To be mindful of goodness brings love, and to be mindful of pain brings love. That is something like a miracle. This weird asymmetry, that to attend to goodness brings love, and to attend to suffering also brings love. The steadier and more unified the mind gets, the deeper the love can be. Sometimes the mind gathers so singularly around an object—the breath, a mettā phrase, the body, sound, sight, looking into the eyes of another person—the mind just becomes unified. And all the static, fragmentation, and division collapses. And in that mind state, it’s like a drop of love reaches everywhere.
Matthew Brensilver
Spirit Rock Residential Teacher
Matthew Brensilver teaches at the Insight Retreat Center, Spirit Rock and Insight Meditation Society. Before committing to teach meditation full-time, he spent years doing research on addiction pharmacotherapy at the UCLA Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine and continues to be interested in the dialogue between Buddhism and science.