Ayya Khema is a wonderful Theravadan teacher who brought a remarkable love and light to her service as a nun in the Theravadan tradition. I highly recommend her book Who is My Self: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation. The following is an excerpt from a set of twelve dhamma talks entitled “All of Us: Beset by Birth, Decay, and Death” that she gave in 1987.

“Everyone is a human being with all the potential and all the obstructions. If one can love that human being, the one that is “me” with all its faculties and tendencies, then one can love others realistically, usefully and helpfully. But if one makes a break in the middle and loves the part, which is nice and dislikes the part, which isn’t nice enough, one’s never going to come to grips with reality. One day we’ll have to see it, for what it is. It’s a “working ground,” a kammatthana. It’s a straightforward and interesting affair of one’s own heart…

There is one aspect of human life, which we cannot change, namely, that it keeps on happening moment after moment. We’ve all been meditating here for some time. What does the world care? It just keeps on going. The only one who cares, who gets perturbed, is our own heart and mind. When there is perturbance, upheaval, unreality and absurdity, then there is also unhappiness. This is quite unnecessary. Everything just is. If we learn to approach all happenings with more equanimity by being accepting, then the work of purification is much easier. This is our work, our own purification, and it can only be done by each one for himself…

There’s nothing else to do and there’s nowhere else to go. The earth is moving in a circle, life is moving from birth to death without us having to move at all. It’s all happening without our help. The only thing we need to do is to get to reality. Then when we do, we will find that loving ourselves and loving others is a natural outcome of that. Because we are concerned with reality and that is the heart’s real work — to love. But only if we’ve also seen the other side of the coin in ourselves and have done the work of purification. Then it is no longer an effort or a deliberate attempt, but it becomes a natural function of our inner feelings, inward directed but shining outward…

The Buddha taught a balanced path, namely to see reality for what it is, to know that dukkha (unsatisfactoriness, suffering) is inescapable, but to have the counterbalance of joy from knowing that there is a way out. If we are too imbued with sorrow and are feeling weighed down under that, believing only that to be the path, then our actions and reactions will have to be based on our suffering. Being oppressed with dukkha doesn’t make for successful meditation, nor for harmonious living. If we try to negate dukkha, and suppress it, then we are not facing reality. But if we see dukkha as an universal characteristic, knowing we can do something about its abandonment then we are keeping in balance. We need equipoise in order to practice successfully.