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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So...

So hello, and welcome to this second talk on the joy of compassion.

And I think this is a very important concept that can be joy and compassion.

And to keep this as a reference point for our compassion is a protection from the compassion becoming tense or stressful or oppressive or exhausting.

It can be difficult to be present for suffering in oneself and suffering for others.

And part of the medicine for suffering is compassion at presence, care.

And for that to be healthy for everyone involved, it has to avoid tension and strain and assertion and collapse and the kind of way of being that is not sustainable.

Because there is exhaustion or...

And so there is just a very idea that there is joy or well-being in the experience of compassion,

puts a question mark next to any other way that we are, any strain-full or difficult way, that we are when we have compassion.

And I'd like to believe that the notion of joy gets of compassion, encourages us to slow down with our compassion, to not be in a hurry to act,

but rather to take the time to find a healthy way of relating to the suffering of others, suffering of the world.

And one of those ways is to be attuned, to find a way to certainly be aware of it,

and not just to be aware of it to have a certain kind of openness or receptivity to receive it,

just like we would be receptive to receptive listener to hear a friend of ours talk about their challenges.

A friend doesn't feel that we are reluctantly listening or have hardly listening or somehow listening in a judgmental way.

But we are just listening, receptive and aware.

So in the same way, we attune ourselves to the suffering of the world before we act, before we rush to do something.

And because that attunement is an absence of strain, an absence of assertion, an absence of conflict with ourselves or the others,

there can be joy, there can be a well-being, there can be a sense of nourishment, there can be a lightness, there can be a sense of rightness.

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