As Evelyn discovered, the first step toward feeling compassion for others is to set the intention. Regardless of our fears or feelings of aversion, we can take joy in the possibility of stretching ourselves—not in a coercive way in which we judge ourselves as bad, but gently, with kindness and self-acceptance.
CHAPTER 19 PRACTICES
Considering the neutral cast of characters
As I wrote in the introduction to this section, I realize the idea of love for all others can be off-putting to some. Often when I teach about practicing lovingkindness for all others, I hear a chorus of reactions something like this: “How can I possibly make a difference? I’m too [take your pick: insignificant, busy, old, young, exhausted, overcommitted, stressed out]. I know I should meditate and exercise, eat a healthful diet, and get plenty of sleep while also meeting deadlines at my high-pressure job. Sorry, but I just don’t think I have it in me to love everybody, too!”
It’s true that the word everybody or the phrase all others can feel overwhelming. So for this exercise, I invite you to get more specific in thinking about who some of these omnipresent others are. Consider those individuals we encounter every day in our lives, but who we may not consider essential to us—or even necessarily good or bad.
1. Draw a vertical line down the center of a piece of paper.
2. In the left-hand column, write down the names of neutral people in your life, or descriptions of people whose names you don’t know. Examples include the dry-cleaning clerk, the delivery person from your favorite takeout restaurant, a person you see often on your morning commute, and so on.
3. In the right-hand column, write down a short intention for how you’d like to shift your behavior toward this person. Perhaps you choose to smile casually at your subway companions rather than look away or down at your cell phone. And on occasion, you may forget your intention or act absent-mindedly. There’s great importance in forgiving yourself so that you can gain resolve and begin again. Remember that connecting with others, even in these small ways, is proven to boost our own quality of life.
Street meditation
Many associate the word meditation with a formal practice—sitting in lotus pose, incense wafting, perfect quiet, and dim lighting. Yet one of my favorite ways to practice meditation is on the move—sitting in the back of a cab, walking around New York City, waiting in line to buy groceries at the supermarket.
At every moment, we can integrate the practice of paying attention with a little more focus and intention—to the breath, to our sensations, to others, to ourselves.
The practice of lovingkindness is a wonderful way to practice in everyday life. While traditional lovingkindness meditation practices begin by directing lovingkindness to the self and then move gradually outward—first to a benefactor, a friend, then to a neutral person, a difficult person, and finally all beings—you can begin the street practices here with neutral people.
1. As you walk around, wait in line, shop at the mall or grocery store, silently repeat phrases of lovingkindness to those you encounter along the way. These may be people you have short conversations with such as a cashier, or people who pass you by and may not notice you’re there.
2. Note that you needn’t focus on one person for several minutes. You may choose to direct one, two, or three phrases of lovingkindness to a specific individual in your surroundings and then shift your focus to another person you encounter next.
3. As you go about your normal activity, stop intermittently to take stock of how you’re feeling. Do these street practices expand your sense of perspective? Do you feel lighter, happier? You may even want to reflect on this at greater length later in the day.
Some phrases to consider are:
■ May you be healthy.
■ May you be strong.
■ May you live with ease.
■ May you have mental happiness.
■ May you be free of struggle.
20
CHALLENGING OUR ASSUMPTIONS
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
NOT LONG AGO, A WRITER friend was shocked to realize how quickly and unconsciously he sizes up other people. His aha moment came over dinner at a restaurant following a talk he’d just given at a midwestern university. He was enjoying his meal with friends from the English department when a woman approached their table.
“She was rather dowdy looking,” my friend recalls. “I automatically assumed she lived in a rural area, probably on a farm. I also pegged her as someone who hadn’t had much education.
“She told me how much she’d enjoyed the lecture, especially the part about Proust. I thanked her and was turning back to my friends when she blew my preconceptions right out the window. This plain-looking woman, about whom I had rushed to judgment, announced that although she thinks there are some decent translations, she much prefers reading Remembrances of Things Past in the original French.”
We all do it. We hastily judge every day of our lives, without even being aware that that’s what we’re doing. It can take an encounter like the one my friend had with the Proust maven to wake us up to our habit of automatically labeling others and plugging them into categories of our own devising. We fabricate stories about them based on little or no information. This is how our species tries to manage the world around us. When we know (or think we know) that someone is one of us, as opposed to one of them, we rest more easily at night.
BIAS IS REAL
RATHER THAN BEAT ourselves up for labeling others (or deny that we do), we need to understand bias in order to be able to work with it. Bias is a basic human trait that’s part of our wiring for survival. Bias helped early humans size up strangers quickly and decide who was a threat and who could be safely admitted to the cave. Those who made the right choice survived, reproduced, and passed the trait on to their children. Bias continues to be our human inheritance, and we’re strongly conditioned to think of others in terms of stereotypes.
At times, snap judgments do protect us from danger—we sense we’re being followed as we walk down a dark street at night, so we change our route home. If we are part of a particular group—because of our ethnicity, sexual preference, appearance—we can wisely understand our vulnerabilities in certain situations. For example, I don’t have a single African American friend, of any socioeconomic class, who has not spoken to their male child about being very, very careful if stopped by police—and increasingly, their female child, too.
Yet we can also see that automatically and perpetually fearing strangers can be a hurtful and damaging habit. A strong sense of justice and ethics helps to tamp down unwarranted fear of those whom we reflexively view as somehow different, and stops us from overreacting. And rather than flatter ourselves that we can become completely bias-free, we can find ways to work more skillfully with our evolutionary programming and cultural conditioning.
But sometimes our primitive fear response takes over, and we may overreact without even being aware of it. This may provide us with a fleeting sense of control in a chaotic world, but it also isolates us and narrows our experience of life. We start to inhabit a world of mental projections, filled with shadows and ghosts bred in the mind. In other words, we’re brainwashed by our knee-jerk reactivity.
HOW WE JUDGE OTHERS
RESEARCH SHOWS THAT most of us make split-second assumptions about people based on superficial differences in appearance. The U.S. epidemic of tragic killings of unarmed black men by police officers starkly underscores the point.
This is not just a white-versus-black issue. Rhonda Magee, a professor of law at the University of San Francisco, tells this story on the Greater Good Web site: “When I was promoted to tenured full professor, the dean of my law school kindly had flowers sent to me at my home in Pacific Heights, an overpriced San Francisco neighborhood almost devoid of black residents. I opened the door to find a
tall young African American deliveryman who announced, ‘Delivery for Professor Magee.’ I, a petite black woman, dressed for a Saturday spent in my own home, reached for the flowers, saying, ‘I am Professor Magee.’
“The deliveryman looked down at the order and back up at me.” Magee explains that while she was not exactly sure what caused the deliveryman not to believe she was the gift recipient, she was sure that her looks had something to do with it. “It seems inescapable that his confusion had something to do with features of my social identity,” she elaborates. Magee recalls feeling like the man perceived her social identity as a black woman to be “inconsistent with the identity of ‘professor’ and ‘resident’ of a home in an upscale neighborhood.”
More often than not, we hear about racial biases in the United States within the context of white-versus-black racism, police brutality, and the relationship between race and mass incarceration. But there are also everyday, insidious ways that race clouds our judgment and determines our decisions and reactions. Of course, as shown by Magee’s story, bias is not just experienced by white people. “As the story of my encounter with the black deliveryman indicates,” Magee concludes, “none of us is immune: Black people may be as conditioned as anyone else by stereotypes and unconscious expectations.”
RECALIBRATING HOW WE RESPOND
BECAUSE WE LIVE in a richly diverse world in which, more and more, we depend on one another, isolating ourselves is simply not an option. “We are social creatures and need to be in relationship with others,” john a. powell, a law professor and researcher on race at the University of California–Berkeley, told Mindful magazine. “Yet we have ways of denying our interconnectedness, different ways of marginalizing each other. A lot of times we do things we aren’t consciously aware of. It causes suffering all around.” And, he adds, “Perhaps most damaging of all, bias can be internalized and make the subjects feel and perform as if the biases about them are true.”
Though bias may be most obvious with regard to race or ethnicity, our assumptions affect all areas of our lives, from gender inequality in the workplace to discrimination against members of the LGBT community to flagrant ageism—all well-documented examples. But we may also judge others on factors hidden even from ourselves.
This was an important discovery for a student at a lovingkindness retreat I taught in downtown Oakland some years ago. She had decided to practice walking meditation by going to the nearby railway station and sending lovingkindness to random passengers getting off a train. Once there, she noticed a man heading in her direction, and for reasons she could never pinpoint, she took an instant dislike to him. But before she was able to get away, he approached her and began speaking.
“I’ve never done anything like this in my life,” the man said. “But you look like such a kind person, and I’m having a hard time; I’d like to ask you to pray for me.”
My student was stunned by the gap between her negative projections and the actual flesh-and-blood human being who stood before her. Of course, she readily agreed to pray for him—and now remembers him as one of her most valuable teachers.
Sometimes our sense of being threatened grows out of a feeling of deficiency in our own lives. Carolyn was a struggling single mother of two young children when she found herself getting angry with a newcomer in her yoga class. It all began when the woman arrived early and took Carolyn’s usual spot in the front row. The next week, she did it again, and by the third week, Carolyn was silently seething at this woman, who appeared to be at least ten years younger and twenty pounds thinner than Carolyn, and, judging by the large diamond ring flashing on her finger, as rich as Croesus.
“I hated her,” Carolyn recalls. “I knew it was wrong, but I just hated her. Not only did she have what I imagined to be the perfect life, she had a perfect body and could hold the hard poses much longer than I could. And though at the time I was practicing lovingkindness, I decided that this was one person I did not have to love.”
After about six weeks, the woman stopped coming to class, and Carolyn more or less forgot about her until she showed up several months later. That morning, Carolyn was back in her old spot in the front row and the woman set her mat down right next to Carolyn’s.
“I couldn’t even look at her,” Carolyn says. “I felt myself stiffen and spent the whole class obsessing about how unfair it was that her life was so easy and I had to work so hard just to feed my kids. But then, at the end, while we were doing corpse pose, I heard her weeping. I looked over and saw that her whole body was shaking. After class, she came over and apologized. ‘I’m so sorry if I disturbed you,’ she said. ‘I’ve been having kind of a rough time.’
“Her face was all splotchy, and she looked so drawn and thin that I asked her what was wrong. She told me, between sobs, that her four-year-old daughter had died of leukemia three weeks earlier.
“I was stunned. I’d made up this whole story about her and her perfect but shallow life, when the reality was so incredibly sad. Everyone suffers, no exceptions. We’ll never know what other people’s life really is like until we put ourselves in their shoes. Looking back, it was crazy that in my mind I was so mad at her, when in reality I knew absolutely nothing about her.”
Simply disliking someone because of your own sense of deficiency is also a strong tendency. Theresa says, “I remember taking a visceral dislike to a guy who used to wait with his group for the other therapist who shared my therapist’s office. He was always regaling the other group members with his troubles, his hypoglycemia, whatever. I never exchanged a word with him, but I would seize up with judgment just seeing him. It was quite a while before I realized I was jealous because he felt so free to seek the attention and care of the group.”
Sometimes our stereotypes hit even closer to home. As Mother’s Day approached, my friend Doris couldn’t help imagining a celebration that matched her own Hallmark ideal: she and her daughter, Cora, would get dressed up and go out for brunch at a table adorned with spring flowers.
The reality was that Cora had dropped out of college to join a punk band and was scraping by as a barista. And Cora had invited her to a crummy theater in a bad neighborhood for a special Mother’s Day showing of an eighties movie called Repo Man—all arranged by her punk friends. Doris regretted it the minute she said yes.
But to her surprise, they had a wonderful day. Cora made a sumptuous breakfast for the two of them at her tiny apartment, and they sat around talking until movie time. The theater was filled with tattooed and pierced young people—and their mothers. There were even flowers and free beer for the mothers, and Doris was delighted to meet some of the other punk-rock moms. She found herself filled with joy. Because Doris had not insisted on her own preferences, Cora had invited her into her own world and expressed her love in a way that felt authentic and real.
TEARING DOWN THE WALLS
FOR MORE THAN half a century, social scientists have been testing ways of breaking down the barriers between potentially hostile groups. “Intergroup contact” has emerged as the most powerful way to reduce bias—specifically, prolonged opportunities for people to get to know one another as individuals, rather than as faceless members of a group. According to a 2006 analysis led by Thomas E. Pettigrew, a professor of social psychology at the University of California–Santa Cruz, more than five hundred studies have shown that even in areas where ethnic groups were in conflict and held negative stereotypes of one another, individuals who developed close friendships in the other group exhibited little or no prejudice. They seemed to recognize that people once seen as other are in many ways just like me.
Some of these studies have documented that such friendships also contribute to “self-expansion.” Whenever we learn or experience something new, our minds literally grow, and we begin to include aspects of our friends into our own sense of ourselves. Researchers caution that this does not apply to casual contact—if we simply have a Muslim co-worker or “know a trans man,” for instance. The growth comes from ongoing co
operation and meaningful communication.
However, one study showed that even using our imagination creatively can begin to break down unconscious biases. A group of white participants watched a five-minute video of two men—one black, one white—in which the men performed identical activities, but where the black man was clearly the target of discrimination. Those who were asked to imagine the perspective of the black man showed less automatic bias than others who were asked to remain objective. The results underscore the value of “putting oneself in another person’s shoes,” according to psychologist Andrew Todd, the study’s lead author.
Ultimately, in order for us to get a handle on our biases and fears, both conscious and unconscious, we must become intimately familiar with the stories we tell ourselves about other people. Mindfulness “is an excellent strategy for recognizing and softening the harmful effects of unconscious bias—that and learning to be at ease with uncertainty,” UCLA professor of psychiatry Daniel Siegel told Mindful magazine. “For the human brain, being uncertain can often be interpreted as danger. With mindfulness training, the brain can learn to rest in uncertainty without freaking out.”
Vinny Ferraro, a meditation teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area who works with young people and the adults who care for them—teachers, social workers, correction officers, parents—discovered the power of mindfulness the hard way. The son of an incarcerated father and a mother who died young, Vinny spent time in prison and suffered from addiction before turning his life around, largely through meditation. He has now taught mindfulness to more than one hundred thousand young people.
“The beginning of the conversation is if we can imagine at least for a minute that we do not know what is going on for other people, to suspend our belief that our truth is the only/whole truth, and to realize that all beings see through a lens of their own conditioning,” Vinny also told Mindful magazine. When people really open up to one another, the walls come down. “If we all got real, basically we would all fall in love with each other,” he added.
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