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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So, here continuing with the third talk on the joy of compassion, and perhaps it's easiest

to understand that this third kind of joy related to compassion, and that is the joy of appreciation.

And when we appreciate others, when we appreciate anything, ourselves included, appreciation has a kind of positive feeling to it.

It's an uplifting feeling, it's an opening feeling, it's a delightful feeling.

And the delight of appreciation, the delight of saying, oh, this is good, this is valuable, this is something I care for, this is something that is important, and this is something that is well done, and this is something I celebrate.

And so, this idea of appreciation usually comes with a positive disposition, a positive feeling.

And so, it may be easier to find the joy of compassion this way.

And this means that it's actually important to practice appreciation or find how to appreciate others if we're going to be compassionate.

I think it's easy enough to feel obligated to be compassionate, to feel that we feel the suffering of the world, the suffering of others, and we kind of are buffeted by it or pressed by it or contracted or tensed because of it.

And we feel like I have to do something, I have to be compassionate.

And so, one way or the other, there's a headlong movement into compassion, into doing compassion, doing what seems like the right thing to do, doing the helpful thing.

But it's not headlong we want to be, we want to be heartlong, moving in with a heart.

We want to ideally take time so that we're not doing compassion out of obligation, we're not doing it as a should that we have to kind of now deal with things.

But we want to do, certainly want to act compassionally in the world, but let that compassion be a flowering of what's wonderful within us, a flowering of something which is medicine for the world.

And the world does not need more people who feel the weight and the heaviness of obligation and its responsibility and a kind of headlong attack on the causes of people's suffering or something.

The world needs us to address this suffering, but to do it in a way that's medicine for the world, that supports it, that's healing for the world and brings out the best and the best in people.

And so appreciation for me is one of those qualities, to take the time to appreciate.

And of course sometimes it's hard to appreciate others so that the kind of, in the same category as appreciation, I think of as, I think is respect.

That to respect everyone, to express their, respect their autonomy, their dignity, their value, respect their potential,

to even if we disagree with someone, even if we feel like what they're doing is wrong, we never want to condemn people, we never want to have hostility towards anyone.

...