Question

Are there any more ways in Buddhism to open the heart or is there only Compassion and Lovingkindness. Please comment.

Answer

Hopefully not. All the Brahma Viharas have to be practiced together. If we only practice Compassion/Lovingkindness by itself, it may not be a full practice. Because there are also things like jealousy, which closes the heart, and an antidote to jealousy and competition is learning how to take joy with our own good qualities and those of others. This is so we open our hearts to the beneficial aspects of people without seeing them as a threat to our own sense of self worth. Although some people may not believe that equanimity helps with opening the heart, it actually does. It protects compassion from falling into grief, which tends to close the heart. So all the Brahma Viharas are necessary to practice balancing the opening that compassion and lovingkindness can bring.

But without wisdom we can't get to compassion, because compassion actually arises from understanding the true cause of Dukkha, by getting closer to it. So compassion is actually linked to wisdom, it's part of the wisdom side of the mind. If we don't have Right View, we can't really get to compassion and we can't really open the heart. So developing one's wisdom is also developing the heart.

People have the tendency to separate things too much in Western ideas of thinking, but all these qualities are interrelated and can't be separated. Just as if we want to walk the path out of Dukkha we have to walk the whole path, we can't just do the last three, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration. Because unless we have the proceeding five factors of the path, we won't be able to attain the last three.

Our apologies if there are any errors in the above text. If anything seems to be wrong or confusing in any way, please feel free to contact the teachers for further clarification.