Loving Kindness

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Loving Kindness

May you be safe.

May you be happy.

May you be healthy.

May you live with ease.

In the Buddhist myth of the god Brahma, Loving Kindness is seen as one of the four faces of the unencumbered and unselfish heart. Together with Compassion, Sympathetic Joy and Equanimity these are expansive and virtuous qualities of love referred to as the Divine Abodes.

Practices around these aspects of the expansive heart guide us as we cultivate their capacities. We come to understand that a deep and abiding Love doesn’t require ideal circumstances, but rather intentional living in ways that help us recognize, awaken, and develop these natural loving capacities that become our own open heart. These states were also prescribed as the antidotes to hatred and aversion. 

There are many “flavors” or aspects of the faces of love such as care, friendliness, goodwill, and benevolence. These are virtuous aspects we extend for all beings without exception. And, of course, we remember to make sure we offer ourselves the same Loving Kindness.


"Compassion is a Verb" - Thich Nhat Hanh

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“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”
— Pema Chödrön

In Buddhist teachings we are encouraged to contemplate ideal, wholesome and virtuous states of the heart and mind such as Compassion. We do this to both expand our understanding of awareness and to see how our thinking mind limits our ability to experience the fullness of life as it actually is.

As we practice, we gain clarity and wisdom beyond the limitations we place on experience. We begin to relax or let go of the limitations we learned or conclusions we formed when we experienced life as separate beings. We come to know our own open heart as being the same as the universal heart we share with all beings.

Seeing all beings as expressions of the one open heart, we effortlessly know the virtuous, wise and wholesome states such as Compassion. It is in realizing the one heart and consciousness that we know each other's suffering and are moved into action to assuage it for them and for ourselves. It is this spontaneous action that Thich Nhat Hanh refers to when he says "Compassion is a verb." 

Compassion

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“Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit,
bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign
of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on
down there where the spirit meets the bone.”
— Miller Williams

Compassion has a foundational place in most spiritual traditions. In his book, "The Essence of the Heart Sutra," His Holiness the Dalai Lama describes that "in Buddhism compassion is an aspiration, a state of mind, wanting others to be free from suffering. It's not passive — it's not empathy alone — but rather an empathetic altruism that actively strives to free others from suffering. Genuine compassion must have both wisdom and lovingkindness. That is to say, one must understand the nature of the suffering from which we wish to free others (this is wisdom), and one must experience deep intimacy and empathy with other sentient beings (this is lovingkindness)."

Generosity

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“Generosity is an activity that loosens us up. By offering whatever we can
– a dollar, a flower, a word of encouragement –
we are training in letting go.”
— Pema Chodron

Generosity has a specific importance in Buddhist practice because it relates directly to the core idea of "letting go" of attachments. In that way cultivating a mind state of "letting go" is the practice of giving, of generosity. The Buddha often began his teachings with a discourse on this virtuous mind state to set the stage for discussions surrounding morality and meditation. 

Interestingly, in Buddhist teaching Generosity is also not about the recipient or about the benefit the recipient may gain. It is about the benefit to the giver. Putting that focus on generosity emphasizes the need to cultivate generosity as something we do as a matter of course, rather than something that we go out of our way to do intentionally. The importance of this is that a person who is giving, a person who is inclined to give, is more likely to "let go."  And, a person who is looking to let go will naturally be generous and giving, and, so we practice to cultivate this quality of mind. As we delve deeper into generosity, we also begin to see more the need to fully understand our intentions for giving, what we are giving and the recipient of our generosity so that we can support our practice with wisdom.

The Gift of Presence - the Perils of Advice (Parker Palmer for OnBeing)

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This article by Parker Palmer must be about generosity too. We get confused between generously offering our advice, opinions and suggestions and generously allowing another person to be fully present as they are. Where in the moving Venn diagram of our interactions with others is the most open centered space where all that is as it is, is allowed to be as as it is? It must be in the open heart we all share.

https://onbeing.org/blog/the-gift-of-presence-the-perils-of-advice/

Gratitude

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“‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say.
I say that one a lot.
Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding”
— Alice Walker

Gratitude is a virtue we can cultivate, but not in isolation. It has to be cultivated together with kindness. These two virtues need each other to be expressions that come from the heart, from our true selves.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, a prominent Buddhist monk says that "if you want to be genuinely kind, you have to be of actual benefit—nobody wants to be the recipient of “help” that isn’t really helpful—and you have to provide that benefit in a way that shows respect and empathy for the other person’s needs."

He continues saying that the gift we receive in return, when we've been able to be authentically kind to another person, comes from being able to accept that others can be kind to us. And, in offering true kindness to others, we also know the effort it takes. It’s not always easy to be authentically helpful, when kind and unkind impulses may struggle in our hearts, sometimes we make sacrifices.  And, we need to trust the recipient of our kindness to make good use of the help. That means that in the end, when we are on the receiving end of kindness, we realize in our hearts there is a kind of debt of gratitude for their sacrifice and trust toward us.

Trust and courage in this intimate aware knowing that rests beyond our thoughts is where true gratitude arises.

Additional Readings

Three Gratitudes - BY CARRIE NEWCOMER - ON BEING SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR https://bit.ly/2FvkE9m

Why a Grateful Brain Is a Giving One - The neural connection between gratitude and altruism is very deep, suggests new research.
https://bit.ly/2D2Wf63

The Five Hindrances - Doubt

“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life
is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi

Lingering somewhere between certainty and uncertainty, doubt finds us all depending on life's changing conditions and our own experience. There are two flavors of doubt described in the Satipatthana Sutra - The Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness. There is the kind of doubt that can be useful when it is constructive and when it is a kind of skepticism that is focused on finding and knowing the truth. Or, there is the kind of doubt that can shut us down completely because we've come to believe ourselves to be solely our indecision, powerlessness, and distrust.

As with the other Hindrances, the teachings emphasize that gaining insights about our doubts is the goal of mindfulness and meditation. As a means of investigation, mindfulness can help us realize freedom from doubt as we remember to expand our awareness, broaden our views and challenge the doubtful stories we’ve created and told ourselves. Phillip Moffit, a well known vipassana meditation teacher, says that we know doubt as “the absence of feeling grounded in something greater than your own ego structure. It is for this reason that doubt is both an existential challenge and a spiritual hindrance.”

The Five Hindrances - Sloth and Torpor

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The Five Hindrances are aspects of mind that can hide or cover over what’s real in experience. They create obstacles to our concentration and attention. Energetically, they interrupt our sense of balance. They show up for everyone on the cushion and in daily life.

As we saw with the hindrances of Attachment and Aversion, we can get thrown around between grasping too hard and hating too strongly.  We miss the fact that they actually both of these aspects exist and our job is to find equanimity or balance between them. The Hindrances obscure reality and profoundly affect our mental clarity primarily when we forget that they are impermanent and come and go. 

In meditation, the hindrance of sloth affects our physical energy and vitality. This is where we feel heavy, weary or weak and struggle to activate our energy. Torpor affects our mental energy. We know is mostly as cloudy or foggy thinking or when our mind wanders.

However, with mindfulness practice we can see that the problem is not that there isn’t available energy. As soon as conditions change, as they certainly will, energy will be at the ready. With awareness we can open the truth of the changing winds and regain balance.

The Five Hindrances - Letting Go is not the same as Aversion

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“Letting go is not the same as aversion, struggling to get rid of something. We cannot genuinely let go of what we resist. What we resist and fear secretly follows us even as we push it away. To let go of fear or trauma, we need to acknowledge just how it is. We need to feel it fully and accept that it is so. It is as it is. Letting go begins with letting be.

Jack Kornfield”

Aversion is another hindrance to skillfully dealing with experiences in life that we sometimes confuse with "letting go."  

We have an understanding about two realities that are at the heart of Buddhist thought -- Impermanence and Interdependence. In our relationship with these two realities, we can have a range of reactions from dissatisfaction all the way to profound suffering. On one hand we are uncomfortable with things always changing, so we attach ourselves to various object of experience trying to steady the ground beneath us. On the other hand, when we don't see the interdependent connectivity of all things, we feel separate and sometimes isolated. Hoping to protect ourselves from outside forces, we attach and identify with external objects for support.

We also need to consider the energetic opposite of attachment -- Aversion. Aversion has to do with our relationship with and reaction to things we don't like or don't want. We can experience aversion in a range of ways from irritation and annoyance to anger and rage. Fear is also frequently a component of aversion and even mind states like sorrow and grief can contain its aspects. 

The undercurrent of aversion is really hatred. And, while, as adults, most of us have tempered our outward expression of hatred, we certainly have had experience of it flaring up in moments of stress or danger or when our beliefs about how things should be is challenged.

As Jack Kornfield suggests in the quote above -- "To let go of fear or trauma, we need to acknowledge just how it is. We need to feel it fully and accept that it is so. It is as it is. Letting go begins with letting be." In mindful meditation, open awareness provides an important opportunity for allowing and investigating aversion as it arises.