Chapter 6
How did the rose ever open its heart and give to this world all its beauty? It felt the encouragement of light against its being, otherwise, we all remain too frightened.
—Hafiz
In the previous chapter you learned several practices for cultivating self-compassion. The word “practice” is so fitting. These are things that you need to work with, just as you’d practice a musical instrument. As discussed in chapter 5, research in neuroscience has revealed that the repetition of practices like mindfulness and loving-kindness can help us establish new traits (Davidson 2009). Perhaps that’s why meditation teacher Mary Grace Orr, a colleague of ours, often suggests a one-hundred-day loving-kindness practice for her students. She says that by the time you get to the hundredth day of practicing loving-kindness for yourself and others, you might actually experience it.
We want to affirm that you can develop new ways of seeing yourself and the world that will help you live with an open heart. From our perspective, living with an open heart means having your heart broken open to love. It means being fully open to everything in the present moment and learning to embrace it all—the good, the bad, the ugly, and all of the thoughts and emotions in the endless parade of the ten thousand joys and sorrows. This is difficult work. It’s a bold move to open your heart to your fears and other painful thoughts and emotions, but there may come a time when you realize there’s nothing more important to do, because living with a hardened or hidden heart is too great a pain to bear.
Embracing all of these experiences involves a certain type of trust that you’ve been building through your direct experience of mindfulness. You began this work of opening your heart with the self-compassion practices in the previous chapter. In this chapter we’ll help you further open your heart with practices of loving-kindness, reconciliation, and empathetic joy.
Howard’s Story
Howard was plagued by anxiety that began the moment he woke up in the morning and stayed with him until he fell asleep at night. Sometimes it also kept him up at night. He felt as if he’d been wracked with these feelings forever, and he remembered being nervous and unsure of himself even as a boy. Whenever he encountered an uncomfortable social situation, he usually broke into a sweat, felt his heart rate go up, and started to breathe rapidly. He tended to flee these sorts of situations, and with time he began to avoid them altogether.
Howard despised how he dealt with his life and felt cowardly and inadequate. He felt so lonely, and so uncomfortable inside his own skin. And as if it weren’t bad enough to feel so flawed and hopeless, he was starting to feel increasingly sleep deprived and stressed-out. He didn’t want to take sleep aids or antianxiety medications, so when he read that mindfulness-based stress reduction might help, he was intrigued and signed up for a class.
In his first class, Howard realized that he wasn’t alone in his struggle, and just knowing that many other people were also plagued by anxiety gave him some immediate relief. He was impressed that people had the guts to introduce themselves to the class and say out loud that they lived with anxiety. When his turn came, he also mustered up the courage to share about his situation, and afterward he felt an incredible lightness within himself. He also felt proud of himself for having the fortitude to speak up and tell his truth, and this gave him the first glimmer of hope he’d had in a long time.
As the weeks passed and Howard witnessed others opening to their fears and feeling freer from them, it gave him the courage to begin to face his own fears. As his mindfulness practice grew, he began to look more deeply into his fears and pain. He finally began to acknowledge his painful childhood and understand how and why he had lost so much confidence and felt so scared about life. When he was just eight years old, his younger brother had died, and that caused him to fear for his own safety and the safety of other loved ones. As these feelings became ingrained, his world was dominated by fear and mistrust. This had made him different and hard to get to know and helped explain why he’d had trouble making friends and why so many kids had picked on him back then.
Getting back in touch with the grief and pain that had been locked in his heart also helped him understand why he’d felt incompetent at school. School hadn’t made much sense because he was dealing with bigger issues. While he was grappling with the meaning of life, and its impermanence, he couldn’t relate to learning about anything else.
Howard’s heart began to break open as he acknowledged his emotional pain and fear. As he understood the suffering of his younger self, he felt great compassion for that boy—self-compassion for his younger self. And, in part because of the stories others in his class had shared, he also realized that many people experience similar losses and similar struggles. These insights awakened his heart to great compassion and love.
Loving-kindness is a meditation practice that involves sending unconditional love and goodwill to oneself and all beings. This practice is the embodiment of friendliness and nondiscrimination and opens the heart to the sublime qualities of altruistic love. It’s a powerful antidote for the unworthy heart. Opening your heart to compassion and loving-kindness for yourself and then others will help you dissolve feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, and disconnection. We have known many people who found deep healing through this heartfelt practice.
The light of loving-kindness can be compared to that of the stars, the sun, or the moon. It shines on all living beings everywhere, encompassing them all without exception or bias. When practicing the loving-kindness meditation, you can direct this generous, unconditioned love to all beings inhabiting this earth. Eventually, you can extend it throughout the universe to all beings, even those yet to be born. This is a beautiful practice that opens the heart and cherishes all beings everywhere.
Exercise: Feeling Safe
The practice of loving-kindness begins with extending well-wishes to yourself and then gradually expands outward to others. Because it’s a process of opening your heart, it’s important that you feel safe as you practice. After all, if you don’t feel safe, you may become confrontational or defensive, and this makes it difficult to open your heart with loving-kindness. You may have good reasons to feel unsafe. Perhaps you’ve been hurt badly in the past and now find it hard to trust others. It’s normal to want to protect yourself, so we’d like to offer you a practice to work with this.
Take a moment right now to feel into your body and mind. Notice how you feel physically, mentally, and emotionally. Are you feeling safe or not? Take a few minutes to write in your journal about how you’re feeling. What physical sensations do you feel? What thoughts or emotions are associated with these sensations?
If you are feeling unsafe, are you open to exploring that feeling right now? If you aren’t open to exploring this right now, please take care of yourself and do whatever you need to do to feel safe.
If you are up for a closer look at why you aren’t feeling safe, begin by acknowledging how you’re feeling. Allow yourself to feel any physical, mental, or emotional experiences that come up for you, and just let them be. Let the waves of these experiences ripple or resonate wherever they need to go, simply giving space to whatever is.
As you let these experiences be, you’ll come to see that whatever arises passes away. You’ll also come to understand what’s fueling the feeling that you aren’t safe. In time this insight can help set you free.
Feel into your skin, flesh, and bones—your body sitting here and now in this room. Know that you are in a safe place, and that there is no danger in opening your heart… Breathing in and out, and opening to feeling safe.
Are you feeling safe now? Can you ease into yourself right now and feel safe?
Take some time to write in your journal about what came up for you physically, mentally, and emotionally when you were doing this exercise. Were you able to enter into a place of feeling safe? If not, what did you do to take care of yourself? How are you feeling right now, after writing about your experience?
Cultivating a sense of safety helps nurture the conditions for practicing loving-kindness meditation. When you feel safe inside your being, it’s easier to open your heart to extend love to yourself and to others.
Jose’s Story
Jose had a lot of anger. It seemed like he was pissed off at just about everything he encountered, and he felt that life was treating him unfairly. He didn’t like his coworkers, didn’t like how people drove, didn’t like to fold the laundry or wash the dishes, didn’t like waiting at red lights, and especially didn’t like his girlfriend asking him to be kinder.
When his boss recommended anger management classes, Jose thought he didn’t need them. And when a respected friend recommended a mindfulness-based stress reduction program, Jose said he thought mindfulness was a bunch of crap. But his life wasn’t working. He’d gotten a couple of warnings for blowing up at coworkers and his job was on the line. Then his girlfriend said she wasn’t sure she could stay in the relationship if things didn’t change. Remembering his friend’s advice, Jose decided to sign up for an MBSR program.
When he began practicing the body scan, he couldn’t even feel his body because he was so disconnected from it. But with continued practice, he began reconnecting with his body. He found a lot of muscular tightness in the process, and in time, that tension led him to his anger. In his day-to-day life, he began to see that the aching neck and shoulders he’d discovered in the body scan usually started to show up when he felt frustrated and impatient, and the tense, locked jaw usually showed up right before he blew his top.
As Jose felt into his anger with mindful self-inquiry, an ocean of sadness about his life welled up. He realized that he hardly had any friends and that most people didn’t like him. He realized that he distrusted people, and that this had its origins in his childhood. Jose had been small for his age, and kids in his neighborhood often bullied him and made fun of him because of this, leaving him feeling humiliated and inadequate. Given those experiences, it’s no wonder that he didn’t feel safe most of the time. As a kid, and ever since, Jose had thought the best bet was just to be as strong as possible and defend himself whenever he felt threatened. But now he had a new experience: he felt sorry for his younger self—and sorry for the person he had become as a result of those early experiences.
Jose realized that he needed to change—that he needed to have more patience with the inevitable frustrations in life, and that he needed to cultivate more acceptance and trust of others and himself, but he didn’t know where to begin. When he learned loving-kindness meditation, he found the answer. Even his very first experience with this practice brought him a measure of peace that he hadn’t experienced in a long time, and as he continued to practice, he discovered depths of love and connection that he hadn’t imagined possible.
Mindfulness Practice: Loving-Kindness Meditation
Feeling into your heart through loving-kindness meditation will open you to what’s important in life, and perhaps to what you need to work on. This meditation can elevate your heart to almost unfathomable feelings of love and may also reveal where you’re holding back or stuck.
Give yourself about thirty minutes for this practice, and once you begin, bring your full, undivided attention to the practice. Read through the entire exercise before you begin. Because this practice is lengthy and specific, you may need to refer back to the text from time to time. Alternatively, you can record the instructions and listen to the recording as you practice. You can also purchase a recording of this practice at www.yourheartwideopen.com. Soon enough you’ll be familiar with the practice and won’t need to listen to the instructions. Also, feel free to personalize the practice. You can use the phrases provided below, but it’s also fine to make up your own phrases. We’ve adapted the instructions for this exercise from A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, by Bob Stahl and Elisha Goldstein (New Harbinger Publications, 2010).
Begin your practice by congratulating yourself for dedicating this time to loving-kindness meditation.
As you become present, check in with yourself and notice how you’re feeling physically, mentally, and emotionally. Simply allow and acknowledge whatever you’re feeling and let it be without judgment.
Gradually shift your attention to the breath, breathing normally and naturally. Focus on the nose, chest, or abdomen, being mindful of each breath, one breath at a time. As you breathe in, be aware of breathing in, and as you breathe out, be aware of breathing out. Breathing in and breathing out…
Now bring awareness into your chest and heart area and feel into your own precious and fragile life with compassion and love. If this brings up feelings of unworthiness or self-blame, know that these, too, are to be acknowledged in the open and nondiscriminating light of loving-kindness.
At times, it may seem that feelings of loving-kindness lie a long way away and you don’t know how to get there. See this practice as a journey; keep walking step-by-step and know that you define the path and draw nearer to loving-kindness with each step you take. Try to feel into the qualities of loving-kindness itself, a boundless, selfless love that shines like the sun, the moon, or the stars, illuminating all beings without exception or bias.
Bring this love into your heart, skin, and bones, into your molecules and very being. May you open to deep kindness and compassion for yourself as you are.
Although it may be a struggle to feel loving toward yourself, continue to simply acknowledge your challenges and try to open to love. May you have immense self-compassion for any feelings of unworthiness, and wisdom to understand that these do not define who you are.
Take some time right now to open to each of the following phrases for a moment, allowing them to become absorbed into your being. If you would prefer to make up your own phrases, please do so.
May I open to great self-compassion.
May I open to deep reconciliation of my past with the wise understanding that all of my past has led me to this moment.
May I hold myself gently, with mercy, kindness, and levity.
May I accept my imperfections and see that I am imperfectly perfect just as I am.
May I be as healthy as I can be.
May I have ease in body and mind.
May I be at peace.
Now that you’ve begun to open yourself to loving-kindness, at some point you may quite naturally want to extend this expansive feeling outward to others. Begin by extending the feeling to those who are easy to love, such as wise and caring mentors—those who have inspired and guided you with love and wisdom. Feel into your heart with gratitude for those who have supported you, and repeat the following phrases for a couple of minutes:
May my mentors be safe from inner and outer harm.
May my mentors be happy.
May my mentors be healthy.
May my mentors be contented and at ease.
May my mentors dwell in peace.
Now gradually expand the field of loving-kindness to loved ones, such as family, friends, and community:
May my loved ones be safe from inner and outer harm.
May my loved ones be happy.
May my loved ones be healthy.
May my loved ones be contented and at ease.
May my loved ones dwell in peace.
Now further extend the field of loving-kindness to those who are neutral, whether acquaintances or strangers:
May my neutral ones be safe from inner and outer harm.
May my neutral ones be happy.
May my neutral ones be healthy.
May my neutral ones be contented and at ease.
May my neutral ones dwell in peace.
Now take some time to remember those you know who are currently living with physical pain or suffering. Bring them into your heart and extend your wishes of healing and loving-kindness to them:
May those who are suffering be safe from inner and outer harm.
May those who are suffering be happy.
May those who are suffering be healthy.
May those who are suffering be contented and at ease.
May those who are suffering dwell in peace.
Now consider extending loving-kindness even to your difficult ones or enemies. Try to neutralize any feelings of resentment, since they’re so toxic to your own well-being, and understand that the hurtful actions of others often come from their fear, woundedness, and lack of awareness. Gently and slowly send loving-kindness to your difficult ones or enemies:
May my difficult ones find the gateway into their own hearts, gain more awareness, and transform their fear into love.
May my difficult ones be safe from inner and outer harm.
May my difficult ones be happy.
May my difficult ones be healthy.
May my difficult ones be contented and at ease.
May my difficult ones dwell in peace.
Further expand the circle of healing to all beings, building this loving-kindness to become as boundless as the sky. Begin to radiate loving-kindness outward to all living beings, sending it to all beings of the earth, the water, and the air and spreading it in all directions, throughout the entire universe:
May all beings be safe from inner and outer harm.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be healthy.
May all beings be contented and at ease.
May all beings dwell in peace.
Gently come back to the breath and sense your entire body as you breathe in and out. Feel your entire body rising or expanding with each inhalation and descending or contracting with each exhalation. Feel your body as a single, complete organism, connected and whole. Feel the peace and loving-kindness within you and around you.
May all beings be at peace.
Take some time to write in your journal about this practice, considering these questions:
Loving-kindness meditation may seem foreign to you at first, but please continue to practice it regularly. It’s a practice that must be repeated to be learned. No matter how hesitant or awkward you may feel with your first steps, continued practice will create a pathway in your mind and heart that will gradually grow deeper and become your way of life, just as old pathways that numbed your mind and heart had become your way of life—except this path doesn’t lead you anywhere other than right here and right now. This path is living in each breath and each heartbeat, sustaining your life and infusing it with kindness and self-compassion. Living in the moment in this way, infused with loving-kindness, allows you to let go of the past so you can live in the moment and open your heart to reconciliation and forgiveness.
Sometimes when you practice loving-kindness meditation, you may not feel very loving. In fact, sometimes you might experience the opposite, including strong feelings of anger, bitterness, sadness, resentment, or unworthiness. We want to assure you that this is normal. Rather than seeing such feelings as problematic or an indicator that you’re somehow inadequate for not being able to do this “right,” consider them to be your teacher, showing you where you’re stuck or holding back and what you need to bring your attention to.
Working with these challenges can be taxing. Support yourself with compassion, and bear in mind that being aware that you’re holding back allows you to move forward. If you didn’t know what was holding you back, you’d be much farther away from resolving it. When you identify the causes of your pain, reconciliation may not too far behind.
As you practice loving-kindness meditation, it may seem formidable or nearly impossible to send loving-kindness to your enemies. You may wonder why you’d even want to in the first place. At the same time, you might also realize that living with a hardened and resentful heart is a heavy load to carry and can ultimately be toxic and counterproductive to your own well-being. Psychologist Fred Luskin and colleagues at Stanford University have studied the physiological and emotional effects of forgiveness. According to Dr. Luskin, “Forgiveness can reduce stress, blood pressure, anger, depression, and hurt, and it can increase optimism, hope, compassion, and physical vitality” (2010, 127).
Ultimately, forgiveness is about making peace—making peace with what happened, and with those involved. It’s typical to think of forgiveness as something you extend toward others for their wrongs against you, but this is just one aspect of it. As you work within to change your attitude and soften your heart, you’ll need to cultivate three aspects of reconciliation: making peace with yourself, making peace with those you’ve hurt, and making with those who have hurt you. Forgiveness is really about freeing yourself.
Making Peace with Yourself
Mindfully looking into your life with kindness is liberating for many reasons, not least because it helps you see more deeply into your mistakes and learn from them. Your biggest mistakes are the places where you may learn your biggest life lessons, so rather than trying to forget or bury them, you need to understand how and why you erred. When you don’t, you may have to repeat your mistakes many times before learning the lessons you need to learn. For example, you may have gotten divorced and then met someone new and wonderful, only to eventually discover that you seem to be married to the same person in a different body. Or you may repeatedly fall in love with people who eventually skip out on you and let you down, just like your father did. There are times it may seem as though you’re stuck in a revolving door and doomed to make the same mistakes again and again.
But as you’ve learned, mindfulness can help you see the stories and habits that keep you stuck in repetitive life mistakes. It may be painful to acknowledge just how hard you’ve been on yourself—that you are your harshest critic and judge and that you’d never talk to anyone else the way you talk to yourself. (If you did, you probably wouldn’t have any friends.) These insights may bring with them the temptation to criticize or berate yourself for being this way. As you acknowledge the events and actions that have fed into your sense of shame, guilt, deficiency, or unworthiness, hold yourself with great care and compassion. This is the key to escaping the trap of self-blame and truly freeing yourself from the cycle.
Yet as we’ve discussed, lack of self-compassion is pervasive, and it’s no small endeavor to find your way out of the unworthy self. Making peace with yourself can be arduous. It requires patience, kindness, and insight. It’s also noble and essential work that’s fundamental to the healing process. You cannot make peace with others until you make peace with yourself.
As you mindfully look back at where you’ve been and everything that contributed to the stories you’ve told yourself, your behavior and automatic reactions may begin to make sense to you. You may realize, “Of course I hated myself when I was twelve. I thought I was the reason my parents got divorced. I thought I should have been a better kid.” As you look back with hindsight wisdom, you’ll see more clearly where you were then, why you thought and felt the way you did, and how all of this shaped the self-limiting stories you lived by for so long. As your self-compassion and your understanding of your suffering deepen, you’ll feel lighter, happier, and freer.
So when practicing loving-kindness meditation, let healing and reconciliation begin inside you. May your heart open with kindness and understanding of the wounded feelings that have caused your suffering. May you hold your heart with tenderness and compassion, forgiving yourself for all the times you’ve been so critical of and hard on yourself. May you open to peace and reconciliation with yourself.
Making Peace with Those You’ve Hurt
Now that you’ve begun to understand and quiet your inner critic, you can use your hindsight wisdom to understand what drove you to hurt others. You’ll understand where you were mentally and emotionally and why you lashed out at others in the ways you did. We’ve all caused pain to others, whether intentionally or not, and this can leave a bitter taste in the mouth.
Making peace with those you’ve hurt doesn’t mean self-justification; it means taking responsibility for choices that have hurt others. This type of reconciliation involves being with things as they are and acknowledging the impact of your actions. Only then can you learn what you need to learn and let go of what you need to let go of. This type of reconciliation is a way to stop adding to the accumulated weight of negative events and memories that may fuel feelings of unworthiness. As you lay these burdens down and begin to live in the here and now, you can suspend blaming and judging of yourself and instead focus on understanding what happened or how you made mistakes, so that you can stop making them.
Susan’s Story
When Susan went on an intensive meditation retreat, she was beset by remorseful memories. She especially remembered and ruminated about having hurt her best friend, Erica, many years ago by telling her that the couple relationship she was in was going nowhere and asking her why she was wasting her time.
Susan shared these remorseful feelings with her mindfulness teacher, who gently suggested that Susan should feel into her shame if she was up to it, and acknowledge whatever arose for her physically, mentally, and emotionally. As Susan sat with her feelings and allowed them to surface, she met them with self-inquiry and began to gain some insight. Susan realized that her mean-spirited comments had been fueled by her own insecurity. She’d had a series of failed relationships and was worried that she would never have a long-term relationship. That had made her wonder if she wasn’t good enough or lovable. She also saw that she had been jealous. These were painful, difficult insights, but because of them, Susan began to feel a deeper sense of self-compassion, and with it, a measure of acceptance and peace.
Making Peace with Those Who Have Hurt You
As with making peace with yourself for hurting others, it’s important to understand that extending forgiveness to others for hurting you doesn’t mean that what happened is okay. But there’s an important difference: You can accept the responsibility for having hurt others, but you can’t make others accept responsibility for hurting you. Perhaps this is one reason why this type of reconciliation can be so challenging. Although there are wonderful examples of people doing this, such as Pope John Paul forgiving his would-be assassin, you may think, “I’m not the pope. I’m just an ordinary person.” You may wonder how you can achieve this sort of reconciliation.
The Buddha likened this to being wounded by an arrow. If that happens, your first instinct isn’t to try to find out who shot it or what might have motivated them. You don’t get caught up in the details of what happened and why. None of that is important until you get the arrow out of your body. In the same vein, when you live with resentments, grudges, or ill will, you are the one who’s suffering. When you bring mindfulness to your body and mind and really sense how you feel when you’re in a state of resentment, you’ll come to know that this harboring of enmity has a toxic effect on your own health and well-being. Compare this to how your body feels when you’re happy and wishing others well. This understanding is a great place to begin the work of reconciliation with others for hurting you, because it brings your own well-being into focus. While you can’t change what others did—or how they are—you can change your own relationship to resentment and heal the damage that’s been done in that way.
As you work on defusing resentments, you may discover that you’ve hurt others in ways similar to how others have hurt you, and for similar reasons, such as fear, greed, or unawareness. This can be a painful insight, but it also deepens understanding of and compassion for those who have hurt you, expanding your capacity for reconciliation and allowing you to transform and release the burden of fear and resentment. It’s also useful to investigate and reflect upon the powers of reconciliation, and the following practice will help you do just that.
Mindfulness Practice: Reconciliation Meditation
As you begin to work with reconciliation in this practice, you may find that you have a hard time opening to compassion, either toward yourself or toward others. If this happens, gently and kindly acknowledge where you are. Remember, it’s a practice and you’re in training. As with loving-kindness meditation, these difficulties show you where you’re emotionally stuck or holding back. Consider this to be good news, since seeing your challenges gives you the opportunity to work with them. As you bring the light of awareness to these stuck places, you can gradually make peace with yourself and others.
Give yourself at least twenty-five minutes for this practice. Choose a place to practice where you feel safe and at ease.
Begin by taking some time to acknowledge your aspirations to practice the reconciliation meditation. Know that this is a courageous and noble endeavor, and congratulate yourself for taking on this difficult work.
Now begin to practice mindfulness of breathing for about five minutes. Feel the sensation of the breath as it travels in and out of the nostrils, or feel the chest or belly expanding with each inhalation and contracting with each exhalation. Breathing in and out with awareness…
Now bring awareness to your chest, and feel into your heart as you breathe in and out. Reflect upon the fragility and preciousness of life—that for each of us breath is life, and when it stops, our life as we know it is over. Consider how ephemeral and short-lived each breath is, each moment is, and how nothing can stop time’s passing.
As you begin to turn your focus toward reconciliation, it may be helpful to reflect upon what it feels like to hold resentments. This burden is like a thorn in your side or a stone in your shoe, and ultimately it’s in your best interest to let it go. Life is so brief and so sacred, why spend it carrying these burdens? May you open to reconciliation.
Bring yourself into your own heart and open to compassion for all those times you’ve been judgmental or critical of yourself or filled with self-loathing. Use your wise hindsight wisdom to understand why you’ve hurt yourself in this way. Looking at your past self from this light now, may you open to deep compassion and love for yourself as you are. Spend at least five minutes with this reflection.
Now reflect upon times you’ve hurt others. Recognize and acknowledge the fears and unawareness that consumed you when you inflicted pain on others, whether intentionally or not. May you grow in deep understanding of what fueled your actions, and may there be reconciliation as your heart opens to compassion and love. Spend at least five minutes with this reflection.
Lastly, reflect upon others who have hurt you. Although it may be difficult to forgive them at first, it’s important to work on neutralizing any resentment, since it directly affects your well-being. May you feel the lightness of casting off the burden of a hardened heart. Spend at least five minutes with this reflection.
Reflect that each of us is trying to find our own way—that every one of us has difficulties and uncertainties, and that no one can escape wounding others or being wounded. May all of those wounds be transformed into sites of healing. May we all find the gateway into our hearts and open to deep compassion for ourselves and others.
Conclude by returning to the breath and practicing mindfulness of the breath for five minutes. As you come to the end of this meditation, congratulate yourself for taking this time for practice. May all beings be at peace.
Take a little time to write in your journal about what you discovered in this practice. What was your experience of the reconciliation meditation? Did you encounter any challenges, and if so, how did you work with them? Consider writing out a plan to begin reconciliation with at least one person in your life.
Reconciliation is an ongoing practice, so try working with it frequently. In truth, this is the work of a lifetime. Releasing yourself from grudges is a gradual process, but in time you will become freer than you ever imagined possible.
Empathetic joy is a wonderful quality that involves taking pleasure in another’s delight. In Yiddish, the lovely word kvell encapsulates this quality. It means feeling happiness for others’ happiness and rejoicing in their successes. Empathetic joy is the opposite of envy. All of us have had moments when we felt this way in regard to someone we care for.
You can also cultivate empathetic joy, as we’ll describe below. We highly recommend it. When you’re focusing on others’ happiness, you aren’t focusing on yourself, and this can help dispel feelings of unworthiness. In addition, empathetic joy helps you cultivate attunement and resonance with others and fosters feelings of pleasure and interconnectedness. This is a powerful antidote to the sense of isolation and disconnection that so often arise as a result of being locked into self-limiting definitions.
Mindfulness Practice: Empathetic Joy Meditation
Meditating on empathetic joy is a powerful way to connect with the timeless truth that love is meant to be shared. Give yourself about twenty minutes for this practice.
Begin by bringing awareness to the breath, being mindful of each inhalation and exhalation. Locate the spot where you feel the breath most prominently and distinctly. It could be at your nose, chest, belly, or somewhere else. Simply tune in to your breath and use it as your way to be present. Breathing in and out… Continue to practice mindful breathing for five minutes.
Now gently withdraw your attention from the breath and bring your mind and heart to someone you care about who is experiencing happiness because of something wonderful that has happened. It could be your partner being recognized for a great accomplishment at work, your child’s elation over a new kitten, or a friend who has just returned from a fantastic vacation. Whatever the case may be, bring your mind to that person and allow your heart to be filled up, perhaps even overflowing, with joy for your loved one. Stay with this reflection for a few minutes.
Now pause for a minute or two and notice the joy you feel inside yourself when you feel joy for another. You may experience how wonderful it is to feel this type of joy, which brings freedom from envy and enmity.
Realizing through empathetic joy that love is meant to be shared, let your heart expand and grow, spreading this joy to others. Spend a few minutes extending empathetic joy out to other loved ones, to acquaintances, and even to strangers, being happy for their successes and happiness—and simply being happy for them that they are here in this world.
Now spend a few minutes radiating this caring joy out to all creatures great and small. May all beings experience happiness and peace in this world.
Now spend a few minutes expanding empathetic joy outward even farther, until it envelops the vast universe, and beyond. May all beings love one another and take delight in the happiness of others. May all beings be held in love and be at peace.
As you come to the end of this meditation, take a few moments to wiggle your fingers and toes, then open your eyes and feel yourself being fully present here and now.
Take a little time to write in your journal about what you experienced with this practice. What sort of physical sensations came up as you cultivated empathetic joy? What came up in your thoughts and emotions? Did you experience any challenges in doing this practice?
Practicing empathetic joy will gradually shift your limited definitions of yourself to a more expansive feeling of interconnectedness and happiness. We highly recommend that you make this practice part of your daily life.
In this chapter we presented three mindfulness practices: loving-kindness meditation, reconciliation meditation, and empathetic joy meditation. In these practices, you extend to others the healing care and concern you developed with the self-compassion meditation in chapter 5. One aspect of reconciliation meditation is making peace with yourself—another step in your journey toward healing, self-acceptance, and wholeness. This creates a strong foundation from which you can extend loving-kindness and a spirit of reconciliation to others, healing your relationships and offering others the opportunity to experience the gifts of healing and wholeness. With time and continued practice, loving-kindness meditation and reconciliation meditation will open the door to spontaneous experiences of empathetic joy.
We recommend practicing the empathetic joy meditation frequently until it becomes an ingrained way of extending yourself to others. Practice reconciliation anytime you feel your heart hardening against yourself or others. Consider making loving-kindness meditation a lifelong practice, as it can foster self-compassion, dissolve feelings of separateness, and help you cultivate a spirit of reconciliation and empathetic joy.