The Boundless Heart

Through meditating on the four boundless qualities of universal love, compassion, joy and equanimity, our heart will be healed and become as vast as space.

Our ordinary emotional life is quite tumultuous and chaotic, full of ups and downs interspersed with periods of boredom. We are attached to some people, dislike or fear others and are indifferent to most. Relationships are so complicated, our mind is unbalanced and our heart tangled into knots. This happens because our normal emotional attitudes are egocentric. We feel we are the centre, and other people derive their value from how they make us feel. We cling to those who make us feel stimulated or comfortable, develop aversion towards those we feel uncomfortable with, and indifference towards everyone else. By stepping outside our self-centred perspective we come to recognize other people as being valuable and important in themselves, irrespective of what they can do for us. Just as we have feelings, they have feelings, just as we have lives, they have lives – the reality is that each and every person matters just as much as we do ourselves. This recognition can become the basis of our emotional life. On this short retreat we will learn to use meditation to first develop equanimity – an equal friendliness towards everyone, irrespective of how they make us feel. On this basis we cultivate love – the wish that each and every person finds true happiness; compassion – the wish that they are freed from suffering; and sympathetic joy – genuine rejoicing in others’ qualities and good fortune. Gradually our heart will become balanced, wise, and vast as space..