7
caring for others

High levels of compassion are nothing but an advanced state of self-interest.

—TENZIN GYATSO, the 14th Dalai Lama

This chapter will take what you’ve learned about caring for yourself and bring it to other relationships—the source of so much pain and joy in life. As you’ll see, self-compassion is an essential, often unrecognized, ingredient in maintaining healthy relationships.

Some of you are already practicing loving-kindness meditation with other people, such as the beloved person who naturally makes you smile. But what about the difficult people in your life? Those folks can be a huge challenge to mindfulness and self-compassion. They also present you with an opportunity to deepen the practice. In this chapter, you’ll learn a systematic method for transforming your relationships with others, based on respect and care for yourself.

Most of us find that giving kindness to others is easier and more palatable than loving ourselves. Some readers may still need special permission to focus on their own emotional needs. If you’re among them, this chapter on caring for others could feel like a sellout. Don’t worry; you’ll learn here how to keep yourself in the picture even in the midst of intense and conflicting demands by other people.

“But can’t I just avoid the people who bother me?” Although it’s often a good idea to steer clear of problematic people, it’s not an effective strategy overall. Unless we’re hermits, we’ll have to deal with difficult people on the street, in a taxicab, at the grocery store, at work, at family reunions—just about everywhere. In the immortal words of British author Douglas Adams, “People are a problem.”

And unfortunately people live in our heads as well. Even if you stand alone on a mountaintop, your mind will be chattering with other people. What’s the conversation you’re having with your mother-in-law, your stepfather, your sister, or your friend? How does it feel? We’re the first to feel the pain of our own negative emotions, as expressed in the Chinese proverb “Hatred corrodes the vessel in which it’s stored.”

Changing our relationships to the people in our heads is the first step toward working with them in real time. After practicing loving-kindness meditation for 3 days on Rajiv, a surly middle-aged clerk at my neighborhood convenience store, I went there late at night to buy some milk. Seeing him as I walked through the door, I broke into a spontaneous smile. My previous habit was to pay my bill and leave as soon as possible, but this time I hung around and we chatted a bit. Only when I got home did I realize what had happened. By meditating on the struggle of this man living far from his native country, working late into the night selling lottery tickets to unhappy people, my aversion had quietly turned to curiosity and caring. Rajiv was none the wiser for my efforts. Transforming relationships with others starts with us; it’s an inside job.

Experiences like this gave me the confidence to tackle more difficult characters in my life. Some people make me feel guilty, some make me angry, others trigger regret or longing. One by one they’ve yielded to the force of inner kindness: “Just as I want to be happy and free from suffering, so does_________________want to be happy and free from suffering.” Negative feelings toward others tend to separate us from ourselves and from others—they trigger aversion. Practicing loving-kindness for others has gradually made me feel less alone and more connected to life in general.

In the words of the Buddha:

Looking after oneself, one looks after others.

Looking after others, one looks after oneself.

What we think, feel, and do toward others shapes how we feel inside.

A heads-up: Please don’t try to get through this chapter in one sitting. The first section explains why loving-kindness toward others is important and how to do it; the second section goes into concerns that might show up as you do the practice; and the third section describes how to bring the practice into your daily life. I recommend that you be a “student-practitioner”: Read a section, try the practice, and then alternate your practice with some more reading for the rest of the week. Go slowly—mindful self-compassion builds gradually. A full course of loving-kindness meditation, such as described in this chapter and the preceding one, is best taught in a relaxed retreat setting over a 4- to 6-week period.

THE WAY OF CONNECTION

Loving-kindness meditation has four healing elements: intention, attention, emotion, and connection. Boosting our core intention (“May all beings be happy”) brings energy and meaning into our lives, focused attention calms the mind (“Return to the phrases again and again”), positive emotions (compassion, love, tenderness) make us happy, and connection makes us feel more peaceful and secure (less alone, less afraid, with a sense of common humanity). You were introduced to self-to-self connection in the previous chapters; now you’ll learn how to practice self-to-other connection. The connection element of loving-kindness practice becomes particularly apparent when we direct our attention toward others. It soothes the pain of disconnection.

Most people don’t appreciate the role of connection in their lives. It’s invisible. As my friend and colleague Jan Surrey explains, connection has an ebb and flow—we continually connect and disconnect—but we’re usually too preoccupied by our families, jobs, and other responsibilities to notice. That doesn’t mean we don’t feel it. Disconnection hurts. A disconnection can be subtle, such as when your partner falls asleep before you do, or it can have the devastating impact of marital infidelity or abuse.

Usually disconnection occurs under the radar. It may show up as irritability, self-doubt, worry, or sadness. When you feel lonely and disconnected, a colleague at work can become irresistibly sexy, especially while you are both working late at the office, or you may consume too much food, spend a lot of time shopping, surf the Web looking for love, or drink too much. That’s when you should follow Jimmy Carter’s advice and look for “the things you cannot see.” Is disconnection what’s really making you anxious? Angry? Sad? Sexually aroused? Do you feel like your old self when your spouse returns from a business trip? Or does your mood get worse because you feel more disconnected in the company of your partner?

Disconnections are inevitable, even in the best relationships. We’re all incompatible to some extent. That’s easy to imagine because we have different DNA, our childhood experiences are different, and we live (or lived) in diverse economic, racial, ethnic, and gender groups. Our dreams continually collide with those of others. Therefore, every relationship includes the pain of disconnection.

Yet at the deepest level, way beyond ordinary awareness, we’re all woven into the same cloth. Thich Nhat Hanh, a prominent meditation teacher, illustrates this point in a lovely way:

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud there will be no water; without water the trees cannot grow; and without trees, you cannot make paper. So the cloud is in here. The existence of this page is dependent on the existence of a cloud. Paper and cloud are so close. Let us think of other things, like sunshine. Sunshine is very important because the forest cannot grow without sunshine, and we as humans cannot grow without sunshine. So the logger needs sunshine in order to cut the tree, and the tree needs sunshine in this sheet of paper. And if you look more deeply … you see not only the cloud and the sunshine in it, but that everything is here, the wheat that became the bread for the logger to eat, the logger’s father—everything is in this sheet of paper. …The presence of this tiny sheet of paper proves the presence of the whole cosmos.

Disconnection and Culture

About 60 million Americans—20% of the population—suffer from loneliness. Culture plays a role in how connected we feel. Ami Rokach of York University in Canada did a survey and found that both men and women in North America were lonelier than their counterparts in Spain on the dimensions of emotional distress, social inadequacy and alienation, growth and discovery, interpersonal isolation, and self-alienation.

Americans may also be losing confidence in the trustworthiness of others, another sign of loneliness. Wendy Rahn and John Transue found that social trust among high school seniors declined between 1976–1995. For example, 32% of students in 1976 felt that people in general could be trusted, whereas that percentage dropped to 17% in 1995. People were also viewed by these young adults as less helpful and less fair over the intervening years. Isolation and lack of trust reflect erosion of social connections.

Alan Hedge at Cornell University speculates that job insecurity and the relative lack of social programs like health care, pensions, and education in the United States may contribute to making Americans a “nomadic society on this treadmill”—needing to emphasize work and material security over personal connections.

The astronomer Carl Sagan echoes this vision: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

Feeling separate from others is at odds with our deepest sense of self. That’s why it hurts. It would be blissful indeed to have an unbroken sense of connection with one’s children, one’s partner, all of one’s friends, and with all people of different races, cultures, ages, and sex, and with all living creatures, no matter how much their survival needs compete with ours.

Hard-Wired for Empathy

The building blocks for empathizing with other people are the “mirror neurons,” located primarily in the insula (empathy and internal perception) and the premotor strip (planning movement) of the brain. Mirror neurons mimic motor neurons—the ones that control our muscles. The way empathy seems to occur is that when you see another person’s face, the mirror neurons will mimic what you see so you can feel what the other person is feeling. For example, if you see a person smile, the mirror neurons will make your face muscles smile and then you will feel yourself smiling and recognize what the other person is feeling. People with less active mirror neurons, such as those with autism, have difficulty understanding what’s happening between characters in a movie or “reading between the lines” when engaged with other people. The implications of this research has been nicely described in Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, which builds on his earlier work on emotional intelligence.

Our mirror neurons start firing as soon as we focus on another person. Happy or unhappy? Friend or foe? We can often detect tiny changes in facial expression or verbal tone that reveal how another person is feeling, even though we’re not fully aware of it. If I’m mad at my wife but plan to speak rationally and reasonably with her, my true feelings may still leak out. I might glance for a split-second too long or frown when I should have smiled. Then she says, slightly annoyed, “Why are you so testy?” and I think, “Me? Why are you so testy?” Our mirror neurons would have been communicating with each other all along despite my best efforts to hide how I feel. That’s probably why it’s so hard to discuss problems in a relationship; if you raise a topic when you feel unhappy, or start feeling bad after the topic is raised, your partner instantly feels as bad as you do.

The insula is full of mirror neurons that help us know what other people are feeling and intending to do. Research (mentioned earlier) has shown that both mindfulness and metta meditation activate the insula. Daniel Siegel puts these findings together in his thought-provoking book The Mindful Brain, suggesting that when we meditate in private, we’re actually improving our capacity for connected relationships in the real world.

In the words of Albert Einstein:

A human being is a part of the whole called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Is that possible? Well, sort of. We can feel connected even in the midst of disconnection by not abandoning ourselves in moments of pain. For example, it takes a lot of self-awareness and self-confidence to admit to oneself, after being snubbed by a boyfriend, “He’s just not that into you!” By not dodging what we’re feeling inside, we can continue to look others straight in the eye. The story of Michael and Suzanne in Chapter 1 also illustrates how bearing witness to one’s own relational suffering keeps us engaged.

METTA FOR OTHERS

Once you decide it’s worth developing loving-kindness toward others, basic training is necessary to deal with difficult people: income tax auditors, ex-spouses, telephone solicitors, and so on. Formal loving-kindness meditation is training for the real world. It transforms us by simultaneously exposing our emotional baggage as we reinforce the habits of loving-kindness and compassion. For example, a close friend may make you secretly green with envy if he gets a huge raise at work, or you might be angry at your sister for becoming pregnant before you did. When you start to meditate— cultivate the wish that your friend or sister be happy and free from suffering—you’ll immediately come face-to-face with these contrary emotions. It helps to make peace with them before you actually meet face-to-face, so no one feels hurt or rejected.

There are traditionally six categories of people with whom we train ourselves in the art of loving-kindness. The trick is to start with an easy target, reinforce the loving-kindness habit, and work up from there.

  1. Self—Your personal identity, usually located within the skin.

  2. Benefactor—Someone who makes you consistently smile, such as a mentor, a child, a spiritual guide, a pet, or a piece of nature.

    “I’ve got a little job for you, Kretchmer. I want you to infiltrate the I.R.S. and sow the seeds of compassion?

  3. Friend—A supportive person toward whom you feel trust and gratitude and have mostly positive feelings.

  4. Neutral—Any living being whom you don’t know and therefore neither like nor dislike.

  5. Difficult—Someone who has caused you pain, or toward whom you have negative feelings.

  6. Groups—Any group of living beings, for example, everybody listed above, everyone in your home, workplace, or city.

In the preceding chapter, you were introduced to loving-kindness meditation toward the self. Some of you have also been practicing with the “benefactor” as a route to yourself. For those of you who have not yet tried the “benefactor,” we’ll begin there and move forward in sequence to the other categories. Once you’ve mastered the “difficult person,” you’re ready to expand loving-kindness to everyone.

To get a sense of the practice as a whole and to keep it interesting, I suggest that you try one category each day in a 20-minute meditation. Then go back and work with each category for an entire week. Please consider this chapter an introduction to loving-kindness meditation. If you wish to practice more intensively—longer than 20 minutes a day—please consider finding a qualified teacher. A teacher is someone who has gone down the road before you, knows the obstacles, and can guide you through them. Retreat centers and other opportunities for additional training are listed in Appendix C.

Benefactor

This category starts the process of paying careful attention to another person. The benefactor is someone who puts a smile on your face and warmth in your heart. It could be a beloved teacher, a spiritual guide, a child, a pet, or something you love in nature. Pick a relationship that’s least likely to disappoint you later on—someone or something that makes you consistently happy.

TRY THIS: The Benefactor

This meditation will take 20 minutes. Begin metta meditation as described in Chapter 6: bring your attention to your heart region, take a few breaths, form an image of yourself in the sitting position, and recall that all beings wish to be happy and free from suffering. Then start repeating the phrases for yourself for 5 minutes or begin straightaway with your benefactor.

Compared to practicing metta meditation toward yourself, focusing on the benefactor is generally pleasant and easy. But if it’s the first time you’ve focused on the benefactor, you could have mixed feelings about the exercise. For example, you may not feel entitled to that level of intimacy with this special person, or it may feel like you’re peeking in someone’s window. Your reticence will probably subside over the coming week, but feel free to switch back to yourself when you need to, or return to the practice of mindfulness meditation—noticing what you’re feeling while you’re feeling it, with acceptance.

Friend

After working with your benefactor for a week or so, you’re probably ready to move on to the “friend” category. Friends have built trust for one another over the years and feel gratitude for the relationship. The relationship is close and predominantly positive. Select a few friends and briefly audition each one with the practice instructions given above for the benefactor, using the image of your friend. You don’t need to find the perfect friend—that doesn’t exist. Most will do just fine, wrinkles and all. When you’ve settled on someone, work with the person for the whole week. Start each meditation with yourself as the object of meditation, go to the benefactor for a minute (or switch around the benefactor and yourself), and then move on to your friend.

Difficult feelings will invariably emerge. If you dearly love your friend, the phrase “May you be safe” could trigger anxiety that he or she may not be safe. Anger may arise, perhaps a memory that your friend didn’t visit you in the hospital after your operation. Or you might feel envious that your friend has more money than you or has a happier marriage. When negative emotions hijack your attention, gently return to the metta phrases. If they dominate your attention, drop back to metta for yourself or your benefactor. Any unpleasant emotion—fear, anger, jealousy, shame, or remorse—is a valid reason for loving yourself.

A confusing feeling that everyone experiences from time to time with friends is schadenfreude. That’s the German word for feeling happy when others are going through difficulties. Ironically, a burst of joy when you hear of a close friend’s good fortune may be less common than the schadenfreude reaction. Instead of feeling ashamed when you feel this way, just continue to cultivate loving-kindness and compassion.

Feeling disconnected is the root of schadenfreude, but our metta practice helps us feel connected. When you know you’re sharing in your friend’s life journey—not feeling left out—schadenfreude will yield to happiness. Say “May she and I be …” You’ll be even happier if you can support your friend’s achievements: “May your good fortune grow and grow.” Keep saying the phrases and see what happens.

Metta Changes the Brain, Making Us More Compassionate

In a pilot study, Richard Davidson and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin trained a group of people via the Internet to practice metta meditation for 30 minutes a day for 2 weeks. A comparison group of people learned to “cognitively reappraise” situations in their lives. After 2 weeks, only the metta group showed significant improvement on the Self-Compassion Scale (see Chapter 4). Then Davidson exposed the participants to images of human suffering, such as a child with an eye tumor, as he scanned their brains with fMRI. The metta group had increased activity in the insula (which shows empathy). The more active the insula was while the participants looked at the distressing photographs, the higher their scores on self-report scales of well-being and self-compassion. Davidson then gave the subjects the chance to donate their $165 honorarium to a cause of their choosing. Activation in the insula predicted how much money the subjects donated! This study demonstrates that only 2 weeks of loving-kindness meditation can change brain activity, make people feel more compassionate toward themselves and others, and even elicit generosity.

Loving-Kindness toward Strangers

Researchers at Stanford University found that only 7 minutes of loving-kindness meditation increased positive feelings and a sense of connection with neutral individuals. Ninety-three participants were randomly assigned to an experimental loving-kindness meditation condition or a comparable imagery condition. The loving-kindness instruction was to imagine two loved ones standing to either side of oneself sending their love. Then the participant opened his or her eyes and repeated phrases to a neutral photograph, wishing health, happiness, and well-being. The comparison condition imagined acquaintances standing in the same positions while focusing on their appearance, and later they focused on the appearance of the neutral person in the photograph. The loving-kindness group showed a significant shift toward positive responding—feeling more connected, similar, and positive toward the neutral person in the photograph.

Neutral Person

This is a very interesting category despite its dull name. It’s an opportunity to develop loving-kindness toward any of the 6.7 billion people (and counting) you may encounter in your lifetime. The neutral person is someone you don’t know yet, which means you have relatively little liking or disliking beyond the usual stereotypes and prejudices.

It’s fun to select someone you’ll probably see again so that you can gauge the effect of your meditation. That’s what I did in the example of Rajiv given earlier. As the weeks progress, also remember to include animals and plants in your circle of kindness. I practiced metta for fruit flies in my kitchen while I was writing this book and had an unexpected flash of compassion when one flew in my nose. Neutral doesn’t stay neutral very long when we make it the object of loving-kindness.

Your main challenge with the neutral person will be to maintain the energy of loving-kindness. You can drop back to your benefactor or yourself whenever the practice needs refreshing. Don’t let the practice become dull or you’ll be training your brain in the fine art of dullness. Visualize the neutral person as best you can, experience the presence of that person, repeat the words slowly and gently, sense the importance of the words, and remind yourself that the neutral person is a vulnerable being just like you, subject to pain and death.

Difficult Person

Whereas the neutral person is an exercise in breadth, the difficult person is an exercise in depth. We need to drop to a deeper place within ourselves to evoke and sustain loving-kindness toward those who’ve hurt us. Difficult people are therefore our “best friends” on the path of loving-kindness.

To begin with, choose a person who is mildly difficult, not a person who has hurt you badly or who is causing massive hardship on the world stage. Let it be someone you feel comfortable enough visualizing in meditation.

Yeah, well, the Dalai Lama never had to deal with your whining.

TRY THIS: The Difficult Person

This meditation will also take 20 minutes. Prepare for meditation in the manner described earlier and then begin repeating the metta phrases to yourself and your benefactor (in either order) for about 5 minutes.

Give yourself credit for taking on this challenge. It reflects your commitment to bringing loving-kindness to all aspects of your life.

You may have the following thoughts as you work with difficult people in your life:

• “I don’t want my difficult person to be happy. Then he (or she) won’t change!” When we offer a difficult person loving-kindness, we’re not accepting bad behavior or hoping the person will escape the consequences of his or her actions. Rather, we’re wishing for the person to become a happy, peaceful human being. It may help to make the phrases more credible to your ear, such as, “May [Michael] heal his inner wounds and find the way to happiness.” Your difficult person might change for the better when you have a warmer attitude, but try not to make your practice contingent upon his or her behavior.

• “I don’t even want to think about my difficult person!” Most people instinctively wish that their difficult person would just disappear or die. There’s a Tibetan saying: “Don’t bother wishing your enemies will die; they’ll do that anyway!” If you’re having strong feelings of aversion and they don’t subside, switch to a less difficult person. Also, don’t feel obligated to feel the presence of the difficult person while doing metta meditation, as you would the benefactor, if it’s too uncomfortable. Work with the phrases so you feel at ease and loving-kindness prevails. You might prefer the emotional distance of using a person’s proper name—“May [John Doe] find inner peace …”—rather than an informal pronoun, “May you be …” Finally, you can always take refuge in the company of your benefactor (or your own company) whenever you wish.

• “I spend too much time giving loving-kindness and compassion to myself!” That’s impossible. Don’t worry if your meditation on the difficult person is 95% self-metta. Working with disturbing emotions (“backdraft”) can comprise the majority of metta practice with difficult people. The more pain you feel, the more self-care you’ll need. Sometimes it helps to put your hand on your heart and slowly breathe through your heart to get the feeling of self-compassion.

• “Can’t I start by tackling the toughest character in my life first?” It’s usually best to take a middle path—someone not too hard and not too easy. With steady practice, even the most difficult people will lose their grip on you. Use your intuition to decide whether the most difficult person will derail you from the task of generating loving-kindness.

• “I just want to forgive and forget.” Don’t rush forgiveness. Forgiveness toward others can come only after you’ve opened to your own pain and accepted it fully. When you feel ready, try repeating forgiveness phrases such as:

I’ve suffered terrible loss, fear, and self-doubt. I’ve been lonely and confused. I forgive myself for what I’ve done, knowingly or unknowingly, to harm you.

Then shift to the difficult person:

I know that you too have suffered. You’ve also had times of loneliness, heartache, despair, and confusion. I forgive you for what you’ve done, knowingly or unknowingly, to hurt me.

Repeat the forgiveness phrases as you would the metta phrases, always returning to self-metta when needed. Forgiveness requires that we deal directly with emotional pain, not bypass it.

I know a woman, Miranda, who was sexually abused in childhood by her uncle. After he committed suicide in his mid-70s, Miranda was told by her meditation teacher to meditate on the good things that her deceased uncle had brought into her life, such as creativity and reckless abandon. To her amazement, it helped Miranda heal the bitterness and despair she felt toward her uncle. This approach is generally not recommended until much has been done to validate one’s own suffering, as Miranda had done. In her case, the teacher was also very loving and aware of how Miranda had suffered, which provided a safety net from which she could forgive her uncle. Even so, Miranda had to intermittently stop her metta practice, or focus only on herself, when she got lost in her traumatic memories.

• “We’re both good people, but the relationship is a pain.” You can care for the relationship as an entity, not just the participants as separate individuals. A relationship is a “we.” Loving-kindness toward a relationship assumes you have made peace with yourself and the other person already. It’s a slightly advanced practice. When you’re ready, you can practice by saying “May we be safe, May we be happy, May we be healthy, May we live with ease.”

• “What if our culture is the ‘difficult person’?” Emotional pain is often embedded in social problems, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice. These can also be addressed in your metta phrases: “May you and I be free from the pain of prejudice.” Since prejudice is the result of ignorance, you can also try the words “May we all be free from the pain of ignorance.” Both sides of the bigotry equation avoid one another to feel safe or more comfortable. The inner work of loving-kindness and compassion practice can start the process of humanizing and reconnecting with one another.

• “Can I skip a category or stay longer with a particular person?” The categories are guidelines, not rules. Use your intuition and common sense, keeping the energy of loving-kindness as alive as possible. Toward that end, you can practice any way you see fit.

Groups

The final category is good will toward numerous individuals at the same time. We already practice this way at the end of each meditation session to expand the circle of loving-kindness: “May I and all beings be happy and free from suffering.”

Once you’ve worked with all the different categories, try gathering everyone together in your mind and offering them loving-kindness at the same time. Or, as if you were hosting a dinner party, you can silently say to each person in sequence, “May you be safe … may you be safe … and may you be safe …” and so on. Don’t forget yourself. The guests at my party might include the Dalai Lama, a childhood friend, the clerk at the convenience store, and a politician who particularly offends me. It’s fun to imagine this unlikely gathering in one place. Your “group” will be easier to visualize the longer you work with each individual in meditation.

Allow yourself to appreciate the common humanity of all the people you’ve gathered together. Everyone is breathing; all experience similar human emotions; everyone suffers from time to time; they all wish to be happy; and no one will live forever. Wish everyone well: “May you be safe, peaceful, healthy, and live with ease.”

Other groupings can be made of the people in your home, town, country, or the entire world. You can focus on all the living beings in each of the four directions; all beings above (birds) and below (bugs and worms); all living things seen and unseen; all men and all women; all tall and short people; slim and fat; old and young. You can make up your own pairs of opposites. The “group” idea is to recognize the equality of all beings and not to exclude anyone, especially those you might tend to overlook. It’s an especially expansive and joyful practice once you get the knack of it.

LOVING OTHERS WITHOUT LOSING YOURSELF

Each individual needs to find a healthy balance between self-care and caring for others, between having an authentic, personal voice and staying connected, and between the need for solitude and the need for relationship. For example, after a day of caring for her two young children, the last thing a woman may want is sex with her partner. What she may really need is a quiet, solitary walk or to receive some thoughtful attention. How do we love others without losing ourselves?

People differ in how much they enjoy connecting with others. Women seem to have a greater appetite for connection than men do. They also seem to like metta meditation more. I’ve even heard some men, but rarely a woman, say, “I hate metta!” Whether you’re male or female, try to know, accept, and trust your own personal tolerance for connection.

During my clinical psychology internship back in 1981, I mentioned to my supervisor that I had a nightmare of people climbing through the windows of my apartment. She replied, “I think you need a vacation!” The same dream has recurred over the last 28 years whenever I need more privacy. Curiously, it happened again on a 7-day metta meditation retreat in which the participants never spoke to one another, nor did they even make eye contact. This taught me how “connected” loving-kindness meditation really is —how the head can get filled with relationships like in daily life. Taking the hint from my dream, I sought the solitude of self-metta and mindfulness practice until I was ready to “reconnect.”

When Me? When Others?

When you’re in pain, give yourself compassion first. Heal the healer. Sometimes a micro-moment of self-compassion is all it takes.

Take the typical morning in an American family. Under time pressure to prepare the kids for school, Mom or Dad may not recognize his or her rising stress level and inadvertently blurt out something like “Why are you always so unhelpful, Sean?” When that happens, try to soften into the catastrophe of the moment. Think for a second, “Ah, stress” and then say, “May I be peaceful. May I be at ease. May we all be peaceful and at ease.” Even before you get up in the morning, start repeating the phrases. Then keep yourself in the picture by using the phrases whenever you need them.

As mentioned earlier, what distinguishes compassion from loving-kindness is the presence of pain. Compassion is a kindly response to pain. You can practice compassion for your own pain, for the pain of others, or for the pain you feel when others are in pain. Just think how you feel when images of burning homes, disemboweled bodies, and malnourished children are beamed into your home on the television. The evening news is a great opportunity to practice metta. Stay mindful of your inner state (“This is painful to watch!”) and offer compassion to yourself and those on the screen (“May I be safe. May you be safe. May we all be safe and live in peace”). Try the same practice when you visit a friend at the hospital. Transforming your “worried attention” into “compassionate attention” through metta practice always comes as a welcome relief.

The most natural time to practice loving-kindness toward others is when you’re genuinely happy—when you have loving energy to spare. It’s easy to wish happiness for others when we’re happy. You’ll feel even greater happiness when you do so, perhaps because you’re temporarily escaping the prison of your individuality by thinking of others. But timing is everything; when emotional resources are low, it’s still best to focus on yourself.

Feeling shy or anxious in social situations, which everyone does from time to time, is another excellent opportunity to practice loving-kindness toward others. Why others at this time? A shy person is likely to be talking with an interesting person at a party and at the same time worrying whether he or she looks nervous. People feel abandoned when their conversation partners are self-absorbed. Ironically, it’s the disconnection from a listener, rather than anxiety itself, that makes shyness such a problem. To stay in connection despite feeling anxious, try loving-kindness. When you notice yourself absorbed in your own anxiety, look the other person in the eye and think, “May you and I be happy.” Practicing like this can help you feel less afraid on a job interview or a first date too.

Metta for others can also be used to heal disconnection in old relationships. Are you tired of another person “taking space in your head without paying rent” (an Alcoholics Anonymous expression)? Healing old wounds requires that we offer compassion to both sides of the relationship.

Helen had been divorced for 25 years and had never remarried. Her ex-husband, John, had an affair that broke up the marriage and he subsequently married that person. As Helen approached her 75th birthday, she decided she couldn’t carry her angry thoughts around any longer—she didn’t want to share her deathbed with bitterness. With this determination, Helen set about loosening the grip of her anger.

Helen decided to revisit in her mind how traumatic the affair and divorce had been for her and her family so many years earlier. As she did this, she comforted herself with metta phrases: “May I be safe and may I find peace.” She practiced like this, over and over, for 9 months. Helen also forgave herself for her own part in the divorce: “May I forgive myself for everything I did to undermine our marriage.” She addressed John in a similar way: “May I forgive you for what you did, mostly out of confusion from a life riddled with loss and abandonment, that hurt me and our family.” As Helen gradually released her bitterness, her relationship with her ex-husband improved. When John died 6 years later, Helen attended the funeral and met his second wife, with very little anger remaining.

It takes courage to heal an old, troubled relationship, but, like Helen, we first need to see how not addressing it can be more damaging. Loving our enemies is not a moral prescription—it’s just the best thing we can do for ourselves.

Try using the metta phrases with old boyfriends and girlfriends, parents, difficult in-laws, siblings, ex-friends, neighbors, and other people in any relationship that creates tension inside. It’s easier than you think. If you feel ashamed of how you behaved in the relationship, make a special effort to recognize that emotional pain. Shame, guilt, and remorse are the trickiest emotions to identify because we’re continually dodging them inside. Remember that not a single emotion is outside the range of self-compassion. Bring kindness to yourself because of your difficult feelings. Thereafter, extend good will to the other half of the relationship.

It requires special skill to work with traumatic relationships that may include physical, sexual, or verbal abuse. Most important, make sure you’re prepared—that you have the emotional resources for your journey and the necessary support of a therapist, friends, or family. Disturbing memories can overwhelm our best intentions. Will you know when your capacity for compassion is running low and you need either to refocus on yourself or to quit the practice altogether? You’re pushing it too hard if you find yourself unable to sleep, emotionally numb, having difficulty concentrating, or feeling unusually fearful and isolating yourself. Go slow and be safe.

Compassion Fatigue

The result of extending ourselves too much to others is called “compassion fatigue.” The term is actually a misnomer because compassion itself isn’t fatiguing. Compassion fatigue is really “attachment fatigue.” We wear ourselves out when we’re attached to the outcome of our hard work, such as the success or recognition. Sure signs of compassion fatigue are (1) believing that you’re indispensable and (2) feeling resentment toward those you’re trying to help. Compassion fatigue feels bad, and it’s not good for anyone. The antidote to compassion fatigue is self-compassion. When your emotional supplies are depleted, take a break and care for yourself in whatever way you can: physically, mentally, emotionally, relationally, or spiritually.

Another way to manage compassion fatigue is by cultivating equanimity. When you’re caught by excessive attachment, see if you can untangle yourself by contemplating: “People are the owners of their deeds. It’s their choice how they make themselves happy or free themselves from suffering.” This is a traditional Buddhist saying to cultivate equanimity. It may sound like a prescription for indifference, but when you’re trapped in compassion fatigue it’s your ticket to emotional freedom.

Altruism and Your Well-Being

The psychologist Martin Seligman says that people seek happiness in three different ways: the Pleasant Life, the Engaging Life, and the Meaningful Life. Research has shown that pleasure contributes less to overall happiness than either being fully engaged in your life or having a meaningful life. Being “engaged” means knowing your strengths (such as your “signature strengths” from Chapter 5) and building them into your relationships and leisure activities. When you’re good at a task, you can become completely absorbed in it-you enter the “flow”—which is a deeply satisfying experience. A “meaningful life” is one in which you use your strengths for the greater good—something larger than yourself. Altruistic pursuits and metta meditation fit into this latter category.

Would you like to know how you’re constructing your own life? If so, you can take the Approaches to Happiness Questionnaire, a quick test developed by Chris Peterson at the University of Michigan (www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx).

Seligman and Peterson’s categories should be considered guides, not prescriptions, for any given individual. For example, some well-meaning people have a tendency to deny themselves pleasure as they pursue the greater good, which can make them harsh and judgmental. Other individuals may need a little encouragement to extend themselves to others so they can enjoy the satisfaction of making a difference in someone’s life. Even absorption in daily activities, though highly satisfying, is not universally desirable. Periods of confusion and doubt are necessary for us to grow. Use your understanding of these three approaches to bring balance and happiness into your life.

TAKING IT ON THE ROAD

Loving-kindness and compassion practice can easily be integrated into daily life. Every moment that you use a metta phrase, you’re doing informal meditation. It takes only a second of your time.

Walking Meditation

A delightful way to take metta meditation on the road, quite literally, is walking meditation. Whether you walk in the city or the woods, your mind will usually be in the “default” mode, digesting the past (who said what to whom) or planning the future (your errands, your evening). Our minds are mostly critiquing the people and things we see around us. Instead, we can use these walks to develop loving-kindness and compassion.

TRY THIS: Compassionate Walking

Plan to walk for 10 minutes or longer, anywhere you like. Dedicate the time specifically to cultivating loving-kindness and compassion.

The phrases will keep your attention anchored in your body and start to evoke the attitude of loving-kindness. Try to synchronize the phrases with each step or with each breath. It may help to shorten the phrases to a single word: “safe, happy, healthy, ease” or “love, love, love, love.”

You also say “May you be safe …” or just “safe … happy … healthy … ease” or “love … love … love … love.” Don’t try to include everyone; just do it one person at a time, keeping the attitude of loving-kindness alive.

Compassionate walking meditation is especially fitting for people who can’t sit still very long and for people who are sitting all day in front of a computer and would like to get some exercise. A common question is “What should I do if I have to talk with someone?” Just let yourself become absorbed in the conversation and keep the wish percolating in the back of your mind: “May you be happy and free from suffering.”

Your heart will be full of loving-kindness when the metta phrases revolve spontaneously through your mind. Then, when you meet someone, your words will align themselves with the phrases. For example, the silent mantra “May you be healthy” may be expressed as “I’m so sorry you had the flu last week.” You’ll not only be speaking kind words; you’ll actually feel them.

Other Everyday Applications

Do you remember the story I related in Chapter 3 of my struggle to help my wife after hip surgery? I was rescued from this domestic dilemma by mindfulness and loving-kindness practice. As I struggled to put my wife’s shoes on her swollen feet, I had a flash of awareness (“Wow, this situation is going downhill fast”) and self-compassion (“May she and I be free from suffering”). The metta phrase was the extra boost I needed to extricate myself from trying too hard to help my wife, which allowed me to get some orange juice and return to his task in a more sympathetic frame of mind.

Metta practice can also penetrate into sleep or near-sleep states of consciousness. Usually I say the phrases before I fall asleep and when I wake up in the morning. This habit seems to have transformed the irritation I first felt as my wife yanked the blankets off the bed during her hot flashes. These days, as the covers suddenly disappear from my shoulders in the middle of the night, I find myself muttering something mildly sympathetic, like “Estrogen depletion sucks, doesn’t it?” as I wave the sheets in the air and create a little breeze for her. That’s a minor marital miracle.

It’s always good to keep some mindfulness meditation in your loving-kindness practice. That will keep you in your body when you feel bad, without trying to change anything, as Darlene discovered.

Darlene had a partner, Jackie, who suffered from mild depression. Jackie took care of their two kids while Darlene worked from her home office. Whenever Darlene went into the office, Jackie felt abandoned. Darlene felt guilty about this, and her stress came out as stomach pain and diarrhea. Over time, Darlene secluded herself more and more in her office. When Darlene finally discussed her problem with Jackie, Jackie reassured Darlene that she should go ahead and do her job even if she felt guilty about it. The ball was back in Darlene’s court.

Darlene decided to approach the problem with mindfulness and self-compassion. First she resolved to find her emotions in her physical body rather than getting caught up in them—guilt, frustration, anger. She learned to recognize mild muscle tension in her gut and practiced “soften, allow, and love” (see Chapter 3). She labeled “guilt” in a soft, gentle way and recognized it as the same feeling she had as a child when her mother became disabled with migraine headaches. As Darlene reflected on her lifetime of guilty feelings, sympathy arose for herself. Rather than having a pity party, Darlene gave herself love: “May I be safe, may I be happy, may I be strong, may I live my life with ease.” Then she added her beloved partner to the mix: “May Jackie be safe, may she be strong, may she be healthy, may she live with ease.” “May we be healthy and strong, may we be free from suffering, may we live our lives with ease.”

Whenever Darlene felt guilt, she located it in her body and resumed using the phrases. This practice put her in a good mood, and she started leaving the office for brief breaks with Jackie. Darlene had escaped her cycle of guilt, frustration, and avoidance, and Jackie’s mood improved considerably. Changes such as these are likely to occur over just a few weeks. Mindfulness helps to keep metta practice grounded in moment-to-moment reality, and compassion softens the criticism we heap on ourselves and others when things go wrong.

As your practice gets stronger, you may want to bring the metta phrases into more challenging situations. For example, if you’re having a problem with a noisy neighbor in the apartment upstairs, start by offering metta to yourself: “May I be safe, may I be free of bitterness, may I live with ease.” Then include your neighbor: “May she and I be safe, may she and I be at ease.” Then, “May we both be at ease, may we both be free from bad feelings, may we both figure out how to communicate with each other.”

Be flexible in your use of metta phrases in daily life, customizing them for each situation. (In formal sitting meditation, it’s better to keep the phrases the same.) Try not to make the phrases so specific that you get hooked on an outcome, such as “May she shut off the music already!” Of course, timely action is sometimes a more skillful approach than silent meditation, but in the long run the most effective interventions occur when we approach others with good will.

The Power of Compassion

Over the years, I’ve learned to trust the power of compassion to heal relationships. The following incident, which occurred during a couple therapy session, reinforced that trust:

Jim worked conscientiously as a photographer but never seemed to earn enough money. Ruth was in despair about this, and occasionally she flew into a rage. This happened once during a therapy session. Ruth just seemed to snap, calling her husband a poor provider, “half a man,” and “lazy.” The words were so harsh that they felt surreal to me, like watching a made-for-TV movie about marital conflict. Jim remained calm throughout the tirade and intently focused on Ruth, which I found both curious and comforting. When it was over and I asked Jim what was going through his mind, he replied, “As the poison was coming out of Ruth’s mouth, all I could see was the pain in her heart.”

The following session, I learned that Ruth had grown up under difficult economic conditions and she was terrified of returning to that lifestyle. When this issue came out into the open rather than remaining a hidden terror in Ruth’s heart, the couple was able to candidly discuss their financial needs and brainstorm together about the future. Ruth even volunteered to take over the financial side of Jim’s photography business, which Jim gratefully accepted.

This outcome would have been impossible without Jim’s deep compassion—it made space for a deeper conversation about the soft feelings behind the hard words. Everyone in an intimate relationship occasionally leads their pain with fighting words. Jim’s remarkable comment “As the poison was coming out of [her] mouth, all I could see was the pain in her heart” has become an anchor for me when I’m with couples in intense conflict. Happily, Jim’s business is now flourishing, thanks to Ruth’s skillful guidance.

Another surprising experience I had as a psychotherapist was an instance of compassion:

Sam arrived in my office looking tense and distracted. He had just called for an emergency consultation a number of years after I’d last seen him. Within a few minutes, Sam blurted it out: “I have to help my mother kill herself and I’m here because maybe you can help me.” I was shocked and perplexed. I’d been a therapist for over 15 years and had never had such a request, especially not from a reasonable guy like Sam.

It all made sense when Sam began to explain. His mother had suffered a stroke, and she couldn’t speak, eat, walk, or toilet herself. Sam said he could read in her anguished eyes that she was begging him to end her life. Knowing a little about strokes, and buying some time as well, I suggested to Sam that he should probably wait before taking drastic action because his mother might recover some functioning over the coming year.

I never heard from Sam again on this issue. When he called for an appointment a year later to discuss a different problem, I asked him how his mother was doing. He said, “Oh, she’s much better.” I inquired what that meant, and Sam said she had not recovered any physical capacity, but she seemed happier than she’d ever been in her whole life. “How could that be?” I wondered aloud. Sam explained that his mother was always the kind of person who was supercompetent, never let others do anything for her, criticized his father mercilessly their entire life together, and now his dad was happily taking care of his mother in every possible way. “My mother was forced to receive love, perhaps for the first time in her entire life,” Sam said, “and it seems to have made her a gentler person.”

Uncommon kindness, combined with curiously favorable conditions, seems to have created this remarkable outcome.

A final example of the power of loving-kindness and compassion concerns my dear friend from graduate school, Gib, and his wife, Faye. Gib was 48 years old when he married Faye, then 32 years old, after the breakup of his first marriage. Faye had blond hair and drove a red convertible sports car with the license plate “FUN4-FAYE.” Three years after they married, Gib was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and the chemotherapy paralyzed him from the chest down. Faye remembers driving home after hearing the awful news, sobbing, “My husband is paralyzed! … My husband is paralyzed! I don’t want my husband to be paralyzed!” When I visited Faye and Gib 2 years later, I asked Faye, “How do you do it?” Her response has echoed in my mind ever since. She softly replied, “I didn’t know I could love so much.”

“It’s been a process,” Faye told me. “We’ve had good counselors and ministers. And Gib allows me to talk. Most of the time he’s a husband and not paraplegic. He allows me to be me because of who he is.” Faye added, “I don’t see that blond bombshell anymore, but Gib can see the beauty of my soul. God has called us to love on a soul-to-soul level. He stripped away much of what we had together initially, forcing us into a deeper level of understanding of each other. The love we have now is nothing short of a miracle.”

Eight years ago, a bright light entered Faye and Gib’s life in the form of an adopted daughter. When their daughter started school, Faye returned to her work as a school teacher. At one point, Faye started worrying about herself: “When parents tear up, I tear up with them. I do the same with just about anybody.” Then someone told Faye, “That’s not weak, that’s compassion!”

I hope this chapter has helped you learn how to integrate loving-kindness practice into your life, without losing yourself. In Part III, I’ll show you how to tailor self-compassion to your personality style and circumstances, how to sustain your practice over time, and how to gauge your progress.