Think Like a Monk

by Jay Shetty

  And you should be at least as attentive to what you can offer them. With friends or colleagues, get into the habit of asking yourself, What can I offer first? How can I serve? Am I a teacher, a peer, or a student? Which of the four Cs do I give to this person? We form more meaningful relationships when we play to our strengths and, like Swami, don’t offer expertise that we don’t have.

  Exercises like the one above aren’t meant to attach labels to people; I’m against labels, as I’ve explained, because they reduce the many nuanced hues of life to black and white. The monk approach is to look for meaning and absorb what you need to move forward instead of getting locked in judgment. However, when we apply filters like the four Cs, we can see if our network of compassion is broad enough to guide us through the complexity and chaos of life.

  TRY THIS: REFLECT ON TRUST

  Pick three diverse people in your life—perhaps a colleague, a family member, and a friend—and decide which of the four Cs they bring to your life. Be grateful for that. Thank them for it.

  Even if we’ve got the four Cs covered, we benefit from multiple viewpoints within each of these categories. A mother’s care isn’t the same as a mentor’s. One person with character might give great romantic advice, while another might help you through a family argument. And one consistent friend might be there for you during a breakup, while another is always available for a spirited hike.

  MAKE YOUR OWN FAMILY

  In order to find diversity, we have to be open to new connections. Part of growing up—at any age—is accepting that our family of origin may never be able to give us all that we need. It’s okay to accept what you do and don’t get from the people who raised you. And it’s okay—necessary, in fact—to protect yourself from those in your family who aren’t good for you. We should have the same standards for our family as we do for everyone else, and if the relationship is fraught, we can love them and respect them from a distance while gathering the family we need from the wider world. This doesn’t mean we should neglect our families. But forgiveness and gratitude come more easily when we accept that we have friends and family, and we have friends that become family. Feeling connected at some level to all of humanity can be positively therapeutic for those whose own families have made their lives difficult.

  THE HUMAN FAMILY

  When you enter a new community—as I entered the ashram—you have a clean slate. You have none of the expectations that have already built up among family and friends. Most likely nobody shares your past. In situations like this, most of us rush to find “our people,” but the ashram showed me another way. I didn’t need to replicate a family, creating a small circle of comfort and trust. Everyone in the ashram was my family. And, as we traveled and connected with people across India and Europe, I began to recognize that everyone in the world was my family. As Gandhi said, “The golden way is to be friends with the world and to regard the whole human family as one.”

  The groups we establish for learning, growth, and shared experiences—like families, schools, and churches—help us categorize people. These are the people I live with. These are the people I learn with. These are the people I pray with. These are the people I hope to help. But I didn’t want to discount someone’s opinions or worth because they didn’t fit neatly into one of these circles. Aside from the limits of practicality, there weren’t certain people who deserved my attention or care or help more than others.

  It’s easier to look at everyone as a member of your family if you don’t imagine that it’s every human at every moment. A well-known poem by Jean Dominique Martin says, “People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime.” These three categories are based on how long that relationship should endure. One person might enter your life as a welcome change. Like a new season, they are an exciting and enthralling shift of energy. But the season ends at some point, as all seasons do. Another person might come in with a reason. They help you learn and grow, or they support you through a difficult time. It almost feels like they’ve been deliberately sent to you to assist or guide you through a particular experience, after which their central role in your life decreases. And then there are lifetime people. They stand by your side through the best and worst of times, loving you even when you are giving nothing to them. When you consider these categories, keep in mind the circle of love. Love is a gift without any strings attached. This means that with it comes the knowledge that not all relationships are meant to endure with equal strength indefinitely. Remember that you are also a season, a reason, and a lifetime friend to different people at different times, and the role you play in someone else’s life won’t always match the role they play in yours.

  These days, there is a small, consistent group of people with whom I am closest, but that doesn’t change the connection I feel to all humanity. And so I ask you to look beyond the people you recognize, beyond your comfort zone, to strangers and people you don’t understand. You don’t have to befriend them all, but see them all as equal, with equality of soul and the potential to add variety to your knowledge and experience. They are all in your circle of care.

  TRY THIS: BE REALISTIC ABOUT YOUR FRIENDSHIPS

  Make a list of the people you have seen socially over the past week or two. In a second column, identify whether the person is a Season, a Reason, or a Lifetime friend. This, of course, is labeling, which I have urged you not to do. We have to allow for fluidity in the roles people play. But roughly sketching the landscape of your current social life can give you an idea as to whether you are surrounded by a balanced group of people—one that provides excitement, support, and long-term love. Now, in a third column, consider what role you play for each of these people. Are you offering what you receive? Where and how could you give more?

  TRUST IS EARNED

  Once you have established reasonable expectations from a relationship, then it is easier to build and maintain trust. Trust is central to every relationship. Trust means we believe that the person is being honest with us, that they have our interests at heart, that they will uphold their promises and confidences, and that they will stay true to these intentions in the future. Notice that I didn’t say they are right all the time or handle every challenge perfectly. Trust is about intentions, not abilities.

  When an important person lets us down, the blow to our trust reverberates across all of our relationships. Even people with the best intentions change or don’t follow the same path that we do. Other people give us plenty of signs that their intentions don’t mesh with ours, but we ignore them. And sometimes, if we were more aware, there are people we would know not to trust in the first place. Other people’s behavior is always out of our control—so how can we trust anyone?

  STAGES OF TRUST

  Trust can be extended to anyone from a taxi driver to a business partner to a lover, but obviously we don’t have the same level of trust for everyone. It’s important to be attentive to how deeply we trust someone and whether they’ve actually earned that level of trust.

  Dr. John Gottman, one of the nation’s top marriage experts, wanted to find out what makes couples get stuck in ongoing conflict instead of resolving it and moving on. He examined couples from all over the country, from varied socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, and in a variety of life situations, from newlyweds, to expecting parents, to families where one spouse was deployed in military service. Across the board, the most important issue to all of these couples was trust and betrayal. The language they used to describe their issues varied a bit, but the central question was always the same: Can I trust you to be faithful? Can I trust you to help with housework? Can I trust you to listen, to be there for me?

  The couples had good reason to make trust a priority. According to studies by Dr. Bella DePaulo, people are dishonest in one-fifth of their interactions. Seventy-seven college students and seventy people from the community at large were asked to keep track of their social interactions for seven days. They were told to record all of their exchanges and to note
how many lies they told. I know what you’re thinking—what if they lied about lying? To encourage honesty, the researchers told the participants that there was no judgment involved, and that their responses would help to answer fundamental questions about lying behavior. They also sold the experiment as a chance to get to know themselves better. In the end, the students reported some level of lying in one-third of their interactions and the community members in one out of every five interactions. No wonder so many of us have trust issues.

  We know from our discussion of ego that we lie to impress, to present ourselves as “better” than we really are, but when these lies are discovered, the betrayal does far more damage to both people than honesty would have. If the seed of trust is not planted effectively in the beginning, we grow a weed of mistrust and betrayal.

  We aren’t careful with when and how we give our trust. We either trust other people too easily, or we withhold our trust from everyone. Neither of these extremes serve us well. Trusting everyone makes you vulnerable to deception and disappointment. Trusting no one leaves you suspicious and alone. Our level of trust should directly correspond to our experience with a person, growing through four stages of trust.

  Neutral Trust. When you meet someone, it is normal not to trust them. You may find them funny, charming, a joy to be around. These positive qualities do not merit trust. They mean you think your new acquaintance is cool. We tend to conflate trustworthiness with likability. In studies examining jurors’ perceptions of expert witnesses, those the jurors found to be likeable they also rated as more trustworthy. We also tend to trust people we find attractive. Rick Wilson, coauthor of Judging a Book by Its Cover: Beauty and Expectations in the Trust Game, says, “We found that attractive subjects gain a ‘beauty premium’ in that they are trusted at higher rates, but we also found a ‘beauty penalty’ when attractive people do not live up to expectations.” When we equate likability or appeal with trust, we set ourselves up for huge disappointment. It is better to have neutral trust than to trust someone for the wrong reasons or to trust them blindly.

  Contractual Trust. I derived this level of trust from rajas, the impulsive mode of life, where you are focused on getting the result that you want in the short-term. Contractual trust is the quid pro quo of relationships. It simply says: If I pay for dinner and you promise to pay me back, I have faith that you’ll do it. If you make a plan, you can count on the person to show up—and there’s no further expectation. Contractual trust is useful. Most of us share contractual trust with the majority of people who cross our paths, yet we expect them to trust us implicitly. The heart may want a deeper connection, but we have to be discerning. Expecting more from someone who is only showing you contractual trust is premature at best and dangerous at worst.

  Mutual Trust. Contractual trust reaches a higher level when you help someone, expecting they would most likely do the same for you, in some way, at some unknown time in the future. Where contractual trust relies on a specific exchange both parties have agreed to in advance, mutual trust is far looser. This stage of trust is derived from sattva, the mode of goodness, where we act from a place of goodness, positivity, and peace. We all want to get to this level, and good friendships usually do.

  Pure trust. The highest level of trust is pure goodness, when you know, no matter what happens, that another person has your back, and vice versa. College basketball coach Don Meyer used to give each of his teammates a blank piece of paper on which he’d ask them to draw a circle to represent their “foxhole.” They wrote their names at the top of the circle, then drew lines at their left, right, and rear, and on each line they had to list the name of a teammate who they’d want in their foxhole with them. Those chosen most often by their teammates were the team’s natural leaders. Choose your foxhole gang wisely.

  * * *

  If you were to graph the number of people you trust at each level, the result would probably look like a pyramid: a lot of people at neutral trust; fewer people at contractual trust; your close circle at mutual trust; and only a handful at the top level, pure trust.

  No matter how dissatisfied you are with your pyramid, don’t promote people without reason. They will only let you down. The biggest mistake we make is to assume that everyone else operates just like us. We believe that others value what we value. We believe that what we want in a relationship is what others want in a relationship. When someone says, “I love you,” we think they mean exactly what we mean when we say “I love you.” But if we think everyone is a reflection of ourselves, we fail to see things as they are. We see things as we are.

  Mutual trust requires patience and commitment. It is built on a true understanding of the other person in spite of and because they are separate from us and view the world differently. The way to step back from making presumptions is to closely observe their words and behaviors. When people show you their level of trust, believe them.

  I want you to feel grateful for the people you can trust and to feel honored by those who trust you. If you have neutral trust for someone, that’s cool too. Accept people as they are, and you give them the chance to grow and prove to be more. We set ourselves up for long-term trust when we let it evolve naturally.

  TRUST IS A DAILY PRACTICE

  Relationships rarely get to a point where both participants can say, “I absolutely know this person and they absolutely know me.” Like a curve that continually approaches but never reaches a line, you never get to the point of saying, “I trust them fully, and they trust me fully, forever and ever.” Trust can be threatened in small and large ways and needs to be reinforced and rebuilt on a daily basis.

  Build and reinforce trust every day by:

  Making and fulfilling promises (contractual trust)

  Giving those you care about sincere compliments and constructive criticism; going out of your way to offer support (mutual trust)

  Standing by someone even when they are in a bad place, have made a mistake, or need help that requires significant time (pure trust)

  AN INTENTIONAL LOVE LIFE

  Now that we have some tools to assess the roles people play in our lives, let’s look at how we can deepen existing relationships and build strong new ones. Letting go of traditional family roles allowed us monks to broaden our connections with humanity. In the same way, celibacy freed the energy and attention that romantic love had consumed. Before you hurl this book across the room, I’m not recommending celibacy for non-monks. Celibacy is an extreme commitment and hardly an essential one for everyone, but it did lead me to revelations that I’d like to share. Let’s say I did it so you don’t have to.

  To stop drinking? That was easy for me. To stop gambling? I’d never done much of that in the first place. And I’d stopped eating meat at sixteen. For me, giving up romantic relationships was the hardest sacrifice. It sounded ridiculous, even impossible. But I knew the purpose behind it: to save the effort and energy that went into being validated in a romantic relationship and to use it to build a relationship with myself. Think of it the same way giving up sugar sounds like a drag—what sane person would want to forgo ice cream?—but we all know there’s a good reason: to be healthy and live longer. When I looked at the monks, I could see that they were doing something right. Remember Matthieu Ricard, “the World’s Happiest Man”? All the monks I met looked so young and seemed so happy. My romantic entanglements hadn’t brought me fulfillment, so I was willing to try the experiment of self-control and discipline.

  When I became a monk, one of my college friends asked, “What are we going to talk about? All we used to do was talk about girls.” He was right. So much of my life had been absorbed in navigating romantic connections. There’s a reason we watch countless sitcoms and movies about romance—it’s endlessly entertaining—but as with any entertainment, it takes time away from serious matters. If I’d been dating or in a committed relationship for those three years instead of being at the ashram, I wouldn’t be where I am today, with understanding of my strengths and who I am
.

  The Sanskrit for monk is brahmacharya, which can be translated to “the right use of energy.” In the dating world, when you walk into a bar, you look around to see who is attractive. Or you swipe through potential mates online without giving a second thought to how much time you spend in the effort to hook up. But imagine if you could buy that time back for yourself, if you could recoup everything you’ve ever invested in relationships that didn’t pan out. That attention and focus could be used for creativity, friendship, introspection, industry. Now, this doesn’t mean every failed relationship is a waste of time. On the contrary, we learn from each mistake. But think of the time around the relationship, waiting for texts, wondering if they like you, trying to make someone change into the person you want them to be. If we are thoughtful about our needs and expectations, our time and energy go to far better use.

  Sexual energy is not just about pleasure. It is sacred—it has the power to create a child. Imagine what it can create within us when it’s harnessed. Certified sex educator Mala Madrone says, “Celibacy by conscious choice is a powerful way to work with your own energy and harness the potency of life energy. It can also help you strengthen your intuition, your boundaries, and your understanding of what consent truly means, including how to differentiate what kind of contact and interaction is truly welcome in your life and by your body.” But your energy is squandered when it is spent tailoring yourself to someone else’s ideal or shaping yourself into the person you think he wants or suspecting her of cheating on you. There is so much anxiety and negativity around dating and so much pressure to find “the one”—never mind whether we’re ready or able to settle down with anyone.