"Know and watch your heart. It's pure but emotions come to colour it. So let your mind be like a tightly woven net to catch emotions and feelings that come, and investigate them before you react."

— Ajahn Chah

Dear friends,

Here's a small thing I’ve noticed over my many years of practice. Someone shares good news, something they've really wanted, and I'm glad for them right away, clean and real. Then a moment later, quietly, a second feeling can slip in underneath. A little comparison. A subtle "and what about me." 

It happens so quickly!

Buddhism has a name for that second one. It calls the feelings that accompany the brahmavihāras their near enemies. I've never loved the word enemy in this context. Nothing within us is out to get us. These are simply the places where the heart, reaching toward love or joy or peace, catches on a hidden hook and gets all tangled up. 

There’s nothing wrong when these things come up. When we take them personally by identifying with them, we actually begin to work against our own true nature. Everything belongs and nothing is out of place. The question we’re asking is what leads to more kindness, compassion, and joy in the world, and what does not. The shadow is just part of the journey. 

This month our theme is Near Enemies: Discernment in Training the Heart.

The obvious and the subtle

Some of what opposes these qualities is easy to see. Cruelty is a long way from compassion. Ill will sits across from lovingkindness. We don't usually confuse those with the real thing. When the heart has gone cold, we can feel it.

The harder recognition is the one right next door. Beside each of these beautiful qualities lives something that looks almost identical and passes for it most of the time. That's where the finer attention is asked of us, and where the real work of the month lives.

Where the heart catches

Lovingkindness wishes someone well and asks for nothing back. Its close cousin is the warmth that clings, the affection that comes with a requirement, where our care for a person is tangled up with what we're hoping to get from them. Both feel good from the inside. One of them is free and the other is not.

Compassion can stay with another person's pain and still be steady enough to help. Its close cousin is the grief that pulls us under, where we feel so much on someone's behalf that we lose the ground to actually do anything for them. Ajahn Chah pointed at this a lot. There's a difference between being moved and being swept away.

Muditā, the gladness we feel at someone else's good fortune, is at its best when there's no reference to ourselves in it at all. Its close cousin is that bright rush that spikes and fades, or the quieter tangle where the pleasure carries a little comparison in it.. Real muditā has room. The look-alike keeps a small self at the center.

Equanimity is the steadiness that lets us stay present to whatever shows up. We met its close cousin back in June, the flatness of having checked out, a stillness that comes from turning away and then calls itself peace. One of them holds everything. The other has just gone quiet.

Wisdom as the heart's own clarity

What tells these apart is discernment, paññā, the clear seeing the Buddha put at the center of the path. In the forest tradition that seeing lives right inside the heart's warmth as part of the same motion. Ajahn Chah taught sati and paññā as one thing, mindfulness and wisdom rising up together. Sayadaw U Tejaniya keeps bringing us back to the difference between actually seeing something and only knowing about it. Wisdom here is the heart's own clarity, the light by which it sees its own tangles.

And the seeing is most of the medicine. This is similar to last month. When we watched how the sense of self gets built out of conditions, we found that catching it in the act was already the loosening. Here it's no different. The moment we feel the small grasp inside our compassion, the hook inside our gladness, the turning-away inside our calm, that seeing already starts to free. We don't have to force anything clean. We see clearly, and the clarity does the work.

A formal practice for the month

Take up whichever brahmavihāra you feel closest to and sit with it the way you usually would, offering the phrases or just resting in the felt sense of it. Then add one layer. Notice the flavor of the warmth itself. Is it open and unhurried, or is there a faint lean toward getting something back, a slight bracing, a quiet comparison? You don't have to fix a thing. Just feel the texture, the way you'd notice the temperature of the room. The feeling of it and becoming more familiar with it is the whole instruction.

An informal practice

Once or twice a day, in some ordinary moment, pause and ask where your heart actually is. You do something kind and feel the warmth of it. Stay a second longer. Is the warmth free, or is it half waiting to be noticed? Or you find yourself calm in a situation that could have rattled you. Nice. Feel into it. Is it the calm of really being here, or the calm of having quietly stepped back from the whole thing? You don't have to fix it or grade it. Just feel the honest texture, held with some kindness.

A gentler way to hold all this

Keep it light. If the attention turns harsh, examining every warm feeling for a flaw, that harshness is just one more thing to notice and free, one more knot dressed up as care. So we look kindly. Discernment is a form of tenderness toward our own heart. We work a caught thread loose the way we'd lift a snagged sleeve off a branch, no drama, no blame, glad to have caught it. Each time we do, the quality settles back into the openness that was underneath the catch all along.

May our care stay clear this month. And may we meet our own hearts with the same patience we're hoping to offer everyone else.

With love,

Adam

Resident Guiding Teacher

Mountain Stream Meditation