Bonnie
So should Dr. Duran have “remained like a block of wood?” Should she have held her tongue and kept the peace? Of course not. What I wrote actually was Eurocentric, patriarchal, and commodified, and she was kind enough to point it out. She didn’t mince words in her email to me. She said exactly what she saw. But what I notice when I read back on this exchange is how unfailingly kind she is. Clarity and kindness, together. That combination is powerful. And Dr. Duran, with her years of meditation training, has managed to build a heart of kindness and then extend that to others.
So there are times when not speaking up is an act of harm. And in order to engage with others in a respectful and productive way, we want to cultivate a sense of warmth and fluidity. Preemptive kindness. An axiological stance of friendliness toward the world. But how? Back to meditation. Meditation is about more than just calming the mind. It’s also about cultivating an atmosphere of warmth and positive regard—for yourself, for others. It’s about finding a way to live in the world that corroborates your deepest aspirations. Sound good? So let’s try some.
A Little Meditation
KINDNESS
You can do this meditation in five minutes, if you’d like. I first started doing these kindness meditations years ago when I was living in the monastery. At first it was hard for me to get a feel for them, but as I kept inclining the mind toward kindness, I noticed parts of myself softening, the voice in my head easing up. I definitely recommend this meditation to anybody who could use a little more kindness in their life. And that’s pretty much all of us.
As always, let’s start by finding a comfortable posture, either sitting or lying down. Obviously if you’re reading this book, it’ll be hard to close your eyes. So you can keep them open. Or read a few sentences and then close your eyes. Then read a few more. Up to you. Whatever you do, you’ll want to just relax. Don’t worry too much about whether you’re doing it right. Don’t worry too much about being a great meditator. In fact, just don’t worry too much.
Now let’s bring a warm awareness to your body. Just feel your body. With a sense of friendliness, a sort of grassroots kindness. Feel your hands. Feel your feet.
Then bring that warm awareness to the area of your heart. Notice any sensations in the heart area—throbbing, humming, tingling, numb, whatever. Also, start to notice any emotions that might be here, in the heart. Just kind of take the temperature. Get a sense of things.
One important point: You don’t need to get rid of anything, don’t need to feel differently or better. If you’re numb, you’re numb. No problem. If you’re sad, that’s how it is. Angry? That’s okay, too.
And often we’re a whole bunch of things all at once. Which is also not a problem.
Now from this sense of the heart—of just being with your heart—let’s call up an image of a good friend. Someone you like. Someone that’s easy for you. They’ve got your back. Sure, they tick you off every once in a while. But essentially it’s a good relationship—all in all, you want them to be happy, and you want to contribute to that.
Got an image? Great.
Now let’s lean a little into this sense that your friend wants to be happy. Just like you, just like everybody, he or she or they really want to be happy. They want to be safe. They want to be healthy. They’d like some peace. See if you can get a sense of that for them.
And now let’s just begin to wish them well, using some traditional phrases.
May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you be peaceful and at ease.
Just continue thinking about your friend, repeating these phrases silently to yourself. And maybe after some time, you can imagine your friend filling up with happiness. Imagine your friend getting lighter. Imagine your friend getting happier. Imagine them smiling. Filled with joy.
Nice job. You’ve completed a kindness meditation. It’s great to start with a friend when you do this at first, somebody who’s pretty easy for you. Once you get the hang of that, though, it can be really helpful to bring this same kindness, this wishing well, to yourself. May I be safe, may I be happy, etc. Then you can extend that general caring out to people you don’t know so well, and even to people you don’t like so much, and then to everyone, everywhere, without exception.
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THE BENEFITS OF KINDNESS MEDITATION
Now that you’ve done some, I’ll throw in a little pitch for kindness meditation. Because there’s actually quite a bit of research on it. And what we know is that, when practiced with a qualified instructor over a period of six or eight weeks, this type of meditation can lead to an increased sense of social connection,6 improvements in overall mood, increased sense of purpose in life, reductions in depression,7 and even, as mentioned in the previous chapter, decreases in implicit bias. So kindness meditation is a powerful practice, and one that can really change your experience of others. Here’s a quick story on that count.
I’ve finished my PhD now, thank god. But it was a long, difficult process, filled, at least for me, with unexpected turbulence, twists and turns, interpersonal difficulties, departmental dramas, and all the rest.
Things kind of peaked in the third year of my program in counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Early on in the program I’d made some dumb mistakes, had kind of kicked the hornet’s nest of the bureaucracy, and things had begun to spin out before I got my head on straight and learned the ropes. So there was damage, and mostly in my feeling about the program. Unlike my master’s program, where I’d felt incredibly supported and welcomed, I didn’t feel I fit in too sweetly with the swing of things in my PhD program.
Right around my low point—year three, spring—my department hosted a brilliant, famous psychotherapist for a daylong workshop. When I walked in, it was the same old feeling—anxiety, out-of-placeness, a sense that people were kind of looking at me funny. Call it paranoia. Or a bad case of the jitters. It was unpleasant. I sat with that for the first few hours of the workshop. Then we broke for lunch and I rode my bike across campus to teach kindness meditation at the School of Veterinary Medicine. I taught a class to students first, then a class to faculty, then I rode my bike back to the workshop.
When I walked in, lunch was just ending. People were milling about, getting ready to take their seats. First one person said hi to me. Then another person said hi to me. It seemed that everyone in the room was smiling—and half of them appeared to be smiling, kind of beatifically, at me. Wow, I thought to myself initially, they must have had a great lunch. But no. They’d had the same Qdoba spread the department always serves.
And then it struck me. Nothing had changed. Except me. I had just spent a couple hours teaching kindness to vets. And it had rubbed off. I was seeing the world through kindness-tinted lenses. And it was beautiful.