The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So we come to the end of the week focusing on appreciation as a foundation for compassion.

And there's one more element that I associate with appreciation that is inevitably invaluable.

And I'll introduce it this way that without there being love first,

I worry that compassion is not really compassion.

That love is a necessary component of compassion.

And I say that because of sometimes people feel an obligation to care for others.

They feel alarmed, they feel worried, they feel upset about suffering in the world, suffering in others.

They feel fear and relationship to it.

And they carry with them a strong sense of obligation like I'm supposed to, I need to.

Or a strong sense that I have to address this and deal with this because I'm so uncomfortable.

And they're addressing suffering, they're trying to bring that suffering to an end.

And so the actions can look like compassionate actions, but they're not informed by love.

They're not informed by a deep appreciation, valuing, understanding of others.

And these first four themes of this week.

I'd like to suggest they're also really necessary for healthy love.

That there's an appreciation of others, there's an understanding of them, there is a respect for them,

and there is a certain kind of acceptance of them.

And love without a healthy dosage of each of these can easily become skewed, can easily become problematic.

And there might be other important elements of love, but those four I think are really invaluable.

And it leads us to a kind of a healthy love.

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