“Our life now is just like meditation. No expectations. Which is not to say we never get depressed, because we do. Still, I wouldn’t trade places with couples who are physically intact but can’t stand each other. If Jack and I didn’t communicate as well as we do and have such deep love for one another, ours would be a completely different story.”
Through it all, she says, “Three things have kept me relatively sane—my daily meditation practice, yoga, and therapy. Meditation doesn’t change the fact that the situation sucks, but it has given me the capacity to deal with it and to stay in the present as much as possible. Jack and I both know that we don’t know what lies ahead. We’re not in control. We just need to remember to remember.”
CHAPTER 18 PRACTICES
Forgiveness meditation
Meditating on forgiveness is not terribly different from lovingkindness or sympathetic joy practices, as all of them invite us to be with our emotional states without judging them and to use the meditation as the anchor of our attention. These practices require courage, as we are not denying our suffering or the harmful actions we’ve taken.
Forgiveness is not passive, but an active gesture of releasing feelings like anger, guilt, and resentment, all of which deplete us if we become lost in them. Forgiveness demands presence, reminding us that we are not the same as the feelings we possess in a given situation, nor is the person who we’ve harmed or who has harmed us.
Traditionally, the meditation is done in three parts: first, you ask forgiveness from those you have harmed; next, you extend forgiveness to those who have harmed you; and the final practice is that of self-forgiveness, for all of those times we harm ourselves with judgmental habits of mind.
1. Sit comfortably, and allow the breath to be natural. Begin by silently (or audibly) reciting phrases of forgiveness for those you have harmed. You may try, “If I have hurt or harmed anyone knowingly or unknowingly, I ask their forgiveness.”
2. Notice what comes up. You may find that offering forgiveness to one person may catalyze memories of another tough situation or person. Don’t push these feelings or thoughts away—but maintain your focus on the practice, and don’t get lost in guilt or self-blame about your distraction. As other thoughts arise, send your forgiveness in these new directions.
3. Next (after however long you want to spend on the first part of the reflection), you can begin to offer forgiveness to those who have harmed you: “If anyone has hurt or harmed me, knowingly or unknowingly, I forgive them.”
4. Once again, thinking about past painful experiences may trigger emotion. As these feelings, images, and memories bubble to the surface, you may simply recite, “I forgive you.”
5. Finally, we turn our attention to forgiveness of ourselves. Most of us have experienced self-blame—at work, in relationships, or simply because we have habitually kept ourselves in cycles of perfectionism. “For all of the ways I have hurt or harmed myself, knowingly or unknowingly, I offer forgiveness.”
Creating space
One of my students tells me that she often asks herself, “Am I opening or am I closing?” when she gets into arguments with close friends, family members, or her significant other.
To her, “opening” in this case is the act of allowing dialogue, of seeing others’ perspectives, of moving toward resolution; “closing,” by contrast, may be withdrawing, seeking to perpetuate an argument. The very idea of contraction makes me think of how New Yorkers literally contract their bodies during winter—shoulders hunch forward and arms clench in an effort to stay warm. It is our nature to “close” when we want to protect ourselves.
But as we saw in Marjorie’s story, creating more space around pain is fruitful. When we expand in the face of suffering, we can feel more—such as where the pain registers in our bodies, or what might have been going on for the other person. We may even wonder about our roles. This exercise is one of self-exploration. Consider the following questions as tools for staying open, expansive, and spacious during or after conflict.
–Where in my body do I feel anger? Sadness? Resentment? Guilt?
–When I try to relax my body, how do my emotions respond?
–What do I know about the other person’s experience that may have contributed to this conflict? Childhood wounds? Past relationships?
–What are some of my past experiences that resonate with this one? What did I learn last time?
–How would I react to myself if I were the other person during this conversation? What was my tone of voice like? My body language?
–What might have happened if I expressed myself differently? (Here you may want to consider various alternative scenarios.)
Note that these questions aren’t meant to send you into a rabbit hole of rumination and regret about the past; rather, you can think of them as exercises in curiosity and creativity. Visualize each question as a way of creating more space and perspective.
SECTION 3
INTRODUCTION
The Wide Lens of Compassion
IN THIS FINAL SECTION, WE consider whether we can learn to see and feel the love that is waiting to be born between ourselves and all others—from the salesperson we know only peripherally to strangers we see only once and even to those whose behaviors may oppose us, near or far. What would it look like to bring greater attention and compassion to these more remote—or perhaps seemingly inconsequential or even negative—relationships?
The love we develop for ourselves keeps this aspiration from being shallow idealism or martyrdom. The love we may have for another is a testing ground for giving and receiving, another strength we take into love for all. And the love we develop for all of life helps us shape a practice of love for life itself.
I have a good friend who looks at me like I’m crazy whenever I talk about loving everyone. “Are you kidding me?” she asks. “Love everybody? I have enough trouble loving the people I already love! And now I’m supposed to love people I don’t care about, not to mention people who do terrible things?”
I get her point. We live in a world punctuated by horrifying acts of violence, in which entire groups of people are marginalized by virtue of race, class, religion, nationality, and sexual preference. How is it even possible to imagine loving all? And what about the truly difficult people in our daily lives—the colleague who takes credit for our ideas, the spendthrift relative who’s always asking for a loan, the neighbor who cut down our tree. Not to mention the random thorns in our side who spike our blood pressure and pull into parking places that should have been ours. There are days when we can feel good simply about staying calm.
I find myself inspired by the perspective my friend and fellow author Jason Garner offers: “At times it can seem glib, naïve, or perhaps even stupid to talk about loving all beings. When we look around our world, with wars, terrorist attacks, people killing each other over things like race, religion, and gender—so many incidents of beings inflicting pain on one another—how can we possibly hold a space for loving everyone? But this is, in fact, exactly why we must … We’re called to practice a love that is more courageous than all the terror we see in our world, because if we aren’t bold in our love, then the hate wins out. And there is nothing more stupid than that. So we love one another even when it’s seemingly impossible; we look for the humanity behind the acts of hatred; we find our own pain in the pain of the world; and we meet it all with an intensity of love that is fitting of our intense times.”
ENLARGING THE PICTURE
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ, BESTSELLING author of The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, recounts how the story of her beloved blue sweater, given to her by an uncle when she was a little girl, inspired her to start Acumen, a non-profit social venture fund that addresses global poverty. One day while jogging in Kigali, Rwanda, Novogratz spotted a small boy wearing the blue sweater—still bearing her name tag—that she’d donated to her local Goodwill a decade earlier, more than five thousand miles away. “I’v
e held that story as a metaphor for how interconnected we are, how our action and our inaction can impact people we might never know and never meet, every day of our lives, all around the world,” she says.
For that, we need to set an intention, even at times when we’re not fully inhabiting what we know to be true. There’s no denying that it takes effort to set the intention to see our fundamental connectedness with others. In a certain sense, the path of least resistance in life is survival, getting by—doing the least to complete what’s necessary to put food on the table and stay safe.
If we stretch ourselves to open our minds, to see our shared humanity with others, we allow ourselves to see the existence of community and generosity in unexpected places. We just need to challenge ourselves to opt for the path that may take a little more effort but actually helps us let go of our conditioned resistances.
Yet it’s also true that we miss a lot when we push for unity at the expense of understanding the differences in context, experience, hopes, and fears we each may have. It’s all too easy to slip into a “we’re all alike at the core, so we should all get along” kind of statement. It’s not real love if we don’t also honor our differences—as long-term couples and friends find out, and as communities and workplaces also find out.
Just think about what it’s been like when you are in a place—a group, an event, a training session—where you have the feeling “I belong here,” in contrast to what it’s like when you are in a place where you sense you don’t belong—the uneasiness, the uncertainty about social cues, the dread of inevitable humiliation.
What about being in an environment where you’ve been told outright you don’t belong? Then our anxiety wouldn’t seem so much about the flight-or-fight syndrome built into our biology from long, long ago … it would feel (and in fact be) awfully current.
So the question arises—along with our oneness, can we also recognize the vast relativity of experience and make room for it? The combination of realizing our distinctiveness along with our unity is seeing interdependence.
Today, with unprecedented threats to our planet and divisions among people, awareness of our interdependence is no longer optional. It’s critical that we widen our attention to include those we encounter as we go about our daily lives, including our dry cleaner and the stranger sitting next to us on the subway. We extend our sense of inclusion even further to people we may have disagreements with, people whose actions we disapprove of, even those who may have harmed us or those we care for. We don’t have to like what they’ve done, and we might take very strong action to try to prevent their doing it ever again, but as our experiences of the universality of suffering grows, our sense of interconnectedness deepens, and we begin to wish others could be free in a new way—in spite of their actions, their beliefs, or their positions in the world.
GETTING TO COMPASSION
AS MODERN NEUROSCIENCE has discovered, we’re wired for empathy. We literally have brain circuits focused on “feeling with” others. “It’s a genetic imperative for us to care,” says James Doty, M.D., a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University. It’s essential to the survival and flourishing of our species.
But the neural circuits related to empathy aren’t always activated, especially when we’re feeling anxious or stressed. And at other times, we may feel so much empathy for another’s pain that we lose our own sense of equilibrium.
In 2004, neuroscientist Tania Singer and her colleagues published an important paper showing that pain-sensitive regions in the brain get activated when we empathize with someone else’s pain. In other words, when we say, “I feel your pain,” we’re voicing the literal truth. But this is not always a good thing.
Singer, who is director of the Department of Social Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, now calls empathy a “precursor to compassion,” but notes that too much of it can have negative consequences. In an interview with the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, she explained, “When I empathize with the suffering of others, I feel the pain of others; I am suffering myself. This can become so intense that it produces empathic distress in me and in the long run could lead to burnout and withdrawal. In contrast, if we feel compassion for someone else’s suffering, we do not necessarily feel their pain, but we feel concern—a feeling of love and warmth—and we can develop a strong motivation to help the other.”
What’s more, Singer said, even the neural networks underlying empathy and compassion are different; the former increases painful emotions, while the latter is associated with positive feelings.
This has a lot of implications for burnout, a distinct kind of exhaustion often characterized by loss of motivation, stress, anger, depression, and dissatisfaction. As a meditation teacher, I often lead retreats for caregivers—mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, spouses, nurses, doctors and hospice workers, therapists, chaplains, and many others. People in positions or professions of caregiving can be particularly vulnerable to burnout, as they tend to empathize with and take care of others without necessarily refilling their well with self-care.
Ellen, who works at a school for students diagnosed with mental illnesses—spanning mild anxiety to severe schizophrenia—is prone to burnout at her job. “I am often in a classroom full of emotional expressions, including anger, anxiety, muteness, screaming, throwing chairs, tuning out with an iPod, tears, and more tears,” she tells me. Ellen is passionate about her work and committed to her students, but describes herself and her fellow teachers as getting “pummeled” by the student body’s resistance to rule enforcement.
Unsurprisingly, Ellen explains that she feels not only frustration and fatigue on the job but often also a sense of hopelessness. When I asked Ellen how she finds meaning each day or if she relies on any self-care routines to replenish her energy, she responded by telling me that she is renewed by the sense of emotional openness between her and her students. “The only real hope I could see is when those kids sincerely felt that you cared about them and believed they could be better and saw some potential in them.”
And in addition to offering students encouragement and support, Ellen admits vulnerability of her own: “And we also told them, ‘I feel that way, too, sometimes’; ‘It is really hard for me to get to work some days, too’ … Telling them the truth, showing them that we can share the same feelings … has made a difference to them and, I think, given them hope. And it gave me hope to give them hope.”
The authenticity that Ellen brought to her relationships with students—and that they gave her in return—helped nourish her, despite the exhaustion and frustration she felt. Her meditation practice fostered that emotional openness, helped her not to be engulfed by the pain of her students, and taught her how to return to a place of steadiness in those times she did get overwhelmed. Like Ellen, we can be compassionate while also strong; understanding while also savvy. Healthy boundaries require balance.
While we discussed the importance of healthy boundaries in close relationships throughout section 2, here we will go on to explore how we can be more skillful with compassion and empathy when it comes to challenging relationships and groups of people that we may not know intimately.
We see that compassion is not just a feeling but a skill that can be learned and applied in our lives in surprising ways. While we typically think of this skill as benefiting others, compassion can also be thought of as an attitude toward living, one that fosters self-care. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s a strong link between compassion and both physical and mental health. When we act compassionately, our vagal tone—or the neural connection between the brain, heart, and other organs—increases. This, in turn, leads to the release of oxytocin, the feel-good neuropeptide that calms the sympathetic nervous system, including the fight-or-flight—that is, fear—response. As a result, our heart rates and blood pressures drop, inflammation is reduced, our immune systems are strengthened, we’re less prone to stress—and we may even live longe
r. Researchers have actually proven that strong social relationships predict a 50 percent increased chance of longevity. What’s more, the greatest advantages come not from receiving love but from offering it to others.
Until we can relate to our own pain with kindness and acceptance, we’re more likely to defend ourselves against the pain of others. This self-defense may mean we shut down when we perceive others are in need, acting out of a self-protective impulse to numb ourselves to any pain at all.
Or perhaps we do, in fact, engage with the pain of others, but are inclined to offer support out of a desire to receive validation, praise, or love to soothe our own pain. If we turn away from our own pain, we may find ourselves projecting this aversion onto others, seeing them as somehow inadequate for being in a troubled situation. And, paradoxically, when we truly allow ourselves to feel our own pain, over time it comes to seem less personal. We start to recognize that what we’ve perceived as our pain is, at a deeper level, the pain inherent in human existence. In fact, it is awareness of both our shared pain and our longing for happiness that links us to other people and helps us to turn toward them with compassion.
Kevin Berrill, a clinical social worker and bereavement counselor who teaches mindfulness to oncology patients and their families, says that he’s able to sense the difference between empathy and compassion in himself when working with clients. “I’m aware that I’m best able to serve when I’m in a compassionate place,” he says, noting that, over the course of his career, there’s been a shift from a tendency to feel another’s pain to simply be present with it. “I love my work the most when I’m in that state of flow. I don’t try to offer solutions or fix anything prematurely. I feel calm and peaceful and fully engaged. I can hold another’s pain without drowning in it,” he explains, adding that he can go through a wrenching session and come out feeling awake and alive. Berrill attributes the movement from empathy toward compassion to his own practice of mindfulness. And, he says, “When I’m in that place of compassion, I feel a deep sense of kinship and affection for the people I’m working with. I find myself loving them.”
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