Kindness Changes Everything
A wise friend once noted to me that Buddhism’s powerful lessons on loving-kindness sometimes seemed daunting to him: “How about just kindness? Or even friendliness? I want to be loving, but let’s see if I can handle just being friendly first!”
In that spirit, the pieces in this Weekend Reader are about flexing our kindness muscles — for ourselves, and for others. You can handle it. You may even love it.
Happy weekend, and thanks for reading.
—Rod Meade Sperry, editor, Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Guide |
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Suffering is more than the first noble truth of Buddhism. To see our own and others’ suffering is the first step on the path, the birthplace of compassion. Judy Lief offers guidance on the journey. As we learn to accept ourselves, we are at the same time learning to accept other people. It may seem that there are always other people around and we have no choice but to accept them, unless we throw everyone out or become a hermit, but just putting up with people is not the same as accepting them. Acceptance is the tender and gentle process of opening our hearts to others, to ourselves, and to our common ground of suffering. Kindness begins at this immediate, personal level of experience. By cultivating an attitude of acceptance and fundamental friendliness, we can lessen not only our own fear and tension, but also that of the people around us. We can actually shift the atmosphere in the direction of relaxation and kindness, and in that way be a force for healing. To the extent that we are relaxed and open ourselves, the people around us begin to pick up on it. It is like putting a drop of water on a blotter — one little drop just spreads and spreads.  |
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You have enlightened nature, says Pema Khandro Rinpoche. If you truly know that, you’ll always be kind to yourself.
hen we are eating, we visualize ourselves presenting food and offerings to the buddhas that live in our body. Likewise, when we are sitting on a seat, we visualize that we are sitting in the celestial palace of a buddha, wherein every sense perception leads us to vivid presence. When we are walking, we visualize that we are circumambulating the three jewels, and — my favorite — when we are bathing ourselves, we visualize that all the deities, buddhas, bodhisattvas, and dakinis are bathing us with nectar.
Such contemplations express an attitude of gentleness, love, and kindness toward ourselves and our body-mind. They are practices of receiving and giving. They are instructions, as buddhanature training, for caring for our body, including its clothing, nourishment, and bathing. This is what it means to bring our everyday life onto the path.
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Awash in the pain of betrayal and a failed marriage, Laura Munson practices Pema Chödrön’s teachings on loving-kindness. It’s hard but it helps.My understanding of maitri practice, thanks to Pema Chödrön, is that by sending loving-kindness into the world we can help increase love altogether. The meditation works like this: First we send loving-kindness to someone we love dearly, someone who is easy to love. Next we send loving-kindness to someone we are fond of, followed by someone who is neutral in our lives. Then we send out loving-kindness to someone who bugs us, and then to someone we really can’t bear. Finally — and this is the clincher — we send loving-kindness to ourselves. That’s the hardest one for a lot of us. In fact, I’m not sure it’s really possible to send loving-kindness to ourselves until we’ve first practiced on someone we really loathe. Because most of us treat our worst enemies much better than we do ourselves. That stings, doesn’t it? But I’ve been paying attention to that in my life and have found it to be true. |
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