Basic Love and Compassion Practice: The Four Immeasurables and the Six Immeasurables
Traditionally, these practices seem to have emerged for at least two reasons. First, as a great therapist of the soul, the sage Siddhartha (Buddha) wanted to offer medicine for his students. He had students gripped by suffering
Meditation is one of the Arts of Awareness that help us to enter into a more skillful way of knowing, being, living, and loving. All arts of awareness must be handled with care, with philosophical/psychological/ecological sensitivity. They can help us to practice and realize an inspired life, characterized by an eco-sensual awareness, which is our own natural awareness.
It’s an eco-centric state of being—eco-centric in the sense of finding our true home, our true refuge, and allowing action to unfold in, through, and as that. It’s not “ecology” in a narrow literal sense, but certainly inclusive of what we conventionally think of as “ecology”. This eco-sensual awareness is relational, and fundamentally involves mutual nourishment, mutual illumination, and mutual liberation. It’s the actualization of the fundamental point of our lives.
Before what comes first, try to make time to settle, to actually arrive at the place where you are, to allow your body to have its full height and volume, and to let go of doing. Take time to appreciate this moment. Acknowledge that the cycles of life continue, and that you live in total dependence on those cycles, and on the countless sentient beings who make your life possible. Send greetings and gratitude to the Earth, to the waters, to the beings of the waters, and so on.
Take as much time as you can to do this, to allow some spaciousness, joy, appreciation, gratitude, and reverence to open you. The sacred is right here. You are not alone or cut off from the mystery and the magic.
Then, first comes intentions. Attune with your highest values and intentions. Think about what matters most to you.
I recommend for this practice that you don’t pick any kind of variable intention. In some forms of practice, we may want to heal a specific wound or address a specific demon. But those are sub-intentions, smaller intentions within the ecology of our larger intentions. In love and compassion practice, we can include those smaller intentions, but we always begin with our highest intention, the thing we would say our life is about.
If our life is about love, then that’s the intention: To practice and realize love. Maybe we would say: My highest intention is to love and care for my family. Or maybe: I want to truly know myself and this wondrous World, for the benefit of all beings. Or: I want to truly embody Wisdom, Love, and Beauty for the sake of all beings.
Whatever we think is the highest intention we could possibly hold, we bring that to mind. If, for instance, we know that we need to practice compassion for someone who is suffering, we honor them by framing the practice in the context of something a little more Cosmic. We can intend their well-being too, but we begin with a broader vision. We thereby weave them into the deepest meaning of our life and the mystery of being. It places them and us in an expansive space, with limitless energy and potential.
Next, think of a time when you experienced a moment of genuine love and happiness. Picture the person who was present with you, the person with whom you experienced this love and joyfulness. It can be a human person, a dog person, a tree person, a horse person, any person at all (or even a place, as long as you experience it as sentient). It can be a living person or a person no longer with us in the form you knew them.
We are complicated beings, so you don’t have to worry about the whole relationship with this person. Just think of one moment, one very specific moment when you knew, or you know now, was a moment of love and happiness. Picture that person, and let that feeling of love and joyfulness blossom in your heart. Allow yourself to really feel it. Allow it to bloom in the heart. Recognize that you yourself created that experience of love and happiness. This special being helped to evoke it in you, but you have the natural capacity to experience love and happiness, and you are able to do so depending on how you use your heart, mind, body, and world. Love and happiness depend on how you live and practice.
With that love and happiness active in your being, think about that person, and send them that warmth of heart, that feeling of love and happiness you now experience in the center of your being. You can think these words: “May you be truly happy, and may you know the causes of true happiness.”
To love someone is to wish for their genuine happiness, to put their happiness above our own. Maybe we can only manage that sometimes, and hopefully at important times. But the ideal is that our beloved’s happiness is more important than our own, and we discover thereby that when we let go of self-centeredness, we are happier. Our true happiness lies in letting go of self-centeredness. Thinking about and taking action for the well-being of others brings us great joy.
This does not mean becoming a slave to someone or neglecting our well-being. We must never lose discernment. Love and Wisdom must go together. To the extent that we lack Wisdom, we lack true Love; to the extent we lack Love, we lack true Wisdom.
But that is just a side note to bracket distracting thoughts and fears. Focus on the love. You just send that thought. You can send the words, saying them in your mind like an affirmation or recitation, or you can feel and/or picture love going to them visually if you like, in the form of warmth, light, energy, or however you would like to imagine it. Do that for at least a few seconds. You can do it for several minutes.
This first practice is the practice of love. It is sometimes called LovingKindness meditation. It’s Love, and the “Kindness” part reminds us that we can send that love to anyone at all, and it is not a matter of romantic feelings or family connection, but a profound warmth of heart, a kind of unconditional friendliness.
Keep the feeling of basic joy, the warmth of heart you experienced in recalling that moment of love. With the spaciousness and warmth of heart and mind still present, recognize that this person you have held in mind, held in your heart, may experience suffering. Recognize that you would like them to be free from suffering. Then send them this thought: “May you be free from suffering and all causes of suffering.”
You can repeat these thoughts again and again. If your mind strays, return to the thought of that person, and return to sending compassion.
Then, recognize that you too suffer. Sometimes we ignore our suffering, or even think we deserve it. We can be quite cruel to ourselves. But if we are suffering, this means the World has that much more suffering in it, and this affects those we love, as well as everyone else. For your own benefit, and for the benefit of all beings, including those dearest to you, you deserve to be free from suffering.
When we are suffering, we are more difficult to be around, and we may do things that cause suffering in others, even accidentally or unconsciously. When people experience our suffering, it brings them suffering. For all these reasons, we begin to see that lack of self-compassion is itself selfish, and the practice of self-compassion is itself generous.
Practicing love and compassion for ourselves can sometimes prove challenging, but we can begin to see that everyone benefits if we can become truly free from suffering, even a little, and even for a moment. So, send the thought: “May I be free from suffering and all causes of suffering.”
Do it for several seconds, or even several minutes. You may even like to send this thought to yourself while placing one or both hands on your heart, in a gesture of kindness and warmth. That’s not about being precious, but about being honest, direct, and warm. It’s about acknowledging our own empowerment.
Finally, recognize that you too deserve to be happy. Even if you feel scared to allow yourself to be happy (that can be an unconscious fear, not so easy to detect), you can see that the people you love, and the world in general, would be better off if you were happy. If you write me an email saying you feel very happy, I feel happy too, and I do not have to suffer because of your suffering. You are nicer to be around, and I don’t have to worry about you.
Of course, your happiness is contagious, and I feel happier to be around you when you are happy. Moreover, when you feel happy, you can more easily realize your highest potential.
Thus, my happiness and the happiness of all beings is interwoven with yours. Therefore, for your own benefit, and for the benefit of all beings, you deserve to be happy. So, send those same feelings and thoughts to yourself: “May I be truly happy, and may I know the causes of true happiness.”
The “truly happy” part means we aren’t wishing deluded happiness on ourselves or others. We want genuine happiness, not mere hedonic pleasures.
These immeasurables arise as states of mind, heart, body, world, and Cosmos. This means that, in a technical sense, the phrasing we use to help us cultivate them are not “affirmations” in the typical sense.
We make use of a phrasing that helps us to keep our understanding clear, but we want to gradually get more intimate with the state of being itself. Adjust the phrasing as needed, but make sure to stay fully attuned to the spirit of the phrasing, and allow increasing intimacy with the state of being the phrasing seeks to orient you to.
Start small with this practice. Doing 2 or 3 minutes per day, just once, is better than zero. And 2 minutes per day will transform you over time. No way around it. But, as you gradually build up to 14 or even 24 minutes a day, you will notice increasing effects. And we have hard science to back up that claim. These practices alter brain structure and even affect us at a cellular level.
Gradually, you can add up to four additional parts to the practice, for a total of six: Wishing that the person you start out focusing on (and then you yourself) may know true peace and joy, intimate wonder, and deep trust (or confianza, a profound spiritual confidence).
As we add more of the immeasurables, the practice will naturally take more time. We can also practice any combination of the immeasurables, though it makes sense to keep up a daily practice of the first two, even if we also have practice sessions that focus on any number of the other four, without the first two. But if we do the first two, we can add one or more of the others anytime.
Joy as an immeasurable differs a bit from the happiness above, because the happiness above comes intimately connected with love. This is more of a pure joy. It also differs because it specifically includes sympathetic joy, which means feeling joy in the joy and success of others.
Sometimes we get a little freaked out by the joy and success of others. We may even take pleasure in the downfall of others. The Germans call it schadenfreude. They are not alone in feeling it, even if we use the German word to describe it.
So, we practice really wishing the joy of another to continue, and to grow—feeling joyful in ourselves at the thought of their joy—and we wish the same for ourselves. You might use the phrase, “May you never be separated from true joy,” or, “May you continue in joy.”
Then we wish true peace for them, which means their well-being is not based on success or failure, on pain or pleasure, praise or blame. If they feel truly peaceful, they feel really wonderful at the bottom of their being, even if something difficult arises. Similarly, they don’t get pulled and hooked by pleasures. Again, you would then wish this for yourself. You would use phrases like this: “May you abide in peace and equanimity.”
Then come the two immeasurables not officially recognized as immeasurables in traditional teachings, but nevertheless recognized as essential to the practice of LoveWisdom. For instance, Plato and Aristotle disagreed about a lot of things, but they seem to agree that the spiritual life begins in wonder. Not only that, but wonder arises as the ground, the path, and the fruition of a spiritual life.
The heart of wonder as a spiritual realization has to do with the seamless unseen luminous living web of what is (try saying that three times—perhaps quickly). We can call it the sacred interwovenness of things, the basic magic that allows life and the cosmos to function. We can get in touch with this immeasurable by contemplating anything that gives us a sense of wonder. Something we have touched in person works best.
For instance, if we have visited Niagara Falls, or watched an especially wondrous meteor shower, or experienced a profound synchronicity, or contemplated deeply into the way ecologies work, or experienced a major spiritual insight, we can bring such an experience of wonder to mind, allow it to fully blossom in the heart, and we can wish it for another, and then for ourselves.
We could use a phrase like this, “May you experience great wonder,” or, “May you experience the intimacy and mystery of the interwovenness of all things,” or, “May you intimately know the sacredness of this life and this world.”
We should emphasize the difference between a basic sense of awe, and a more profound intimacy with the wonder of life. Scientists studying awe have evoked it through simple but effective means, such as having people stand under very tall trees and gaze upward at them for a few minutes—wonder, after all, surrounds us. Contemplating trees, rivers, waterfalls, and other natural phenomena will evoke a basic sense of awe in us, but wonder in a spiritual sense should increasingly include intimacy with the interwovenness of things.
The feeling of awe softens the rigidity of the self, and this allows us to expand into the fullness of our being. A synchronicity, for instance, ruptures the barriers of time and space, but the ego may quickly cover this over.
We may experience a “wow” moment, but we may also grasp after that experience, or in countless other ways prevent the nonduality of mind and world from sufficiently sinking in. We remain with only an interesting memory or another set of concepts, rather than a transformative insight into the interwovenness of all things.
In our practice of cultivating the mind of wonder, we can begin with any moment of “wow,” and gradually deepen and broaden our experience and our insight. The immeasurables are immeasurable in part because they have no limits.
As we deepen our insight into wonder, we may come to understand suffering as a cutting off of our innate sense of the sacredness of life. The problems of the world seem, from this perspective, something like a crisis of reverence, a failure to fully recognize the sacredness of life, to open to it and allow it to work on us, to function in, through, and as us. Allowing sacredness and wonder to function in, through, and as us, our thinking, speaking, and activity become sacred and wondrous.
The final immeasurable relates to something interesting about the fruition of spiritual practice. In the end, spiritual practice comes to realizing a profound trust in ourselves and in reality, trust in the cosmos itself. It may seem strange, but much of our neurosis, confusion, and suffering comes from not knowing, and thus not really trusting, reality.
We don’t really trust ourselves. We may have moments of intellectual or egotistical bravado, moments of acting like we know what’s best or we know what to do, but this differs from a deeper confianza or spiritual confidence in reality itself.
Confianza means the trust that Christ had on the cross, or the trust that Socrates had when he refused to do the evil bidding of authoritarians, or when his students offered to break him out of prison, and he instead chose to stay, knowing it meant his death. Facing death with a heart, mind, body, and world at peace indicates a great deal of trust in life. Taking action when the soul seems to direct us, even though the intellect has not yet captured the situation in concepts and must admit an uncomfortable level of uncertainty, happens because of a trust that transcends the duality of known and unknown.
We can begin practicing a depth of acceptance—not passivity, but the great affirmation of life—such that, no matter what we encounter, we can work with it creatively, as if guided by an intuition that Sophia, that Wisdom Herself, circled this very situation, this sacred place in the landscape of our soul, and wrote, “I have made this moment especially for you. Here, you can come home.”
Of course, we are fallible beings, and we must discern the difference between impulse and true inspiration. Often, we play the game of following impulses, and calling that “trusting myself”. Spiritual practice means cutting through the impulses and letting the inspirations come forth. That process relies on trust, and it has trust as its fruition.
When practicing the immeasurable of trust, we think of times when we really trusted something or someone, even if it also had some uncertainty in it for the ego. For instance, we might think of how we trust our dog to play with us without biting us in a way that would hurt. We may think of how we trust gravity, or trust our bodies to keep breathing when we sleep, or how we trust an apple to nourish us. We may think of a moment when we faced a challenge and had to trust ourselves to get through it. We may think of a friend or doctor we would trust with our lives, or think of someone we can speak with who will keep our most sensitive concerns in a caring space, fully confidential and without harsh judgment.
Then we can send the thought to another, “May you experience a deep and genuine trust in yourself and this world.” Finally, we can send this thought to ourselves.
Always practice in mutuality: Self and other. Self-compassion seems particularly challenging for westerners (especially people in the U.S.), and that stands out as an important spiritual symptom to ponder. This challenging nature makes self-compassion very important for us, for a variety of reasons.
For instance, the work of Kristen Neff has shown that practicing self-compassion gets us what attempts at self-esteem aim for but fail to deliver. Self-compassion is not self-esteem. Self-compassion is not self-indulgence, it is not self-gratification, it is not self-obsession, it is not self-pity. Self-compassion is about seeing that you can handle seeing. Self-compassion is about allowing yourself to do the alchemy of the soul, discovering and creating your capacity to handle the heat, your capacity to be medicine for the World.
We practice self-compassion as part of general training in cultivating wisdom, compassion, love, joy, and peace, and working toward the liberation of ourselves and all beings. It’s a come-and-see thing and an altogether thing, which is the essence of Sophia Thinking. Compassion means the heartfelt wish to alleviate suffering wherever it arises, and engaging in endless creativity to help, benefit, and liberate all beings.
If suffering arises “here,” then we deal with it. If it arises “there,” we deal with it. And we deal with it in an altogether Way. We are all interwoven (we are interwovenness, which is not a “thing”), and our practice of life is an altogether practice, not something we can “do” in pieces, even if pieces often deliver valuable relief from suffering measured in a narrow way.
After you work with the above practice for several weeks, you can gradually expand the practice from 2 people (someone you love, and then yourself), to four people. These are all individuals. The two people to add are a stranger and then a difficult person.
The stranger could be someone you pass on the street, a shopkeeper, a neighbor you see often but never really interact with, or anyone else who seems right. Each time you practice, choose a unique individual (you can work with the same person over many sessions if you like, but choose a specific person for each session).
Then, try a challenging person. Don’t start with anyone too intense. Maybe try a person you had a little argument with, or someone who gets on your nerves a bit, someone you find a little prickly. After a lot of practice you can move on to much more challenging people, but never push yourself. We should engage the practice in a gentle but precise manner, so that we feel healthy, even if frequently challenged—the practices are, after all, medicine for the soul. We should experience them as healthy and healing.
In the case of challenging people, we can work with the same difficult person over as many sessions as seems fitting, and gradually move on to more intense or even very intense people. But don’t start with someone who has traumatized you.
As you progress in experience, you can send these feelings, these immeasurable goodnesses, to larger and larger groups of people, and then finally you can beam them out in all directions, throughout the whole Cosmos (the brain waves of advanced practitioners doing that latter practice were so unprecedented that the scientists running an experiment on them thought machines had a malfunction).[1]
Again, Buddha offered these practices in part to help heal the psyche.[2] We can find ways to engage with these practices no matter our current state of being. But, for those who have experienced trauma, it can take extra patience (which means inclusiveness) and gentleness to allow these practices to heal the psyche. The healing will come, with patience and sustained effort, a kind of joyful perseverance.
We must be sensitive to the needs of anyone we introduce these practices to, but they have proven quite safe and reliable, and are perhaps the safest form of meditation with which any of us can begin, and which most all of us should always keep up with.
There is a growing, impressive body of science on compassion and other meditation practices. Frankly, our neuroscience is still in its infancy, and there is a lot we need to learn, though we will consider some of that science as we go along. I rely mainly on the 2500 years of philosophical elaboration and practical engagement with these practices, and on my own experience with them, including teaching them to students. I have seen profound changes in my own life and in the lives of my students. The main thing is to try it for yourself and see what you discover and create.
“Whatever kinds of worldly merit there are, all are not worth one 16th part of the release of mind, the heart deliverance by LovingKindness; in shining, glowing, beaming and radiance the release of mind, the heart deliverance by LovingKindness far excels and surpasses them all.” ~ Siddhartha
“As a mother even with own life protects her only child, so should one cultivate immeasurable Love towards all living beings.” ~ Siddhartha
“Indeed, Allah enjoins justice, and the doing of good to others; and giving like kindred; and forbids indecency, and manifest evil, and wrongful transgression. He admonished you that you may take heed.” ~ The Koran, 16:91
“And as for those who strive in Our path — We will surely guide them in Our ways. And Indeed, Allah is with those who are of service to others.” ~ The Koran, 29:70
“A guidance and a mercy for those who do good.” ~ The Koran, 31:4
“Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” ~ Colossians 3:12-13
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” ~ 2 Corinthians 1:3-4
“The Lord is gracious and righteous; our God is full of compassion.” ~ Psalm 116:5
“Thus if a man does kindness on earth, he awakens loving-kindness above, and it rests upon that day which is crowned therewith through him. Similarly, if he performs a deed of mercy, he crowns that day with mercy and it becomes his protector in the hour of need. So, too, if he performs a cruel action, he has a corresponding effect on that day and impairs it, so that subsequently it becomes cruel to him and tries to destroy him, giving him measure for measure. The people of Israel are withheld from cruelty more than all other peoples, and must not manifest any deed of the kind, since many watchful eyes are upon them.” ~ The Zohar, 3.92b
“Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves.” ~ Philippians 2:1-3
“And the word of the Lord came again to Zechariah: “This is what the Lord Almighty said: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.’”
~ Zechariah 8-10
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
~ from the Sermon on the Mount
“God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another.” ~ 1 Peter 4:10
“Finally, all of you should be of one mind. Sympathize with each other. Love each other as brothers and sisters. Be tenderhearted, and keep a humble attitude.” ~ 1 Peter 3:8
[1] Just Imagine . . . we know so little about our own HeartMindBodyWorldCosmos that a scientific result related to meditation and compassion initially appears as if it must be due to a malfunction in our equipment. I find this a remarkable fact. It was not included in the original study, but was reported by Richard Davidson, a lead investigator in the study, in the course of a presentation at Stanford University in June of 2016.
[2] One finds these practices in the oldest layers of Buddhist philosophy. It is said that certain love and compassion practices were prescribed by the Buddha to help practitioners in the grips of various “demons”. In our more prosaic, modern discourse we might say these monks were suffering from trauma, neurosis, and various other maladies of the soul. Given the intensely psychological orientation of Buddhist LoveWisdom, this is not such a horrible way of putting it, since many philosophers in Buddhist traditions make it quite explicit that “demons” are simply obstructions to liberation, and that it makes little sense to try and think of “demons” as self-existing “creatures” roaming around “outside” of us. In other words, all demons are ultimately inner demons. But, to arrive at that, we must see the nonduality of inner and outer, and we must see the archetypal dimension of the energies that flow through us, directing our lives and the life of the world.