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SOFT KINDNESS

SMILE!

Integrate the smile into your life, smiling all the time, smiling each and every moment. By smiling, you relax your heart and mind. Smiling softens and opens you.

Smile to your breath. With each breath, smile. As you smile there is a certain calmness, serenity, tranquility, a certain friendliness, or mitra. This is ci in Chinese: a gentle, friendly, soft kindness, which can also mean generosity and giving or a positive regard.

As a result of mitra, the smile, you become closer to the breath; it is no longer something that is dead—it comes alive.

When you see a stranger and you want to make friends, what do you do? You smile to that person. By smiling, you start a relationship, and as you smile there is more warmth, more friendliness. As a result, the relationship will become closer and more intimate.

Mitra actually comes from another word in Sanskrit, maitri. In the Pali Canon, the standard collection of Buddhist scripture in the Theravada tradition, it is also known as metta. Most Buddhists in the West are probably more familiar with this term, which means “loving-kindness.” In order for you to have metta or maitri, you have to make friends. If there is no friendliness, then it is difficult to have love and kindness.

The laughing Buddha—with his big, beautiful smile and big, jolly belly—is called Maitreya. His name derives from the word maitri, and he embodies the principal of warmth, friendship, loving-kindness. He is one big smile!

When we are sleepy, we smile; we are friendly to the sleepiness. When there are wandering and scattered thoughts, we smile. We smile to pain. We smile at our aches. We smile at our sickness. We smile when we fail. With all these things we make friends. We are friendly. When there is friendliness, all our suffering transforms. It is no longer the enemy.

Let’s look at what happens when suffering becomes your enemy.

If suffering is your enemy, what happens? You have to fight; the whole day fighting. You try to push suffering away. You become very tense and agitated. It is exhausting! You constantly have to guard yourself against the enemy that may be coming to attack you.

If you smile and become friendly to your enemies, you establish a form of friendliness. When you no longer feel threatened, there is no threat. You feel secure and stable. And with this sense of security, you are better able to accept the present moment. You can come back to the breath.

On the other hand, when I say to be friendly, it doesn’t mean that you play with wandering and scattered thoughts and the whole day you are busy making friends. Or you become pals with sleepiness and you fall asleep, and you and your new friend sleepiness have a nice, long nap together. To have a sense of friendliness simply means there is no enmity, no threat, no bad feelings. So you are friends, and as a result, when your friends are around you feel comfortable. You feel very comfortable and relaxed. And you stay in the present moment.