Exploring how kindness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity work together to keep the heart in balance

This is a long guided meditation in which Shaila Catherine offers systematic instruction for cultivating loving kindness (metta) and compassion (karuna) through the use of intention filled phrases directed toward beings in various categories.

If we are suffering, we are believing an interpretation of reality that is limiting and untrue. At these times we are imprisoned in a painful looping of fear-driven thoughts and feelings. This talk explores the ways our practices of mindfulness, compassion and loving presence can guide us from addictive thinking to perceiving life with a wise heart.

Cultivating mindfulness and non-harming brings us to the practice of compassion.

We will explore ways to engage with the precepts-as prescriptive prohibition; as compassionate inquiry; and as a description of Buddha's mind. To support San Francisco Insight Meditation Community, please go here: sfinsight.org/donate

Exploring the intersections of wisdom and compassion.

A central way to describe our practice is to say that we aim to touch and deepen in wisdom and in the awakened heart (particularly through cultivating the “divine abodes”: lovingkindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity), and to live and act increasingly from wisdom and the awakened heart. This is like the well-known image of the teachings and practices being like the bird with two wings—wisdom and compassion (the latter signifying the different qualities of the awakened heart). In the talk, we cover five areas exploring particularly how we connect wisdom and the awakened heart: (1) the aspiration to grow in wisdom and the awakened heart and the nature of wisdom and the awakened heart; (2) our social conditioning (including gender conditioning) about wisdom and the heart and how they can be separate in our lives or one or both may be relatively undeveloped; (3) some ways that they seem separate even in Buddhist teachings and practices, particularly in how metta has sometimes been understood; (4) how to have from different teachings of the Buddha a deeper sense of wisdom and the awakened heart as connected and integrated; and (5) how we might integrate the two in our practices, particularly focusing on the practices we explored in the guided meditation. The talk is followed by discussion.