very experienced attorney who was unbelievably fabulous.

And she said to me,

I'm going to do everything that person does.

This is in my law practice,

I've decided I'm just like,

I'm going to imitate this person.

And so the same is true with compassion or any one of these wholesome states,

Right?

It's sort of,

If you can associate with people who really let that shine,

Then that can be your teacher.

Alright,

So last one.

Have faith.

It's the last one.

Have faith that this is actually really close at hand.

It can seem hard,

But it's very close at hand.

I'll give you two examples.

One was Dorothy Day,

Who was the founder of this thing called the Catholic Worker,

These homeless shelters throughout the United States.

She when she was a young girl,

Eight years old,

Experienced the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

And she recalls as one of the formative experiences of her entire life,

This recollection of they were living in Oakland right outside of San Francisco and these refugees,

Homeless people from the city,

Which was burning at that point,

Were streaming out of San Francisco.

And all of her neighbors,

Including her mother,

Kind of dropped everything,

You know.

And she said everyone around her was giving away every piece of clothing,

That excess piece of clothing they had.

And people were spending all day cooking food for these strangers who were streaming out of the city.

And she said,

While the crisis lasted,

People loved each other.

It makes one think of how people can care for one another,

Unjudgingly with love.

And the last one,

Again,

Another Metro story,

Being a former Metro commuter.

One night late,

Coming home in the Metro,

And you know how people are on the Metro,

Like everyone is in their little bubble,

Right?

You can be standing right next to someone and they won't look you in the eye because everyone is in their bubble.

And so a bunch of us were,

Came to our stop,

We were all getting ready to come out of the door.

And there was a man,

A very frail man in a wheelchair.

He looked maybe he was homeless.

And he was edging towards the door and he was in front.

And everyone was backed up behind him.

And the doors open and he was very slow getting out of the car.

And then you could feel the anxiety rise of the people behind him.

And they were starting to chalky around him,

Trying to get out because the doors were going to close soon and we were going to miss our stop.

So it was like very uncomfortable thing.

People trying to be polite,

But they were sort of pushing by him and so forth.

And then the doors start to close and both of us have not left the car yet.

And so the doors start to close and then they actually close on his wheelchair.

And suddenly everyone,

All these people who had previously been very agitated turned and people rushed the doors and like people helped to pry them open and push his wheelchair out.

And somebody ran,

You know,

So at the same time,

Somebody ran up to tell the conductor and then they got him out on the platform.

And these people who had been so irritated and just a moment before started coming up to him and asking like,

Are you okay?

Like what can I do for you?

Where are you headed?

You know,

Do you need anything?

And I thought,

You know,

It's just this like thin veneer of separateness between us that it just takes something so small as that and it reveals this connection,

Which we all feel.

So why don't we just pause for a moment together before concluding?

Just let go of the words.

Rest back into this openness that we all share.

Our interbeing.

Thank you so much for joining today.

And it's so good to see you all.