Cultivating Kindness & Compassion

  “Compassion is a verb.”
    ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
 
Through mindfulness or meditation and contemplation you discover the causes of suffering and through loving kindness and compassion you develop an open heart and that brings an end to suffering. Once you are liberated from your own suffering, the desire to create this freedom for others arises spontaneous. In the meantime, in terms of compassion, they often say, “Fake it until you make it.” In practical terms, this just means doing things that help others when you’d rather just stay home and watch TV.

Every human being has the same potential for compassion; the only question is whether we really take any care to create circumstances that allow it to develop, and then—very important—implement it in our daily life. This can be difficult. We are going against our me-centered culture. We don’t live in a compassionate age. The Tibetans call our time the Kali Yuga, the age of strife, discord, quarrel, or contention. Also the age of spiritual degeneration. Our culture doesn’t stress compassion, our educational system pays more attention to self-esteem than to cultivating or implementing the overcoming of the suffering of others. So we have to make an effort.

Inconvenient as it sometimes is, we can’t just believe in compassion, but have to live it, be it. We need to avoid something called “idiot compassion” where we fake up a sort of goopy concern for every little thing: To say “Oh, it’s raining, the poor little birdies are getting wet. I’ll go out and put up my umbrella over the birdbath” is more about you as a “compassionate” person than it is about the birds. This sort of faux compassion might produce a gushy feeling of being good, but again, this is all about you. Your actions have to be compassionate without drawing attention to them as yours.

The point, as one teacher put it, isn’t to feel compassion, but to be deeply compassionate toward others.

A good habit to develop is a simple one: when you enter a room, any room, ask yourself: what can I do to help? In time, this habit can gradually change your life.

And why make an effort to cultivate compassion? Because pursuing our own personal happiness without including a regard for others doesn’t lead to happiness. As HH Dalai Lama says: “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

 

KS
 

Meditations to Develop & Express Active Compassion

Loving Kindness Meditation

Before you begin an exercise, it is a good idea to slow down, quiet yourself and center by concentrating your energy in your chest, abdomen, or on your breathing. The following exercise, called "Loving Kindness Meditation," is an extremely powerful tool in opening the heart and developing compassion.  

Visualize a lotus or an orb of light in your heart. Feel it open and send out rays of love-filled light. Direct this stream of love first to yourself, then to those around you, to specific members of your family, your friends, and to people you see casually everyday--the postman, the clerk at the supermarket. Feel the loving kindness from your heart overflow the room you are in and spread into your neighborhood, then the city where you live. It grows and swells until your loving kindness covers the state, country, continent, finally the entire globe. As you visualize the earth as a whole, bring it back into your heart where it again becomes a lotus or an orb of light. Relax the mind, and rest in this state as long as possible. 

Taking and Sending 

  After you've used the loving kindness exercise over a period of time, you come to feel that you're filled with healing light which you wish to share with others. When you are standing next to someone--say an impatient person in the grocery line in front of you--visualize that you breathe in their energy which is dark and smoky. Bring it into your light-filled being, and breathe it out clear and fine. Match your breathing to the distressed person's, breathing in dark, breathing out light. Concentrate on doing this whenever you are with others. By controlling the way in which their energy is absorbed and processed, you will be able to remain centered yourself as well as helping others in distress. It is surprising how this technique calms others down. To take in pleasure and push away pain is logical to the ego. The practice of taking and sending, called tonglen in Tibetan--reverses this process.

 

Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun, is the director of Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia writes:

 

 

The slogan "Begin the sequence of taking and sending with yourself" is getting at the point that compassion starts with making friends with ourselves, and particularly with our poisons--the messy areas. As we practice tonglen--taking and sending--and contemplate the lojong (mind training), gradually it begins to dawn on us how totally interconnected we all are. Now people know that what we do to the rivers in South America affects the whole world, and what we do to the air in Alaska affects the whole world. Everything is interrelated--including ourselves, so this is very important, this making friends with ourselves. It's the key to a more sane compassionate planet. 

 

That's one of the points about this tonglen practice of exchanging oneself for others; that what you do for yourself--any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself--will affect how you experience your world. What you do for yourself, you're doing for others and what you do for others, you're doing for yourself. It becomes increasingly dubious what is out there and what is in here. If you have rage and strike out, rather than surrendering to yourself and allowing yourself to see what's under all that rage--especially if you feel very justified in striking out--it's really you who suffers. The other people and the environment suffer also, but you suffer more because you're being eaten up inside with hatred, causing you to hate yourself more and more. 

 

We strike out because, ironically, we think it will bring us some relief. We equate it with happiness. Actually there is some relief, for the moment. When you have an addiction and get to fulfill that addiction, there is a moment in which you feel some relief. Then the nightmare gets worse. So it is with aggression. When you get to tell someone off, you might feel pretty good for a while, but somehow the sense of righteous indignation and hatred grows, and it hurts you. 

 

On the other hand, if we begin to surrender to ourselves, begin to drop the storyline, and experience what all this messy stuff behind the storyline feels like, we begin to find bodhicitta, the tenderness that's under all that harshness. By being kind to ourselves, we become kind to others. By being kind to others--if it's done properly with proper understanding--we benefit as well. So again, the first point is that we are completely interrelated. What you do to others, you do to yourself. What you do to yourself, you do to others.  --

 

Pema Chodron Be Grateful to Everyone: A Guide to Compassionate Living, Boston: Shambhala, 1994.

 

Also see Pema Chodron's The Wisdom of No Escape; When Things Fall Apart;  The Places that Scare You;  and many other excellent books from Shambhala Publications.

 

 Anonymous Kindness

 

 When you spontaneously give your ice-cream cone to a little boy who has just dropped his, when you drop a coin in an "expired" parking meter so a stranger's car won't get a ticket, or whenever you do anything spontaneously kind or generous, you have committed a "random act of kindness." Imagine what would happen if everyday were filled with these acts? If there were a rash of such outbreaks worldwide?  

 

Random Acts of Kindness 

 

When I graduated from college I took a job at an insurance company in this huge downtown office building. On my first day, I was escorted to this tiny cubicle surrounded by what seemed like thousands of other tiny cubicles, and put to work doing some meaningless thing. It was so terribly depressing I almost broke down crying. At lunch--after literally punching out a time clock--all I could think about was how much I wanted to quit, but I couldn't because I desperately needed the money. When I got back to my cubicle after lunch there was a beautiful bouquet of flowers sitting on my desk. For the whole first month I worked there flowers just kept arriving on my desk. I found out later that it had been a kind of spontaneous office project. A woman in the cubicle next to me brought in the first flowers to try to cheer me up, and then other people just began replenishing my vase. I ended up working there for two years, and many of my best, longest-lasting friendships grew out of that experience.

 

Editors of Conari Press  Random Acts of Kindness Emeryville, CA, Conari Press, 1993 If you practice random acts of kindness whenever you can. You'll find you benefit as much or more than the recipient.

 

Expanding Compassion

 

Compassion easily flows toward our family and circle of friends, but Teresa of Calcutta points out that this isn't enough: community is a global matter. 

 

Community 

  It is not enough for us to say: I love God, but I do not love my neighbor. St. John says you are a liar if you say you love God and you don't love your neighbor. How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live. And so this is very important for us to realize that love, to be true, has to hurt. It hurt Jesus to love us, it hurt him. And to make sure we remember his great love he made himself bread of life to satisfy our hunger for his love. Our hunger for God, because we have been created for that love. We have been created in his image. We have been created to love and be loved, and then he has become man to make it possible for us to love as he loved us. He makes himself the hungry one--the naked one--the homeless one--the sick one--the one in prison--the lonely one--the unwanted one--and he says: You did it to me. Hungry for our love, and this is the hunger of our poor people. This is the hunger that you and I must find, it may be in our own home.  

Teresa of Calcutta, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech 1979