“No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility; you must live for your neighbor, if you would live for yourself.”
– Seneca
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
– John Donne
How did it feel to send loving and kind thoughts to yourself?
In this lesson, we are going to practice extending our lovingkindness to others. You’re possibly already noticing how mindfulness is transforming the way you interact with others. While mindfulness brings a lot of individual benefits when we practice it, I believe one of the most powerful things about it is how it transforms how we approach other people.
As mindfulness helps us understand our emotions and thoughts, we come to a deeper understanding of the human condition. We begin to recognize that sadness, joy, anger, jealousy, gratitude, and all the other emotions are simply part of being human. We see that what makes us suffer, makes other suffer too. We discover that another’s joy can become our joy, too.
Albert Einstein wrote,
A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”
As I noted in the previous video, the more aware we are of the present moment, the more in tune we are with the experiences of others, their joy and their pain. This generates compassion — a true desire that all creatures be free of suffering. We act to help others not because we know we should or because it’s what we’ve been told to do. We help others because we are aware that their pain is our pain.
Our awareness becomes compassionate engagement with life.
The audio download in this lesson is a guided meditation for practicing lovingkindness by sending kind thoughts to others. We will start by focusing on someone we love, and then a neutral person, and finally end with sending kind thoughts to a difficult person. Again, the practice can feel a bit contrived at first, but over time can be very powerful.
This practice is especially helpful for transforming our feelings toward people we dislike. When we dislike someone, or wish them ill, it doesn’t make us feel very good, does it? Every thing the person does bothers us, and it prevents us from helping this person. Carrying around anger is essentially a way of letting other people’s mistakes punish us. By practicing lovingkindness, we can begin to soften towards this individual. It doesn’t mean we need to become besties with this person, but we can radically change our experiences with them.
We will continue to explore “interpersonal mindfulness” in the next several lessons as we talk about mindful communication and forgiveness. In the meantime, you can listen to the audio for another practice session.