The Dharma of Care
Beloved Sangha,
If our one quest in life was to Care - care for our inner life, care for each other, care for all of nature - there might not be a need for any other teaching, philosophy, or religion.
Mettā Bhāvanā, the Cultivation of Care, is one of the four pillars of what I call Yoga Bhāvanā. Its teachings are deeply rooted in the Buddhist practice of Loving Kindness, sometimes translated simply as Friendliness.
“At this moment, the world is breaking our hearts.”
Most of the time, when life touches into what is most tender, our spontaneous reaction is to close up. Like sea anemones, we withdraw from what seems unbearable. Paradoxically, our greatest power lies in turning towards our heartbreak. In cultivating Bodhichitta - the Awakened Heart that longs to relieve suffering, our own and that of all beings.
This opening begins inside, with an inner befriending. Learning to care for our own broken-heartedness - including our grief, our outrage, our confusion, our numbness and our fear. Being willing to feel our own feelings. If we cannot be intimate with our own feelings, we simply cannot empathise when they arise in others, cannot feel others in our heart.
“The wisdom of true intimacy is rooted in an undefendedness - a willingness to let the world touch our heart, and to extend that compassion to all begins.”
So many images in our feeds convey the delusion that it is somehow a personal failure to suffer. That it is shameful and humiliating to age, be sick or even to die! Underlying these assumptions is an expectation that we should in some way be able to control pain and loss - which makes us feel even more isolated.
Dysregulation at this time is completely normal. What is not normal is not to care. And we all care in different ways.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche distills the centrality of Mettā: “If this one Dharma comes into your hand, all Dharmas come into your hand. If you do not have this Dharma, none of the Dharmas come.”
We need to remember, Mettā is a Bhāvanā, a cultivation, a training and practice. We have to work person by person, heart by heart, to recognise our shared humanity. What Zen master Thich Nhất Hạnh calls our fundamental interbeingness. This is not easy.
“Opening towards this boundless field of care takes fierce courage, deliberate training, and skilful guidance.”
A traditional practice to begin strengthening our heart is a meditation called Mettā Bhāvanā itself. I'm sharing a guided practice on the podcast this week. A live recording from my retreat in Tenerife, which centred around exactly this theme.
At the retreat, we had been sitting with the question of what it means to care in a world that is, right now, genuinely hard to look at? This recording comes out of that context and is wrapped in Yotam’s soundscapes. You don't need to have been there for it to land, but it may help to know that the people in the room were sitting with the same things you are.
With Mettā,
kia Paris, April 2026