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

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Hello and welcome to this third talk on the aspects of love, the different forms of love,

or flavors of love or qualities of love.

And for me, I kind of feel that the first one I talked about, the simple, sometimes quite humble care to offer care, makes the others a lot easier.

It makes the others less likely to be something we latch on to or get attached to.

That it's just simple care that gets expressed as friendliness or care that expresses compassion provides the friendliness, provides

the compassion with a little bit of ease or openness or maybe in some ways supports it from being too heavy.

And certainly compassion can be heavy,

can be a big thing, can be overwhelming at time.

But that's because it's not only compassion we feel.

Compassion, in my understanding, I don't want to make a claim for everyone, but my

understanding is compassion always has something light, something feeling rightness to it. Even if

there's pain with the compassion, it's all happening in a field within us, the heart within us, that feels,

it's given that they're suffering, there's a rightness, there's a goodness, to feel that pain.

And for some, sometimes compassion is held up in Buddhism as the most important social emotion.

And sometimes that can feel that way or can be that way when we realize the magnitude of suffering in this world.

And one of the ways to understand the magnitude is not to read the newspapers and see how big it is in Somalia and Gaza and Ukraine and around the world.

Certainly that's huge.

But to understand that in your own mind, how this is a percentage of the way we think

has stress in it, has suffering in it.

And then we realize these ordinary ways of thinking that has some kind of tension built into it,

...