Love, compassion and equanimity are commonly held principles in both secular and non-secular fields of thought. They may be controversial, misunderstood, and incredibly challenging, but none of these three is likely to be something new to the reader, regardless of how they may be presented or classified.
In Buddhism, these three are often presented as part of a group of four, known as the ‘Four Brahma-viharas’ or, to the English speaking student, the Four Limitless Qualities. They are known as ‘limitless’ because cultivating any of them does not diminish their availability to anyone else.
The fourth, and the topic of this post is sympathetic joy, a concept which may, in fact, be unique to Buddhism.
Sympathetic joy is something we have all experienced but rarely cultivate or consider valuable or virtuous. However, it is valuable, incredibly so. It is the practice of delighting in the good fortune of others. More formally it is described as ‘joy that is unadulterated by self-interest’. Or put very simply, it’s being happy for other people.
Before we examine sympathetic joy in greater depth, however, we should clarify the other three for the purposes of this examination, and establish what it means to ‘cultivate’ something that is infinitely available.
Love, or metta, can be difficult to describe and explain, as the English language is ill-equipped to name this quality. Metta is most often translated as ‘loving-kindness’ in an attempt to convey the kind of love we are to tap into. This is much greater than romantic or familial love. It is not love born of obligation, infatuation or biology. It is a deep feeling of responsibility and care based on the understanding that we are all interconnected. Our choices do not happen in a vacuum, and none of us is any less subject to suffering than anyone else. From this sense of shared humanity and interdependence, we see that it is logical to take care of one another and our shared home.
Metta is a tender quality, but it is also fierce, even wrathful when it needs to be. Like a parent who abruptly (and possibly painfully) grabs their child to pull them out of the way of an oncoming car or denies their screaming toddler candy, this kind of love clearly sees what is of benefit, even if the recipient does not.
As you can imagine, cultivating this kind of love is a challenge. It is unconditional love, and as any parent will tell you, we can feel it strongly, but it’s not so easy to maintain when someone is acting appallingly. It is one thing to feel kindness and a sense of care towards someone who is in a pleasant mood and making choices we agree with or who has opinions that align with our own, but not so easy when someone is in a rage or they voted in a way that threatens the safety of others or they genuinely believe they are superior due to the colour of their skin or the shape of their genitals. It’s not even particularly easy when we are mildly irritated by the actions of another, like if someone has just cut us off in traffic. So while it is infinitely available, it can and often does become obscured.
This is where compassion comes in. In the context of the limitless ones, compassion is our ability to relate to others regardless of shared experience. It is a relationship between equals and is rooted in longing to be of benefit and not to cause harm. Empathy is not synonymous with compassion, but an aspect of compassion. Compassion is the container and empathy, as well as kindness, discernment, and aspiration, are the working parts within that container. This clarification is important, as empathy alone does not necessitate action. Empathy can and often does lead to burn-out or shut down when that is the singular approach we take.
Compassion carries with it our ability to relate to another being without taking on their pain for ourselves. We see someone suffering, acknowledge it, and possibly even understand it, but we do so as witnesses to it, not subjects of it. Because we are witnessing it, and not inclined to take it on, we can address this pain effectively.
Compassion, like love, is a very natural human response. One can look at the way people band together in the wake of a natural disaster to see compassion playing out. There is not a lot of hand-wringing and fretting going on at the ground level. People simply respond because of shared humanity and a longing to be of service and take care of each other.
But natural disasters and epic waves of pain and suffering are not required to cultivate compassion. Considering the pervasiveness of pain and suffering, care and consideration for the the wellbeing of others is something we can and should show daily. Whether it’s acknowledging a person living on the street as a fellow human being by smiling at them and saying hello, pausing on our way to work to hold open a door for an elderly person with a walker, or even just letting someone go ahead of us in traffic, we are connecting with the limitless compassion of which we are capable.
Equanimity plays out across all of the limitless ones as the ability we have to strike a balance. Too much empathy without discernment puts us at risk of burn out. Too much discernment without empathy puts us at risk of closing our hearts and minds. Love is wonderful, but if we are not careful, it can become possessive, even controlling, driven by attachment rather than an open, fluid appreciation that allows for change.
This sense of balance, of being able to maintain our seat and not get pulled every which way, contributes to an effective and skilful way of being in the world. It is something we cultivate when we go to the cushion or take three conscious breaths or practice yoga, allowing us to connect with right here, right now.
And while they are all natural qualities, that doesn’t mean we can become complacent about them. Just like muscles will weaken if we don’t use them, love, compassion and equanimity need flexing.
But what about sympathetic joy?
Sympathetic joy is the wonderful feeling of happiness that most of us are probably familiar with in cases where someone we love has life going their way. It is the way happiness increases as it is shared, through genuine appreciation for the beautiful things in life. To cultivate it is to expand joy for others’ good fortune to include people on the fringes of our social circle, and even those we don’t know well or have never met.
This is not merely a case of telling someone we are happy for them, but a deep sense of joy felt for their good fortune, as strong as if we ourselves had just had something similar happen. It is the opposite of schadenfreude, which is taking pleasure in the misfortune of others, and much better for us.
As a practice, sympathetic joy can prove to be challenging, as most of us raised in a white-centric, patriarchal colonial society have been taught to compare ourselves with others, which is why schadenfreude feels good. But schadenfreude has a hangover with it. It doesn’t consistently feel good or make us better people to delight in bad things happening to others. In a short time that natural compassion and sense of love we have playing underneath everything — even if we aren’t cultivating them — will communicate how we’ve gone against our nature. Guilt often comes up, or shame, at taking a shot of personal pleasure at the expense of someone else’s suffering, even someone we don’t particularly like.
As the teaching goes, envy is the thief of joy, and schadenfreude is absolutely about envy. It’s delighting in seeing someone being taken down a peg. But as long as we are keeping score, we will never be able to sustain that sense of delight because we will always be in competition. It is based on a limited, finite view of happiness and good fortune, and by cultivating schadenfreude, we are cultivating a mentality of scarcity around things which are not quantifiable.
Because there is no ‘pot of happiness’ or ‘bank of feeling good’, sympathetic joy is always available to us and has no such hangover. There is no limit to the delight we can find in valuing good fortune, regardless of who is experiencing it directly. In any given day we might hear about someone starting up a training programme for community leaders, publishing their first book, buying land to create a co-housing community, selling a piece of their artwork, graduating with their Master’s degree, or seeing their child get a yellow belt in Tai Kwan Do. It is absolutely possible to feel great joy for all of these things, and when we do, it is energising, uplifting and can often be galvanising.
Cultivating any one of the limitless qualities is a life-long practice. One way is, of course, through meditative contemplation. But there are little things we can do daily to help us specifically notice sympathetic joy when it arises. We can start by celebrating the good fortune of friends when we see a post they make about something positive happening. Pause and intentionally consider the happiness they are experiencing. Then wish for this to expand, so others may also feel such contentment, starting with yourself. Phrases like “This is wonderful, may all beings share in this” or even just “This is wonderful. May everyone who reads this post share in this” are useful for reminding us of this limitless quality which anyone can tap into. No one has or could ever have the monopoly on happiness, and happiness is actually very simple. It’s connecting with and appreciating the richness and possibility of life.
Which is why sympathetic joy is such an incredible thing to cultivate. We may not always have everything going our way in the confines of our limited personal experience, but in any given day or week, our social circle, communities and the planet, have things worth celebrating. As we cultivate sympathetic joy, our ability to connect with it will expand, just like our ability to connect to love, compassion and equanimity expand when we work on developing them.
Imagine if every time you hear of the good fortune of another, or a positive step forward socially or environmentally, you get a sense of uplift and openness, happiness and joy — not because of anything external, but from a sincere appreciation for the wonder and joy of life, regardless of the recipient.
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Originally published on Medium
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