Today I want to introduce you to something called the Four Karmas or enlightened actions.

Often, Buddhist meditators are presented as kind of inert, as people who strive for a kind of impassivity. Au contraire. As much as anything, by creating presence of mind and enabling you to have accurate perceptions about what is happening around and within you, a meditation practice prepares you to take action in this world–to improve your life, help the planet, navigate the difficulties, and truly take in the joys.

As you might expect, after all these centuries of practice and observation, Buddhists have defined four ways of taking action in an enlightened sense–how to act in such a way that you contribute to the sanity of whatever situation you find yourself in rather than, well, the insanity. There are four actions you can take that will always help. The trick is knowing which one to employ when.
For our next four practice sessions, I’ll offer a brief explanation of each of the four karmas, which are called pacify, enrich, magnetize, and destroy. Between these four, we have an unlimited palette of paints to choose from to turn every possibly hurtful situation into something more beautiful.

The first, as mentioned, is called “pacify.” Here, pacify doesn’t meant to shush everyone or make everyone quiet down or go away. Often, such efforts actually increase aggression or anxiety. Here, to pacify means simply this: to open to a situation or a person without aggression (which is another word for preconceived notions). We simply open to it with a quality of curiosity rather than demands or distaste. It’s like when one of your friends calls you sobbing, hardly able to choke out his words. If you simply ask calmly hey, what is going on and then listen without offering advice or piling on with judgments, the situation itself simply begins to even out, to pacify. If you jumped in with advice or criticism or by bursting into tears yourself, you would actually rile the situation up more.

So the first karma, pacify, means basically to open your mind and heart to whatever situation you’re in. You’ll find that as you travel through your day with this kind of receptivity, difficult situations and people may sort themselves out more readily.

Your meditation practice can help you know when to apply the karma of pacifying–because it’s not always appropriate. In the coming days we’ll explore the other 3 possibilities for taming difficulties, which are called, as mentioned to enrich, to magnetize, and, to destroy.