Wisdom and compassion are sometimes called the two wings of awakening — and a practice built on only one of them will eventually veer off course.
In this talk, Travis Hicks introduces the four heart practices — loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity — and makes the case for weaving them into a meditation practice that might otherwise lean heavily toward insight and awareness.
Travis walks through each of the four brahmaviharas, including both their far enemies (hatred, cruelty, envy, indifference) and their subtler near enemies (sentimental attachment, pity, forced cheerfulness, aloof detachment). He offers practical guidance on how to work with the phrases, when visualization helps, and why starting with someone easy — kindling the fire with small twigs before adding the wet log — matters more than people often realize. He closes with a reflection on how these practices off the cushion, noticing that genuine metta toward a difficult person isn’t just an exercise — it’s a retraining of the heart.
So this evening I wanted to talk about the wings of awakening, wisdom and compassion. And these 2 components of our practice are like a bird that flies towards awakening. The bird needs both wings to fly.
Skillfully. If one wing’s too strong, you kind of fly off in one direction. If the other one’s too strong, you go in the other.
And this one wing of awareness and wisdom we worked on and discussed quite a bit last week, and we talk about in some of the insight practices, in this noting and steady attention and awareness of the reality of the world. And this other wing of compassion is what we practice tonight as one example of loving-kindness, compassion, interdependence, and this opening of the heart. And these wings are inseparable to a holistic practice.
The wisdom without compassion gives us a cold perfectionism, an aloofness, a dryness. And compassion without wisdom can really lead us to emotional overwhelm, an instability, a lack of grounding. So both of these need to be cultivated together.
I encourage people who practice the heart practices very frequently to move in and practice with the body, practice with some of these aspects of grounding ourselves and viewing reality. And if this— if a careful noting and a careful attention is the main part of your practice, you got to mix in some more of this heart work. It really, really livens things up.
And so there are 4 main heart practices. One of them we did tonight, which is metta, or loving-kindness. Metta is the Pali word.
You’ll hear it referred to that way quite frequently. It’s this loving-kindness, this loving friendliness for all beings regardless of their stature, regardless of their closeness to us. There’s compassion where we focus more on opening our heart to the suffering of others.
And ourselves. When we see that suffering in the world, we open our heart to that. There’s sympathetic joy, where we open our heart to the joys of the world.
We see things— when we see people being happy, when we see things are going well, we see people celebrating. You know, you drive by a park, you see a birthday going on, people are celebrating. This touching into that joy, that there’s joy all around us also.
And the last one is equanimity, this grounding of the heart such that it can weather the waves that come with all of our lives. At some point on a retreat, I shared some metaphors that go with You can imagine some phases of the sun and moon throughout the day with these, with loving-kindness being the noonday sun that shines down on everything with an intense beaming warmth, compassion in the Kind of nostalgic heart opening of the sunset. Mudita and the sympathetic joy of the dawn, a new day coming, happy at the future beginnings.
And equanimity and the full moon shining out in the darkness on a still lake. And one thing that I think is particularly important is that, you know, these are trainable states. These aren’t habits.
These aren’t— well, they are habits. They’re not fixed personality traits though. They’re habits of mind.
And I can tell you, and I’m very grateful to Ginger for this, for repeating these things over and over and over and over again in the years that I’ve been sitting with her, because This was not my cup of tea originally, for sure— loving-kindness and these other practices. And but again, we need both of these wings to stay aloft. We need both wings to stay moving in a skillful direction.
And so skillful effort really means cultivating these beneficial states intentionally. Intentionally setting aside time to develop the practices of the heart as well as those practices of wisdom. And there are many ways to do this.
The phrases I offered are one way. Many people do use phrases. Those phrases aren’t special in any way.
They’re just ones that work for me and ones I like to share because they’re fairly short. But if you go and look around, listen to some other guided practices from different teachers, you’ll find other phrases or phrases in different books. You can make up your own phrases too.
It’s just whatever brings up that upwelling in the heart of loving-kind sentiments. You can also just purely rely on visualization, just imagining these people, these beings. That may be enough for some people, just to visualize them intensely and feel that feeling in the heart, or to just focus on that feeling and the embodiment of that feeling of heart opening.
For some people, if you haven’t done this a lot, it may have just felt like repetition of words. But if this is something you’ve worked with for a while, there can be an a real feeling in the body of the heart opening, a warmth in the chest or some in the hands, maybe even a vibration of the whole body. And really leaning into that, leaning into how this feels, and dropping away any visualizations, any words.
But the visualizations and the words definitely help us get there. Whatever skillful means you can bring to it are helpful. I’ve known people who have loving-kindness books where they have books of pictures of people that they care about, images that stir up the heart in ways, you know, you just look at some pictures and your heart just like, oh, that’s, you know, so whatever works for you.
And the purpose of this is very important, and, you know, it’s to clarify and cultivate our own intentions. It’s not necessarily going to change anybody else. You know, this is about how we open our hearts.
It’s about our feelings of non-harm, of non-ill will, of working with people so that we see others that we encounter— again, as we expand that circle out— people we may not know well, people we may have issues with, beings we don’t even know exist and don’t pay attention to, can we expand that out to where those are part of what we can open our heart to with non-ill will and non-harm? And you can really direct the practice however most benefits you. What I did tonight is, is a more I guess, traditional approach. Sometimes people start with themselves, sometimes people start with the benefactor and then go to themselves.
But generally, again, starting somewhere close to the heart, somewhere that’s close to something that’s easy to access. Um, one of my teachers, Ajahn Sona, talks about, you know, kindling the fire of loving kindness. You’re starting a fire, you got to start with some little twigs, you got to start with some stuff that burns easily.
You don’t start with a wet log. You don’t like go to the hardest person imaginable, set them there, and then try to light the thing on fire. It won’t work.
So you start with things that are easy to open the heart with. You know, you could start with a pet, sibling, someone who’s very close to us, a dear friend. Here in the West, we sometimes have a hard time starting with ourselves, but You can start with yourself too, that’s perfectly fine.
But just starting to tend this fire, making it grow, encouraging it to get bigger as we then can expand out and out and out and start to incorporate things that may be a little harder when the fire was small. And so in this loving-kindness practice, again, we’re wishing for happiness and safety and health and ease for all beings. And it can be important to view each of these that there’s a— there’s what they call a near enemy and a far enemy to each of these states.
So for loving-kindness, this far enemy is obviously like Extreme ill will, hatred, the desire to do harm, this feeling that when we bring someone to mind you’re just angry. That’s the far enemy. It’s very easy to see the difference there.
The near enemy though is a sentimental affection or attachment. I’ll love you if— and that’s not what mettā is. Mettā is expanding the heart regardless of of what’s there with the ifs.
And so it’s important to notice that as we practice. With compassion, again, this heart’s response to suffering and our desire to alleviate it, our wish to alleviate it, that near enemy is pity. This desire to fix, Not seeing others doing their best.
And it’s quite easy also to fall into overwhelm and despair with karuna, with compassion. So really keeping it again to our heart, we care about your suffering. And you’re doing your best.
Mudita and sympathetic joy, this joy at the success of others, the happiness of others, contradicts envy. Envy is the far enemy. Jealousy.
And mudita sympathetic joy is often paired with gratitude. There’s this grat— you know, I’m happy that you’re happy and I’m happy with the things that I’ve received, whatever those may be. The near enemy is an insincerity, a forced cheeriness, a kind of grit your teeth and smile sort of feeling.
Something to watch out for. With equanimity, it’s this impartiality, this balance. Non-reactivity, like a mountain in the winds being calm but caring.
And the near enemy there is indifference or aloof detachment. And it’s very common to, you know, I’m just going to pretend I’m being equanimous and just cut something off. And so these are— these again are things that we can cultivate in ourselves with skillful practice, bringing it to mind, taking sitting periods where we intentionally decide, I’m going to cultivate this aspect of the heart.
And they really help us embody ethical conduct when we’re not on the cushion because the more we are able to work on these things, the more we’re able to ingrain these as habits of mind, the more we’re able to engage with people on the cushion. I’ll give you an example. I, you know, when we got to the challenging person today, This is somebody I’ve been having challenging conversations with probably, you know, every week, 2 weeks or so, probably for the last 3 months or more, and it’s really hard to not get excited when you see that that person’s calling you.
Not excited in a like, oh boy, what’s this gonna be? You know, you already are starting to get your guards up. When you see the name on the phone. And so it’s important again to take time to offer this person feelings of non-ill will, because if that person truly felt safe and happy and healthy and at ease, we would— and I did as well— we would not be responding to each other the way we are.
And it’s important for me to come back and remind myself of that and train my heart in that way. And the next time I sit and do this practice, it’ll be somebody different, somebody different. But it, it really helps engage and connect the trainings on the cushions to the way we interact with people in day-to-day life.
So the scholar monk Bhikkhu Analayo has a great quote that I wanted to share to conclude, that it’s not through great experiences that we measure the success of our practice, but rather through measuring the openness of the heart. For the face of liberation is the face of happiness and love. It’s important that in this journey on the path of practice, we do not forget either of the 2 wings of wisdom and compassion that lift us up.
Again, I want to thank you for your kind attention this evening.
