SHARON SALZBERG
Developing the Four Boundless States:
Love, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy, and Equanimity
Course ID: | TTT-06 |
Original Dates: | 3/8, 3/15, 3/22, 3/29 (2006) |
Archived Content: | MP3 (digital audio file) recordings / PDF transcripts | Price: | $60.00 |
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Course Overview:
Session One: Metta is the word for friendship or lovingkindness in Pali, the language of the original Buddhist teachings. It is taught as a meditation that cultivates our natural capacity for an open and loving heart. With its roots in teachings by the Buddha himself, metta, along with its associated practices, leads to the development of concentration, fearlessness, happiness and a greater ability to love.
Session Two: Karuna is the word for compassion in Pali. Distinguished from callousness, denial, pity, and being overcome by the suffering we face, compassion gives us the strength to be present and wholehearted with our own pain and with the pain of others. We realize that all beings want to be happy, and all beings are vulnerable to loss, to change. True compassion is a state that unites us all.
Session Three: Mudita is the word for sympathetic joy in Pali. This quality is the antidote to the common reaction we have when faced with someone else’s success or good fortune, “I would be happier if you could just lose some of that.” Envy or jealousy is based on the feeling that happiness is a limited commodity in this world, and the more someone else has the less there is for us. Mudita points us to the abundance that genuinely exists, and frees us to be happy for others.
Session Four: Upekkha is the word for equanimity in Pali. Equanimity can be described as balance of the mind, a spacious stillness that allows us to accept things as they are, avoiding apathy and indifference on the one hand and driven reactivity on the other. The opening of mind that equanimity brings is the basis for qualities like lovingkindness, compassion and sympathetic joy to be boundless, to be lived without burnout, to be activated with wisdom and peace of mind.
Recommended Readings:
Salzberg, Sharon. The Revolutionary Art of Happiness. Shambhala, 1997.
Salzberg, Sharon. The Force of Kindness: Change Your Life with Love and Compassion. Sounds True, 2005.
Teacher Bio:
Sharon Salzberg has been a student of Buddhism since 1971, and has been leading meditation retreats worldwide since 1974. She teaches both intensive awareness practice (vipassana or insight meditation) and the profound cultivation of lovingkindness and compassion (the Brahma Viharas). She is a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts and The Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.
Sharon’s latest book is Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, published by Riverhead Books. She is the author of Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness and A Heart as Wide as the World, by Shambhala Publications; and co-author with Joseph Goldstein of Insight Meditation, a Step-by-Step Course on How to Meditate (audio), from Sounds True. She has edited Voices of Insight, an anthology of writings by vipassana teachers in the West, also published by Shambhala.
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