ornoth | Con Pasión

Since 2009, I’ve oriented my meditation practice around the brahmaviharas, the Buddhist virtues of lovingkindness (metta) and compassion (karuna). I’ve just completed a year of intensive karuna practice and thought I’d do a quick debrief, much as I did last October after twelve months of metta practice.

I certainly found compassion a more productive practice than metta. I think part of that is because metta’s basic friendliness is my default mode to begin with, whereas compassion isn’t quite as natural and intuitive to me. After all, I’ve always been more prone to blame someone for causing their own problems than to empathize with them.

Compassion also has a proximate cause: it is a response to obvious suffering. So when someone is under mental or physical stress, that provides a prompt that reminds one: this is a situation that calls for a compassionate response. For me, that makes it easier to evoke than metta, which is just a vague kindness with no immediate intent behind it, rather than a response to an obvious need.

I used the Buddhist concept of the two arrows to structure my compassion practice. The first arrow is the painful event or situation: the basic discomfort that cannot be avoided, like the pain of a stubbed toe. The second arrow is the additional, unnecessary discomfort that we inflict upon ourselves: “Why am I always stubbing my toe? I’m such a klutz! I’m worthless and no one loves me and it’s always going to be this way until I die…” The second arrow is the self-generated fear and anger that proliferate as a result of how we relate to an event.

A couple of my insights this year had to do with the nature of these two kinds of suffering.

It’s odd to me that when people think about that first arrow—physical or emotional pain—they usually think of it as applying to humans. But it’s equally true that many animals experience pain in a very similar way. And a sensitive person might even leave open the question of whether plants experience some kind of analogue to the pain we feel. When we wish for everyone to be free from pain, I think it wise to extend that to all forms of life.

But the second arrow—the proliferation of painful mental states that we add to simple pain—that is indeed the exclusive birthright of sentient beings.

As my meditation practice grew, I came to see how we allow our mental states to compound this indirect suffering on top of simple, direct suffering. I also discovered that we actually choose to do this. The second arrow isn’t required; it’s completely optional, and if we are truly free, we can choose not to harm ourselves with it.

Ironically, this is how I discovered the primary thing blocking my compassion for others. While I find it easy to feel for someone who is experiencing a simple, unavoidable pain, I find it extremely difficult to empathize with someone who is allowing their own mental state to create additional, unnecessary suffering. It’s hard to feel compassion for someone when you know that the pain they are feeling is entirely within their control (or would be, if they were only self-aware enough to realize it). Again, I find myself falling back on blaming people for their misfortune, because I see their ignorance as something they have chosen, a shortcoming they have neglected to address.

Getting past that view will be one of my ongoing challenges.

Those are some of the insights I’ve experienced through my karuna practice, but they are more of a small side-effect of the practice, which was primarily oriented toward nurturing the experiential, felt sense of compassion, which doesn’t translate as well to a simple blog post.

As for what’s next, I can’t say. After two years of structured brahmavihara practice, I think I could use something a little less directed. And the two remaining brahmaviharas—equanimity (upekkha) and taking joy in the happiness of others (mudita)—I feel I already have a good handle on.

The only two things that stick out right now are being a little more relaxed in terms of letting more thoughts and emotions arise during meditation, and continuing to look more carefully at the body and the breath for any indication of physical manifestations of emotion.

But I think the main change will be giving up both such a structured, approach to meditation and such a strongly directed technique. After two years of focused practice, I think I’ll let things be a little more relaxed and free-form for a while.