To neglect all your mothers from the past,
And remember only one is a form of attachment.
So don’t think that you’ve truly aroused compassion!
For as long as you have partiality and attachment,
There will be no liberation from saṃsāra.

This also comes back to the fact that we are not one thing. We are many things, and in fact, we are many things in the process of becoming many more things. And that feels to me like a kind of faith

Poet Ross Gay reflects on his practice of finding delight every day and how that practice has helped him to cultivate a distinct kind of generosity and equanimity.

I’m not looking at the bright side of things, I’m just trying to look at everything. I’m very capable of looking at what’s miserable!

Our novel findings provide preliminary evidence that self-compassionate people are less likely to engage in bedtime procrastination, due in part to their use of healthy emotion regulation strategies that downregulate negative mood.

Multiple mediation analysis in study 1 revealed the expected indirect effects of self-compassion on less bedtime procrastination through lower negative affect but not higher positive affect. Path analysis in study 2 replicated these findings and further demonstrated that cognitive reappraisal explained the lower negative affect linked to self-compassion. The direct effect of self-compassion on less bedtime procrastination remained significant.

A total of 536 Hong Kong university students completed questionnaires measuring their experiences of compassion from others, self-compassion, resilience, psychological distress, flourishing, and meaning in life. Serial mediation analyses showed that compassion from others was associated positively with self-compassion, which was, in turn, linked to greater resilience and consequently lower levels of psychological distress and higher levels of flourishing and meaning in life.

Collectively, the 12 eligible studies suggest that incorporating the Buddhist wisdom practices of contemplating interdependence, emptiness, and perspective-taking on self and others may enhance prosocial behaviour through various mechanisms, such as (i) developing a sense of interdependence and common humanity, (ii) fostering the altruistic desire to help others, and (iii) experiencing a state of oneness. However, concerns were raised about the overuse and reliability of self-report measures for accurately assessing prosocial behaviour

Our search identified 19 relevant studies of adolescents (10–19 years; N = 7049) for inclusion. A large effect size was found for an inverse relationship between self-compassion and psychological distress indexed by anxiety, depression, and stress.

Neither behavioral nor imaging analyses supported the hypothesis that altruists’ reduced social discounting reflects effortfully overcoming selfishness. Instead, group differences emerged in [brain regions corresponding to] the subjective valuation of others’ welfare

Loving Kindness Meditation training did not result in more generous behavioral or neural patterns, but only greater perceived difficulty during social discounting. Our results indicate extraordinary altruists’ generosity results from the way regions involved in social decision-making encode the subjective value of others’ welfare.

Results showed that this meditation practice produced increases over time in daily experiences of positive emotions, which, in turn, produced increases in a wide range of personal resources. In turn, these increments in personal resources predicted increased life satisfaction and reduced depressive symptoms.

Discussion centers on how positive emotions are the mechanism of change for the type of mind-training practice studied here and how loving-kindness meditation is an intervention strategy that produces positive emotions in a way that outpaces the hedonic treadmill effect.

It is possible to care without helping. It is also possible to help without caring. Given these two options, most people would choose the second, especially in difficult moments. Dear reader, this is an honest book.

Help requires the establishment of an interpretive context or system of meaning — a relationship, in several senses — in which help does not threaten the creativity, autonomy, or personhood of the helpee and in which, instead, help facilitates development and strengthens the self. This is a creative act.

Someone who had not established mindfulness of the body might well attack one of their spiritual companions and leave without saying sorry.

When another monk falsely accuses Sāriputta of hitting him, the Buddha calls Sāriputta to respond to the allegation.

Firstly, a person meditates spreading a heart full of love to one direction, and to the second, and to the third, and to the fourth…

The Brahma Vihāras lead to rebirth in the Brahma Realm. And from there, it depends…

In the Velāma Sutta, the Buddha provides us with a vivid outline of the relative degrees of merit that can be acquired by performing different kinds of good actions.

In this translation and introduction to the Velāma Sutta (AN 9.20), the author brings out the salient message of the sutta, which is to perform good deeds. However, it is pointed out that the Buddha sees developing concentration and meditating on loving-kindness and impermenance as the best sources of merit since they lead to liberation.

In healthy adults, we found that compassion training increased altruistic redistribution of funds to a victim encountered outside of the training context. Furthermore, increased altruistic behavior after compassion training was associated with altered activation in brain regions implicated in social cognition and emotion regulation, including the inferior parietal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and in DLPFC connectivity with the nucleus accumbens.

These results suggest that compassion can be cultivated with training and that greater altruistic behavior may emerge

… increased meditation practice was correlated with decreased TSST-induced IL-6 and POMS distress scores. Moreover, individuals with meditation practice times above the median exhibited lower TSST-induced IL-6 and POMS distress scores compared to individuals below the median, who did not differ from controls.

Compassion meditation helps build resilience—but only if you do it!

Of course, there will be instances where a stranger will not be amenable to your overtures (this isn’t permission to harass people on the street), but your intention should be to brighten someone’s day without worrying what they think about you.

Your job isn’t to cure. It’s to care.

Ajahn Brahm’s seventh talk during the 2009 rains retreat.

The wild elephant of the mind, long accustomed to roam in the jungle of desires, does not take readily to taming, or to being tied to the post of practice …

This short book addresses common problems that modern practitioners encounter and how to best handle them so one can continue to progress along the Buddhist path.

So too, all wholesome qualities are rooted in heedfulness and converge upon heedfulness

Diligence is the foremost of all good qualities.

… why did you get up from your seat and leave while there was still more left to do?

A corrupt tax-collector is (partially) redeemed by an encounter with Venerable Sāriputta.

Once upon a time, mendicants, a battle was fought between the gods and the demons…

Fleeing the demon host, Sakka’s chariot risks endangering the nests of little birds in the forest. Rather than render the birds homeless, Sakka instructs his charioteer to turn back, even at the cost of his life.

I have been aware of loving-kindness,
limitless and well-developed

… how is the liberation of the mind by lovingkindness developed? What does it have as its destination, its culmination, its fruit, its final goal?

Some wanderers tell some Buddhist mendicants that they, too, teach the five hindrances and the four Brahmā meditations, so what is the difference? The Buddha explains the detailed connection between the Brahmā meditations and the awakening factors, which taken together lead to liberation.

… you can expect eleven benefits when the heart’s release by love has been cultivated, developed, and practiced, made a vehicle and a basis, kept up, consolidated, and properly implemented.

Asked by a householder to teach a path to freedom, Venerable Ānanda explains no less than eleven meditative states that may serve as doors to the deathless.

The lay life is like farming in that it’s work with many requirements and when it fails it’s not very fruitful; but when it succeeds it is very fruitful.

Working hard is not valuable in and of itself; what matters is the outcome. And just as in lay life, spiritual practice may or may not lead to fruitful results.

The point of Metta is not what we feel about a person, at least not in the beginning, but rather what we aspire to

A thorough account of love and relationships from a Buddhist perspective.

To be able to let go of the past and future, it’s not seeing the negativity of the past or a waste of time thinking about the future, but it’s actually appreciating the joy and the beauty and the compassion of being right here right now. This is Kindfulness of the present moment. When you’re kindful of where you are right now, it means you’re here and you’re kind to this moment: Appreciating the beauty of being here and now

… it is impossible that they should teach the path to that which they neither know nor see

The simile of the blind leading the blind followed by lovely similes for the chords of sensual pleasure and the hindrances, as well as for their overcoming via the limitless, divine abidings.

せせらぎが止まるよ 重なる髪かざり
せせらぎが止まるよ 風向きが変わるよ

An exuberant celebration of youthful disaster.

See also the heart-warming Tonofon Remote Festival Version recorded during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in June 2020.

Besides being a prominent motivation for the delivery of a teaching, compassion regularly features in descriptions of meditation practice in the early discourses

You’re not trying to push the stress away, or annihilate it or get rid of it, but just lifting it up and seeing it and then using it as a bridge so that it can take one to kindness and compassion.

I will not perish

They feel safe around you, and because you, out of genuine compassion, never intend to harm them but only try to be of help, they also feel a sort of joy in your presence.

A short introduction to the Bodhisattva Precepts and on seeing the positive side of the familiar five.

Protecting oneself, bhikkhus, one protects others; protecting others, one protects oneself.

A reading of SN 47.19.

The people of Sunāparanta are wild and rough, Puṇṇa. If they abuse and insult you, what will you think of them?

Venerable Puṇṇa goes to the Buddha and asks for a teaching before he immigrates to a foreign land. The Buddha warns him that folk there are fierce, and questions whether he is ready for such a difficult assignment.

Take a person who kills living creatures. If we compare periods of time during the day and night, which is more frequent: the occasions when they’re killing or when they’re not killing?

The Buddha rejects the poorly phrased fatalism of a Jain follower and gives an alternative method for overcoming bad karma.

[A meditator’s] physical discomfort is not completely settled, their dullness and drowsiness is not completely eradicated, and their restlessness and remorse is not completely eliminated. Because of this they practice absorption dimly, as it were. When their body breaks up, after death, they’re reborn in the company of the gods of corrupted radiance.

A lay person becomes confused when encouraged to develop the “limitless” and “expansive” liberations, and asks Venerable Anuruddha to explain whether they are the same or different.

‘What the hell, Kāḷī!’

Mendicants, there are these five ways in which others might criticize you. Their speech may be timely or untimely, true or false, gentle or harsh, beneficial or harmful, from a heart of love or from secret hate. When others criticize you, they may do so in any of these ways. If that happens, you should train like this: ‘Our minds will remain unaffected.’

Even if low-down bandits were to sever you limb from limb, anyone who had a malevolent thought on that account would not be following my instructions.

If you frequently reflect on this advice–the simile of the saw–do you see any criticism, large or small, that you could not endure?”

A discourse full of vibrant and memorable images on the importance of patience and love even when faced with abuse and criticism.

Once the mind has been made peaceful, we then allow the mind to rest for some time in this calm state. Once it begins to think and proliferate again, we then take up the body for contemplation. Contemplation and samādhi are practiced in alternation like this.

‘I’ve developed the heart’s release by love… Yet somehow ill will still occupies my mind.’

The Buddha’s teachings are effective, so we can’t claim to have practiced them fully if we’re still afflicted by various forms of suffering.

… use these five methods to completely get rid of resentment when it has arisen towards anyone

Five reflections to eliminate enmity in brief.

What lies behind this insistence on love is a worry: without a deep-seated fear that one day love would no longer exist (or exist in the same way) why would anyone feel that they have to insist upon it so much?

Applying Buddhist wisdom to an area of our life we all care about deeply — our relationship with our loved ones — Ajahn Jayasaro makes the teachings relatable and applicable. An excellent sermon and well worth a read.