Meditation practice is regarded as a good and in fact excellent way to overcome warfare in the world: our own warfare as well as greater warfare.
—CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE
AS A SPECIES, we should never underestimate our low tolerance for discomfort. To be encouraged to stay with our vulnerability is news that we can use. Sitting meditation is our support for learning how to do this. Sitting meditation, also known as mindfulness-awareness practice, is the foundation of bodhichitta training. It is the natural seat, the home ground of the warrior-bodhisattva.
Sitting meditation cultivates loving-kindness and compassion, the relative qualities of bodhichitta. It gives us a way to move closer to our thoughts and emotions and to get in touch with our bodies. It is a method of cultivating unconditional friendliness toward ourselves and for parting the curtain of indifference that distances us from the suffering of others. It is our vehicle for learning to be a truly loving person.
Gradually, through meditation, we begin to notice that there are gaps in our internal dialogue. In the midst of continually talking to ourselves, we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream. We recognize our capacity to relax with the clarity, the space, the openended awareness that already exists in our minds. We experience moments of being right here that feel simple, direct, and uncluttered.
This coming back to the immediacy of our experience is training in unconditional bodhichitta. By simply staying here, we relax more and more into the open dimension of our being. It feels like stepping out of a fantasy world and discovering the simple truth.
Yet there is no guarantee that sitting meditation will be of benefit. We can practice for years without its penetrating our hearts and minds. We can use meditation to reinforce our false beliefs: it will protect us from discomfort; it will fix us; it will fulfill our hopes and remove our fears. This happens because we don’t properly understand why we are practicing.
Why do we meditate? This is a question we’d be wise to ask. Why would we even bother to spend time alone with ourselves?
First of all, it is helpful to understand that meditation is not just about feeling good. To think that this is why we meditate is to set ourselves up for failure. We’ll assume we are doing it wrong almost every time we sit down: even the most settled meditator experiences psychological and physical pain. Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, a simple, direct relationship with the way we are.
Trying to fix ourselves is not helpful. It implies struggle and self- denigration. Denigrating ourselves is probably the major way that we cover over bodhichitta.
Does not trying to change mean we have to remain angry and addicted until the day we die? This is a reasonable question. Trying to change ourselves doesn’t work in the long run because we’re resisting our own energy. Self-improvement can have temporary results, but lasting transformation occurs only when we honor ourselves as the source of wisdom and compassion. We are, as the eighth-century Buddhist master Shantideva pointed out, very much like a blind person who finds a jewel buried in a heap of garbage. Right here in what we’d like to throw away, in what we find repulsive and frightening, we discover the warmth and clarity of bodhichitta.
It is only when we begin to relax with ourselves that meditation becomes a transformative process. Only when we relate with ourselves without moralizing, without harshness, without deception, can we let go of harmful patterns. Without maitri, renunciation of old habits becomes abusive. This is an important point.
There are four qualities of maitri that are cultivated when we meditate: steadfastness, clear seeing, experiencing our emotional distress, and attention to the present moment. These qualities not only apply to sitting
meditation but are essential to all the bodhichitta practices and for relating with difficult situations in our daily lives.
Steadfastness. When we practice meditation we are strengthening our ability to be steadfast with ourselves. No matter what comes up—aching bones, boredom, falling asleep, or the wildest thoughts and emotions—we develop a loyalty to our experience. Although plenty of meditators consider it, we don’t run screaming out of the room. Instead we acknowledge that impulse as thinking, without labeling it right or wrong. This is no small task. Never underestimate our inclination to bolt when we hurt.
We’re encouraged to meditate every day, even for a short time, in order to cultivate this steadfastness with ourselves. We sit under all kinds of circumstances—whether we are feeling healthy or sick, whether we’re in a good mood or depressed, whether we feel our meditation is going well or is completely falling apart. As we continue to sit we see that meditation isn’t about getting it right or attaining some ideal state. It’s about being able to stay present with ourselves. It becomes increasingly clear that we won’t be free of self-destructive patterns unless we develop a compassionate understanding of what they are.
One aspect of steadfastness is simply being in your body. Because meditation emphasizes working with your mind, it’s easy to forget that you even have a body. When you sit down it’s important to relax into your body and to get in touch with what is going on. Starting with the top of your head, you can spend a few minutes bringing awareness to every part of your body. When you come to places that are hurting or tense you can breathe in and out three or four times, keeping your awareness on that area. When you get to the soles of your feet you can stop, or if you feel like it, you can repeat this body sweep by going from bottom to top. Then at any time during your meditation period, you can quickly tune back in to the overall sense of being in your body. For a moment you can bring your awareness directly back to being right here. You are sitting. There are sounds, smells, sights, aches; you are breathing in and out. You can reconnect with your body like this when it occurs to you—maybe once or twice during a sitting session. Then return to the technique.
In meditation we discover our inherent restlessness. Sometimes we get up and leave. Sometimes we sit there but our bodies wiggle and squirm and our minds go far away. This can be so uncomfortable that we feel it’s
impossible to stay. Yet this feeling can teach us not just about ourselves but also about what it is to be human. All of us derive security and comfort from the imaginary world of memories and fantasies and plans. We really don’t want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience. It goes against the grain to stay present. These are the times when only gentleness and a sense of humor can give us the strength to settle down.
The pith instruction is, Stay . . . stay . . . just stay. Learning to stay with ourselves in meditation is like training a dog. If we train a dog by beating it, we’ll end up with an obedient but very inflexible and rather terrified dog. The dog may obey when we say “Stay!” “Come!” “Roll over!” and “Sit up!” but he will also be neurotic and confused. By contrast, training with kindness results in someone who is flexible and confident, who doesn’t become upset when situations are unpredictable and insecure.
So whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to “stay” and settle down. Are we experiencing restlessness? Stay! Discursive mind? Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay! What’s for lunch? Stay! What am I doing here? Stay! I can’t stand this another minute! Stay! That is how to cultivate steadfastness.
Clear seeing. After we’ve been meditating for a while, it’s common to feel that we are regressing rather than waking up. “Until I started meditating, I was quite settled; now it feels like I’m always restless.” “I never used to feel anger; now it comes up all the time.” We might complain that meditation is ruining our life, but in fact such experiences are a sign that we’re starting to see more clearly. Through the process of practicing the technique day in and day out, year after year, we begin to be very honest with ourselves. Clear seeing is another way of saying that we have less self- deception.
The Beat poet Jack Kerouac, feeling primed for a spiritual breakthrough, wrote to a friend before he retreated into the wilderness, “If I don’t get a vision on Desolation Peak, then my name ain’t William Blake.” But later he wrote that he found it hard to face the naked truth. “I’d thought, in June when I get to the top . . . and everybody leaves . . . I will come face to face with God or Tathagata (Buddha) and find out once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence and suffering . . . but instead I’d come face to
face with myself, no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it, but face to face with ole Hateful . . . Me.”
Meditation requires patience and maitri. If this process of clear seeing isn’t based on self-compassion it will become a process of self-aggression. We need self-compassion to stabilize our minds. We need it to work with our emotions. We need it in order to stay.
When we learn to meditate, we are instructed to sit in a certain position on a cushion or chair. We’re instructed to just be in the present moment, aware of our breath as it goes out. We’re instructed that when our mind has wandered off, without any harshness or judgmental quality, we should acknowledge that as “thinking” and return to the outbreath. We train in coming back to this moment of being here. In the process of doing this, our fogginess, our bewilderment, our ignorance begin to transform into clear seeing. Thinking becomes a code word for seeing “just what is”—both our clarity and our confusion. We are not trying to get rid of thoughts. Rather, we are clearly seeing our defense mechanisms, our negative beliefs about ourselves, our desires and expectations. We also see our kindness, our bravery, our wisdom.
Through the process of practicing the mindfulness-awareness technique on a regular basis, we can no longer hide from ourselves. We clearly see the barriers we set up to shield us from naked experience. Although we still associate the walls we’ve erected with safety and comfort, we also begin to feel them as a restriction. This claustrophobic situation is important for a warrior. It marks the beginning of longing for an alternative to our small, familiar world. We begin to look for ventilation. We want to dissolve the barriers between ourselves and others.
Experiencing our emotional distress. Many people, including longtime practitioners, use meditation as a means of escaping difficult emotions. It is possible to misuse the label “thinking” as a way of pushing negativity away. No matter how many times we’ve been instructed to stay open to whatever arises, we still can use meditation as repression. Transformation occurs only when we remember, breath by breath, year after year, to move toward our emotional distress without condemning or justifying our experience.
Trungpa Rinpoche describes emotion as a combination of self-existing energy and thoughts. Emotion can’t proliferate without our internal conversations. If we’re angry when we sit down to meditate, we are
instructed to label the thoughts “thinking” and let them go. Yet below the thoughts something remains—a vital, pulsating energy. There is nothing wrong, nothing harmful about that underlying energy. Our practice is to stay with it, to experience it, to leave it as it is.
There are certain advanced techniques in which you intentionally churn up emotions by thinking of people or situations that make you angry or lustful or afraid. The practice is to let the thoughts go and connect directly with the energy, asking yourself, “Who am I without these thoughts?” What we do with meditation practice is simpler than that, but I consider it equally daring. When emotional distress arises uninvited, we let the story line go and abide with the energy. This is a felt experience, not a verbal commentary on what is happening. We can feel the energy in our bodies. If we can stay with it, neither acting it out nor repressing it, it wakes us up. People often say, “I fall asleep all the time in meditation. What shall I do?” There are lots of antidotes to drowsiness, but my favorite is, “Experience anger!”
Not abiding with our energy is a predictable human habit. Acting out and repressing are tactics we use to get away from our emotional pain. For instance, most of us when we’re angry scream or act it out. We alternate expressions of rage with feeling ashamed of ourselves and wallowing in guilt. We become so stuck in repetitive behavior that we become experts at getting all worked up. In this way we continue to strengthen our painful emotions.
One night years ago I came upon my boyfriend passionately embracing another woman. We were in the house of a friend who had a priceless collection of pottery. I was furious and looking for something to throw. Everything I picked up I had to put back down because it was worth at least ten thousand dollars. I was completely enraged and I couldn’t find an outlet! There were no exits from experiencing my own energy. The absurdity of the situation totally cut through my rage. I went outside and looked at the sky and laughed until I cried.
In vajrayana Buddhism it is said that wisdom is inherent in emotions. When we struggle against our energy we reject the source of wisdom. Anger without the fixation is none other than clear-seeing wisdom. Pride without fixation is experienced as equanimity. The energy of passion when it’s free of grasping is wisdom that sees all the angles.
In bodhichitta training we also welcome the living energy of emotions. When our emotions intensify, what we usually feel is fear. This fear is always lurking in our lives. In sitting meditation we practice dropping whatever story we are telling ourselves and leaning into the emotions and the fear. Thus we train in opening the fearful heart to the restlessness of our own energy. We learn to abide with the experience of our emotional distress.
Attention to the present moment. Another factor we cultivate in the transformative process of meditation is attention to this very moment. We make the choice, moment by moment, to be fully here. Attending to our present-moment mind and body is a way of being tender toward self, toward other, and toward the world. This quality of attention is inherent in our ability to love.
Coming back to the present moment takes some effort, but the effort is very light. The instruction is to “touch and go.” We touch thoughts by acknowledging them as thinking and then we let them go. It’s a way of relaxing our struggle, like touching a bubble with a feather. It’s a nonaggressive approach to being here.
Sometimes we find that we like our thoughts so much that we don’t want to let them go. Watching our internal movie is a lot more entertaining than bringing our mind back home. There’s no doubt that our fantasy world can be very juicy and seductive. So we train in using a “soft” effort when interrupting our habitual patterns; in other words, we train in cultivating self-compassion.
We practice meditation to connect with maitri and unconditional openness. By not deliberately blocking anything, by directly touching our thoughts and then letting them go with an attitude of no big deal, we can discover that our fundamental energy is tender, wholesome, and fresh. We can start to train as a warrior, discovering for ourselves that it is bodhichitta, not confusion, that is basic.
In all activities, train with slogans.
—MIND-TRAINING SLOGAN OF ATISHA
IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY Atisha Dipankara brought the complete bodhichitta teachings from India to Tibet. In particular he emphasized what are called the lojong teachings, the teachings for training the mind. What is so up-to-date about these teachings is that they show us how to transform difficult circumstances into the path of enlightenment; what we most dislike about our lives is the meat and potatoes of the mind-training practices of Atisha. What seem like the greatest obstacles—our anger, our resentment, our uptightness—we use as fuel to awaken bodhichitta.
For some time after the death of Atisha these teachings were kept secret, passed on only to close disciples. They did not become widely known again until the twelfth century, when the Tibetan Geshe Chekawa organized them into fifty-nine pithy slogans. These sayings are now known as the lojong slogans or the slogans of Atisha. Becoming familiar with these slogans and bringing them to mind throughout our lives is a valuable bodhichitta practice.1
Geshe Chekawa had a brother who was contemptuous of the Buddhist teachings and was always giving him a hard time. However, when many lepers who were studying with Chekawa became cured, his brother began to get very interested in what they were being taught. Hiding outside Chekawa’s door, the irascible brother started listening to the teachings on using uncomfortable circumstances as the path. When Chekawa began to notice his brother becoming less irritable, more flexible, and more considerate, he realized that his brother must be listening to the mind- training teachings and applying them. It was then that he decided to teach
the lojong slogans far more publicly. He figured that if they could help his brother, they could help anyone.
Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum and don’t interrupt our patterns even slightly. When we feel betrayed or disappointed, does it occur to us to practice? Usually not. But right there, in the midst of our confusion, is where the slogans of Atisha are most penetrating. The easy part is to familiarize ourselves with them. More challenging is to remember to apply them. To remember a slogan right in the midst of irritation—for example, “Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment”—might cause us to pause before acting out our resentment by saying something mean. Once we are familiar with it, a slogan like this will spontaneously pop into our mind and remind us to stay with the emotional energy rather than acting it out.
The mind-training slogans present us with a challenge. When we are escaping the present moment with a habitual reaction, can we recall a slogan that might bring us back? Rather than spinning off, can we let the emotional intensity of that red-hot or icecold moment transform us? The pith of the slogan practice is to take a warrior’s attitude toward discomfort. It encourages us to ask, “How can I practice right now, right on this painful spot, and transform this into the path of awakening?” On any average day of our lives, we have plenty of opportunities to ask this question.
The slogan “Train in the three difficulties” gives us instruction on how to practice, how to interrupt our habitual reactions. The three difficulties are
(1) acknowledging our neurosis as neurosis, (2) doing something different, and (3) aspiring to continue practicing this way.
Acknowledging that we are all churned up is the first and most difficult step in any practice. Without compassionate recognition that we’re stuck, it’s impossible to liberate ourselves from confusion. “Doing something different” is anything that interrupts our ancient habit of tenaciously indulging in our emotions. We do anything to cut the strong tendency to spin out. We can let the story line go and connect with the underlying energy or do any of the bodhichitta practices introduced in this book. Anything that’s nonhabitual will do—even sing and dance or run around the block. We do anything that doesn’t reinforce our crippling habits. The third difficult practice is to then remember that this is not something we do just
once or twice. Interrupting our destructive habits and awakening our heart is the work of a lifetime.
In essence the practice is always the same: instead of falling prey to a chain reaction of revenge or self-hatred, we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction and drop the story lines. Then we feel the bodily sensation completely. One way of doing this is to breathe it into our heart. By acknowledging the emotion, dropping whatever story we are telling ourselves about it, and feeling the energy of the moment, we cultivate compassion for ourselves. Then we could take this a step further. We could recognize that there are millions who are feeling the way we are and breathe in the emotion for all of us with the wish that we could all be free of confusion and limiting habitual reactions. When we can recognize our own confusion with compassion, we can extend that compassion to others who are equally confused. This step of widening the circle of compassion is where the magic of bodhichitta training lies.
The irony is that what we most want to avoid in our lives is crucial to awakening bodhichitta. These juicy emotional spots are where a warrior gains wisdom and compassion. Of course, we’ll want to get out of those spots far more often than we’ll want to stay. That’s why self-compassion and courage are vital. Staying with pain without loving-kindness is just warfare.
When the bottom is falling out we might suddenly recall the slogan “If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained.” If we can practice when we’re jealous, resentful, scornful, when we hate ourselves, then we are well trained. Again, practice means not continuing to strengthen the habitual patterns that keep us trapped, doing anything we can to shake up and ventilate our self-justification and blame. We do our best to stay with the strong energy without acting out or repressing. As we do so, our habits become more porous.
Our patterns are well established, seductive, and comforting. Just wishing for them to be ventilated isn’t enough. Those of us who struggle with this know. Awareness is the key. Do we see the stories that we’re telling ourselves and question their validity? When we are distracted by a strong emotion, do we remember that it is our path? Can we feel the emotion and breathe it into our hearts for ourselves and everyone else? If we can remember to experiment like this even occasionally, we are training as a
warrior. And when we can’t practice when distracted but know that we can’t, we are still training well. Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what’s going on.
When we’re feeling confused about our words and actions and about what does and does not cause harm, out of nowhere the slogan “Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one” might arise. Of the two witnesses—self and other—we’re the only one who knows the full truth about ourselves.
Sometimes the way we see our ignorance is by getting feedback from the outside world. Others can be extremely helpful in showing us our blind spots. Particularly if they cause us to wince, we’d be wise to pay attention to their insights and criticism. But ultimately, we are the ones who know what’s happening in our hearts and minds. We’re the only ones who hear our internal conversations, who know when we withdraw or feel inspired.
When we begin to train we see that we’ve been pretty ignorant about what we’re doing. First, we see that we are rarely able to relax into the present moment. Second, we see that we’ve fabricated all kinds of strategies to avoid staying present, particularly when we’re afraid that whatever’s happening will hurt. We also see our strong belief that if only we could do everything right, we’d be able to find a safe, comfortable, and secure place to spend the rest of our lives.
Growing up in the fifties, for a while I believed that what I saw on television sitcoms was the typical family. They all got along. Nobody got drunk or flew into a rage. There was never any real ugliness. Many of us watching thought, of course, that only our family was the exception to the norm. The truth went unspoken in favor of this American dream.
As we practice, we begin to know the difference between our fantasy and reality. The more steadfast we are with our experience, the more aware we become of when we start to tighten and retreat. When we are denigrating ourselves, do we know it? Do we understand where the desire to lash out at another is coming from? Do we aspire not to keep going down that same old self-destructive road? Do we realize that the suffering we feel is shared by all beings? Do we have any longing for all of us to stop sowing the seeds of misery? Only the “principal one” knows the answers to these questions.
We can’t expect always to catch ourselves spinning off into a habitual reaction. But as we begin to catch ourselves more frequently and work with interrupting our habitual patterns, we know that the bodhichitta training is
seeping in. Our desire to help not just ourselves but all sentient beings will slowly grow.
So in all activities, not just sometimes when things are going well or are particularly bad, train with the bodhichitta slogans of Atisha. But remember, “Don’t try to be the fastest,” “Abandon any hope of fruition,” and “Don’t expect applause”!
1. For more information on the mind-training slogans, please refer to the appendix, where all fifty- nine slogans are listed, as well as to the list of books on slogan training in the bibliography.
May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness. May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering.
May we not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering.
May we dwell in the great equanimity free from passion, aggression, and prejudice.
—THE FOUR LIMITLESS ONES CHANT
IT’S UP TO US. We can spend our lives cultivating our resentments and cravings or we can explore the path of the warrior—nurturing open- mindedness and courage. Most of us keep strengthening our negative habits and therefore sow the seeds of our own suffering. The bodhichitta practices, however, are ways for us to sow the seeds of well-being. Particularly powerful are the aspiration practices of the four limitless qualities—loving- kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.
In these practices we start close to home: we express the wish that we and our loved ones enjoy happiness and be free of suffering. Then we gradually extend that aspiration to a widening circle of relationships. We start just where we are, where the aspirations feel genuine. We begin by acknowledging where we already feel love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. We locate our current experience of these four boundless qualities, however limited they may be: in our love of music, in our empathy with children, in the joy we feel on hearing good news, or in the equanimity we experience when we are with good friends. Even though we may think that what we already experience is too meager, nevertheless we start with that and nurture it. It doesn’t have to be grand.
Cultivating these four qualities gives us insight into our current experience. It gives us understanding of the state of our mind and heart right now. We get to know the experience of love and compassion, of joy and equanimity, and also of their opposites. We learn how it feels when one of the four qualities is stuck and how it feels when it is flowing freely. We never pretend that we feel anything we don’t. The practice depends on embracing our whole experience. By becoming intimate with how we close down and how we open up, we awaken our unlimited potential.
Even though we start this practice with the aspiration for ourselves or our loved ones to be free of suffering, it may feel as if we’re just mouthing words. Even this compassionate wish for those nearest to us may feel phony. But as long as we’re not deceiving ourselves, this pretending has the power to uncover bodhichitta. Even though we know exactly what we feel, we make the aspirations in order to move beyond what now seems possible. After we practice for ourselves and those near us, we stretch even further: we send goodwill toward the neutral people in our lives and also to the people we don’t like.
It might feel like stretching into make-believe to say, “May this person who is driving me crazy enjoy happiness and be free of suffering.” Probably what we genuinely feel is anger. This practice is like a workout that stretches the heart beyond its current capabilities. We can expect to encounter resistance. We discover that we have our limits: we can stay open to some people, but we remain closed to others. We see both our clarity and our confusion. We are learning firsthand what everyone who has ever set out on this path has learned: we are all a paradoxical bundle of rich potential that consists of both neurosis and wisdom.
Aspiration practice is different from making affirmations. Affirmations are like telling yourself that you are compassionate and brave in order to hide the fact that secretly you feel like a loser. In practicing the four limitless qualities, we aren’t trying to convince ourselves of anything, nor are we trying to hide our true feelings. We are expressing our willingness to open our hearts and move closer to our fears. Aspiration practice helps us to do this in increasingly difficult relationships.
If we acknowledge the love, compassion, joy, and equanimity that we feel now and nurture it through these practices, the expansion of those qualities will happen by itself. Awakening the four qualities provides the
necessary warmth for an unlimited strength to emerge. They have the power to loosen up useless habits and to melt the ice-hardness of our fixations and defenses. We are not forcing ourselves to be good. When we see how cold or aggressive we can be, we aren’t asking ourselves to repent. Rather, these aspiration practices develop our ability to remain steadfast with our experience, whatever it may be. In this way we come to know the difference between a closed and an open mind, gradually developing the self- awareness and kindness we need to benefit others. These practices unblock our love and compassion, joy and equanimity, tapping into their boundless potential to expand.
Peace between countries must rest on the solid foundation of love between individuals.
—MAHATMA GANDHI
OUR PERSONAL ATTEMPTS to live humanely in this world are never wasted. Choosing to cultivate love rather than anger just might be what it takes to save the planet from extinction.
What is it that allows our goodwill to expand and our prejudice and anger to decrease? This is a significant question. Traditionally it is said that the root of aggression and suffering is ignorance. But what is it that we are ignoring? Entrenched in the tunnel vision of our personal concerns, what we ignore is our kinship with others. One reason we train as warriorbodhisattvas is to recognize our interconnectedness—to grow in understanding that when we harm another, we are harming ourselves. So we train in recognizing our uptightness. We train in seeing that others are not so different from ourselves. We train in opening our hearts and minds in increasingly difficult situations.
For an aspiring bodhisattva, the essential practice is to cultivate maitri. In the Shambhala teachings this is called “placing our fearful mind in the cradle of loving-kindness.” Another image for maitri or loving-kindness is that of a mother bird who protects and cares for her young until they are strong enough to fly away. People sometimes ask, “Who am I in this image
—the mother or the chicks?” The answer is we’re both: both the loving mother and those ugly little chicks. It’s easy to identify with the babies— blind, raw, and desperate for attention. We are a poignant mixture of something that isn’t all that beautiful and yet is dearly loved. Whether this is our attitude toward ourselves or toward others, it is the key to learning
how to love. We stay with ourselves and others when we’re screaming for food and have no feathers and also when we are more grown up and more cute by worldly standards.
In cultivating loving-kindness, we train first to be honest, loving, and compassionate toward ourselves. Rather than nurturing self-denigration, we begin to cultivate a clear-seeing kindness. Sometimes we feel good and strong. Sometimes we feel inadequate and weak. But like mother love, maitri is unconditional. No matter how we feel, we can aspire to be happy. We can learn to act and think in ways that sow seeds of our future well- being, gradually becoming more aware of what causes happiness as well as what causes distress. Without loving-kindness for ourselves, it is difficult, if not impossible, to genuinely feel it for others.
To move from aggression to unconditional loving-kindness can seem like a daunting task. But we start with what’s familiar. The instruction for cultivating limitless maitri is to first find the tenderness that we already have. We touch in with our gratitude or appreciation—our current ability to feel goodwill. In a very nontheoretical way we contact the soft spot of bodhichitta. Whether we find it in the tenderness of feeling love or the vulnerability of feeling lonely is immaterial. If we look for that soft, unguarded place, we can always find it.
For instance, even in the rock-hardness of rage, if we look below the surface of the aggression, we’ll generally find fear. There’s something beneath the solidity of anger that feels very raw and sore. Underneath the defensiveness is the brokenhearted, unshielded quality of bodhichitta. Rather than feel this tenderness, however, we tend to close down and protect against the discomfort. That we close down is not a problem. In fact, to become aware of when we do so is an important part of the training. The first step in cultivating loving-kindness is to see when we are erecting barriers between ourselves and others. This compassionate recognition is essential. Unless we understand—in a nonjudgmental way—that we are hardening our hearts, there is no possibility of dissolving that armor. Without dissolving the armor, the loving-kindness of bodhichitta is always held back. We are always obstructing our innate capacity to love without an agenda.
So we train in awakening the loving-kindness of bodhichitta in all kinds of relationships, both openhearted and blocked. All these relationships
become aids in uncovering our ability to feel and express love.
The formal practice of loving-kindness or maitri has seven stages.1 We begin by engendering loving-kindness for ourselves and then expand it at our own pace to include loved ones, friends, “neutral” persons, those who irritate us, all of the above as a group, and finally, all beings throughout time and space. We gradually widen the circle of loving-kindness.
The traditional aspiration used is “May I and others enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.” In teaching this I’ve found that people sometimes have trouble with the word happiness. They say things like, “Suffering has taught me a lot and happiness gets me in trouble.” They aren’t sure that happiness is what they wish for themselves or others. This may be because our conventional notion of happiness is far too limited.
To get at the heart of the loving-kindness practice we may have to put the aspiration for happiness into our own words. One man told me of his aspiration that he and others realize their fullest potential. The aspiration of a woman I know is that we all learn to speak and think and act in a way that adds up to fundamental well-being. The aspiration of another person is that all beings—including himself—begin to trust in their basic goodness. It is important that each of us make the aspiration as genuine as possible.
To work with this practice it is useful to consider ahead of time people or animals for whom we already feel good heart. This might be a feeling of gratitude or appreciation or a feeling of tenderness. Any feeling of genuine heart will do. If it’s helpful, we can even start a list of those who easily inspire these feelings.
Traditionally we begin the practice with ourselves, but sometimes people find that too hard. It’s important to include ourselves, but whom we start with isn’t critical. The point is to contact an honest feeling of goodwill and encourage it to expand. If you can easily open your heart to your dog or cat, start there and then move out to more challenging relationships. The practice is about connecting with the soft spot in a way that is real to us, not about faking a particular feeling. Just locate that ability to feel good heart and cherish it, even if it ebbs and flows.
Before we begin the aspiration practice we sit quietly for a few minutes. Then we begin the seven-step loving-kindness practice. We say, “May I (or a loved one) enjoy happiness and the root of happiness,” or we put that in
our own words. Perhaps we say, “May we learn to be truly loving people.” Or “May we have enough to eat and a place to sleep where we will be safe and comfortable.”
After making this aspiration for ourselves and for someone we easily love, we move on to a friend. This relationship should be slightly more complicated. For example, we care for her but perhaps we also feel jealous. We say, “May Jane enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.” And we send loving-kindness her way. We can spend as much time as we want with each stage of this process, not criticizing ourselves if we sometimes find it artificial or contrived.
The fourth step is to cultivate loving-kindness for a neutral person. This would be someone we encounter but don’t really know. We don’t feel one way or another toward this person. We say, “May the shopkeeper (the bus driver, the woman who lives down the hall, the panhandler on the street) enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.” Then we watch without judgment to see if our heart opens or closes down. We practice awareness of when tenderness is blocked and when it is flowing freely.
The Buddhist teachings tell us that over the course of many lifetimes all beings have been our mothers. At one time, all these people have sacrificed their own comfort for our well-being, and vice versa. Although these days “mother” doesn’t always have a positive connotation, the point is to consider everyone we encounter as our beloved. By noticing and appreciating the people in the streets, at the grocery store, in traffic jams, in airports, we can increase our capacity to love. We use these aspirations to weaken the barriers of indifference and liberate the good heart of loving- kindness.
The fifth step of the maitri practice is to work with a difficult person, someone we find irritating; when we see this person we armor our heart. We continue as before by making the loving-kindness aspiration. “May this really annoying person enjoy happiness and the root of happiness. May this woman whom I resent awaken bodhichitta.” It’s best, at least at the beginning, not to practice with our heaviest relationships. If we jump right into the traumas of our lives, we’ll feel overwhelmed. Then we’ll begin to fear the practice and walk away. So in this fifth stage we work with the feeling of negativity, but not the most heavy-duty variety. If we start with
less-difficult relationships first, we can trust that our capacity to stay open to people we dislike will gradually expand by itself.
Because they challenge us to the limits of our open-mindedness, difficult relationships are in many ways the most valuable for practice. The people who irritate us are the ones who inevitably blow our cover. Through them we might come to see our defenses very clearly. Shantideva explained it like this: If we wish to practice generosity and a beggar arrives, that’s good news. The beggar gives us an opportunity to learn how to give. Likewise, if we want to practice patience and unconditional loving-kindness and an enemy arrives, we are in luck. Without the ones who irritate us, we never have a chance to practice.
Before Atisha brought the bodhichitta practices from India to Tibet, he was told that the people in Tibet were universally cheerful and kind. He was afraid that if this was the case, he’d have no one to provoke him and show him where he needed to train. So he chose to bring along the most difficult person in his life—his Bengali tea boy, who was as skillful at showing him his faults as his guru. The joke is that he really didn’t need that Bengali servant. There were already plenty of irritating people in Tibet.
The sixth stage of the practice is called “completely dissolving the barriers.” We visualize ourselves, our beloved, a friend, a neutral person, and our current Bengali tea person—all standing in front of us. At this stage we try to connect with the feeling of kind heart for all these individuals. We evoke equal loving-kindness for the loved ones and the enemies in our lives, as well as for those who evoke indifference. We say, “May each of us equally enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.” Or again, we can put this in our own words.
The seventh and final stage is to expand loving-kindness to all beings. We extend our aspiration as far as we can. We can start with those nearby and gradually widen our circle to include the neighborhood, the city, the nation, and the universe. “May all beings in the universe enjoy happiness and its causes.” This is equivalent to making the aspiration that the whole universe be at peace.
Each stage of the practice gives us a further chance to loosen up the tightness of our hearts. It’s fine to take just one stage and work with that for a while. In fact, many people train in the first stage for a week or more, aspiring over and over that they themselves enjoy happiness and its cause.
We can also simplify the stages. One form of loving-kindness practice has just these three steps: “May I enjoy happiness and its causes. May you enjoy happiness and its causes. May all beings everywhere be happy.”
At the end of the loving-kindness practice, we drop all the words, all the wishes, and simply come back to the nonconceptual simplicity of sitting meditation.
The main point of doing this practice is to uncover the ability to love without bias. Making the aspirations is like watering the seed of goodwill so it can begin to grow. In the course of doing this we’ll become acquainted with our barriers—numbness, inadequacy, skepticism, resentment, righteous indignation, pride, and all the others. As we continue to do this practice, we make friends with our fears, our grasping, and our aversion. Unconditional good heart toward others is not even a possibility unless we attend to our own demons. Everything we encounter thus becomes an opportunity for practicing loving-kindness.
1. See the appendix for a concise overview.