Diane Powell, co-facilitator of the Mindful Living Path Intensive for the fall of 2021, tells us in this interview about the Four Immeasureables and how Intensives are significant in the development of our practice.

Question:  What are the Four Immeasureables and why did the Buddha say they were so important in our lives?

 Diane:  They’re called the “Immeasureables” because the Buddha said they are the boundless capabilities of our hearts. They are very important in Buddhism because we think of there being ”two wings of the bird.” For the bird to fly, one wing is wisdom, and the other is the heart teachings. These are the heart teachings. The Buddha said, “I teach one thing, the cessation of suffering.” Both the wisdom and the heart teachings are pathways to the end of suffering.

The Four Immeasureables are loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. 

Loving kindness is the friendly, loving, kind, positive attitude we have towards other people, wanting the best for others, caring for others. Compassion is partly empathy (being able to feel the suffering of others) but it is more, wanting people not to suffer and, in its active phase, wanting to take action to alleviate their suffering. Sympathetic joy is taking joy in the joy of others. Equanimity underlies all the others, impartiality or even mindedness, applying our loving heart towards everyone, not just for the people we care about or like, but all beings.

This is a direct path to alleviating our own suffering, and to understand it, you only have to look at how your mind feels when you’re feeling loving towards somebody versus when you’re feeling constriction, anger, jealousy or fear towards somebody. 

Question: How might this Intensive be helpful to FCM members?

Diane: If you are a newcomer and have not taken an Intensive but have been in some FCM programs and know a little about our teachings, Intensives are an important next step because they give structure and focus to our practice. It is said there are 84,000 Dharma doors, but that can be overwhelming. Where do I start? Intensives give a starting place and structure. If you find the teachings engaging, you should not be afraid to plunge right in and take an Intensive. 

There are lots of elements in an Intensive – Dharma talks, readings, instructions about what to do in meditation and practices in daily life, and, one of the most important elements, the mentor group. You meet with the same group of five or six people and a facilitator every other week and share experiences with the readings and the practices. These groups are valuable because they give you a chance to articulate what is going on with your practice and to hear others and learn that the same issues are coming up for them, too. Also, it is a way of forming connections with others in the sangha.

I am so glad we’re offering the Four Immeasureables after the Anapanasati Sutra and the Four Nutriments, which we studied in the spring and summer. For those who have taken these Intensives, this fall our studies will flow naturally to the next level. In those two Intensives, we emphasized mindfulness and learning some stability of mind, bringing mindfulness into our lives to help make wise choices of actions of body, speech and mind. This Intensive will build on that foundation to bring our practice into the arena of relationships with other people and our mind states, the importance of having an open, loving, caring mind. We think of it as having a mind of goodness, a mind that brings goodness into the world. This path of the Four Immeasureables tells us how to do that.

Finally, I know we’ve offered this several times in the past. I’m so grateful to have been involved with it many times. Each time I take it or facilitate it, my mind is in a different place. I’m a different person each time. It always has new meaning and brings new depth to my practice. Like all the fundamental teachings of the Buddha, it can be practiced and realized on different levels. It is the practice of cultivating an open, caring, peaceful mind, but it has meaning at the level of interconnection and non-self for Wisdom-level practice, as well.

 

Diane Powell, a member of FCM since its formative years, is a senior leader who has facilitated many FCM Intensives and programs and is a member of the Elders Council, the Sangha Harmony Committee, and the Order of Interbeing. She is leading the Intensive on the Four Immeasureables with Bill Mac Millen, also a long-term FCM member and frequent presenter of programs for the Sangha.