By Leo Babauta
In this webinar, I talked about the importance of compassion and loving kindness in melting away our attachments, helping our suffering, and creating a connection between us and others..
I also did a short guided meditation and answered questions.
Here are the notes (video is below the notes):
- what is compassion: in this webinar, we’re going to combine two things into one — compassion and loving kindness — but compassion is a desire for suffering in another person (or yourself) to end; and loving kindness is a desire for someone else (or yourself) to be happy
- why compassion: it helps us with suffering & attachment; the things we learned about in the last course, that cause our suffering, the attachments are hard to work with … compassion is the way to work with it
- start with yourself – if you don’t do it with yourself, it’s hard to understand how to do it with others, hard to connect with their suffering
- being a good friend for yourself – don’t run away when you’re having difficult feelings
- don’t criticize, accept yourself as valid
- give yourself a warm hand
- acceptance and love for how you are melts attachment to who you think you should be
- give yourself a wish for your suffering to end, and the root of your suffering to melt away
- give yourself a warm hug, and wish for your happiness
- wish for peace, and well being
- expanding it to other people is important, because it helps us to experience the interdependence that is at the heart of happiness
- when we feel separate, it creates attachments — I want this, I need this, I don’t want them to be like this … but when we see that we are interdependent, we don’t feel such a strong need to focus on our own desires and aversions
- we can see that this focus on ourselves is limited, but by seeing that we’re in this together with others, we can wish not only for our own needs to be met, but for everyone else’s needs too … it’s not a prioritizing of them over you, nor is it our normal prioritizing of ourselves over others … but instead it’s about equal love for all, it’s about us instead of separation
- expand the meditation to a loved one, neutral, and hostile
- then try to separate the boundaries between all four
- then expand to all living beings
- training – do it daily
- what does this do for us? it melts away our attachments, helps us to suffer less and accept more, and therefore we are more at peace, happier, more content. this helps us form habits, be productive, have good relationships, be healthy
- and in the end, it helps us to expand our hearts to include others, which is where the true happiness lies
The Webinar Recording
You can watch the video below or download the video here (or just download the audio):