Intro to Practicing Lovingkindness toward a Difficult Person (15:05)
Guided Meditation on Practicing Lovingkindness Toward a Difficult Person (16:26)
You can read Thich Nhat Hahn’s poem “Call Me by My True Names” here.
Because I am so early in my own practice of lovingkindness toward a difficult person and find it so hard and complicated, I leant heavily on the work of Sharon Salzburg in our session today. Somehow I find it reassuring to learn that even after 40 years of continuous practice, she still struggles. As she wrote in her book Real Love, “I remember complaining to a friend about someone we both knew, and she said, ‘Haven’t you read your own book?’ Recognizing when our actions don’t match our aspirations can also be an act of love.”
I can’t recommend Real Love highly enough (and also Salzberg’s earlier book, Lovingkindness), and her chapters about practicing lovingkindness toward people who have hurt us or who we feel perpetrate injustice are particularly valuable. I hope you will attain one or the other of these books. Lovingkindness is a life’s work, and Salzberg’s writing can inspire you to integrate it into your life, even if only for a few moments each day. Further on, you will find the quotations from her writing that I shared today.
Many of the comments after today’s meditation revolved around the sense of futility we can feel practicing lovingkindness toward someone who seems unchangeable or who we feel is doing real damage in the world. It is important to remember that the transformation that matters most is inside oneself, and lovingkindness practice is first and foremost a way to support our own growing sense of agency and personal freedom. Civil rights warrior John Lewis has written extensively about this and you can find some relevant excerpts from his book Across that Bridge here.
Below are some excerpts from Sharon Salzburg’s Real Love
About Martin Luther King
A few years ago: I met Myles Horton, who founded what was then called the Highlander Folk School (now known as the Highlander Research and Education Center), a training center for the civil rights movement, whose students included activist Rosa Parks. Myles asked me what I did, and when I told him about teaching lovingkindness meditation, he said, “Oh, Marty”—as in Martin Luther King, Jr.—“used to say to me, ‘You have to love everybody.’ And I would say, ‘No, I don’t. I’m only going to love the people that deserve to be loved.’ And Marty would laugh and say, ‘No, no, no. You have to love everybody.’”
Sometimes when I tell this story, people reply, “Well, look what happened. He got assassinated.” As if this were a case of cause and effect, and King would not have been killed if he hadn’t tried to love everybody. But how do we know that? If Martin Luther King had been hateful, vicious, and small-minded, would he have been safer? Would we be safer? How far would the movement have gotten if he hadn’t insisted on meeting hatred with love? (pp. 247-248)
About MALALA YOUSAFZAI, the Pakistani girl wounded by the Taliban who was the youngest ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
The daughter of an education activist and school owner in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, Malala began to speak and blog about education for girls when she was twelve. In 2012, when she was just fifteen, she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman who boarded her school bus and asked for her by name. …
In 2013, Malala appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to tell her story. Stewart asked her to describe her reaction when she first learned the Taliban wanted her dead. She replied: “I used to think that the Talib would come, and he would just kill me. But then I said, ‘If he comes, what would you do, Malala?’ Then I would reply to myself, ‘Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.’ But then I said, ‘If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib.’”
Despite her young age, Malala’s wise heart already knew that “an eye for an eye” retaliation, even with those who sought to harm her, would only hurt her further. When we think, speak, and act from a sense of awareness and compassion, we see that there are many ways to respond to threats and accusations. It’s not as though Malala’s instinctual reaction to danger was necessarily to be loving and accepting of her attackers; but she had the perspective to recognize that hitting the Talib with her shoe would mean perpetuating the cycle of violence and fear further, playing by the same rules as those who opposed and endangered her. By recognizing that retaliation would both fuel the cycle of violence and cause her to carry the burden of pain, anger, and fear in her own heart, Malala gave herself freedom and courage, reinventing the rules of the game the Taliban tried to “play” with her.
When we allow ourselves to consider the consequences of our actions with a wider lens, we also realize the profound link between how we relate to others and our own sense of harmony and well-being. What is perhaps ironic is that the resolve of Malala’s non-violent emphasis on dialogue and education proved to be more disarming than any violent retaliation. Her goal was not to kill or harm those who were threatening her life as a result of the cause she stood for but to support the cause regardless of the outcome on her [own] safety. … With stories like Malala’s, we have living proof of how such acts of love can be fiercely powerful. (pp. 249-250.)
About our fears that we don’t have the moral fiber of a Martin Luther King or MALALA YOUSAFZAI
I’d also be the first to acknowledge that this work is never done. After the publication of Lovingkindness, people often said to me, “It must be incredible to love everybody all the time!” I had to tell them that although I believe that universal love is possible, I don’t live every day overflowing with love. I remember complaining to a friend about someone we both knew, and she said, “Haven’t you read your own book?” Recognizing when our actions don’t match our aspirations can also be an act of love.
Inspiring figures don’t have to be used as cudgels against our own sense of worth, though we may veer toward that kind of conditioning and need to be sensitive to that tendency. Inspiration points us to a bigger world than the one we may have been inhabiting, where we suddenly can see that human beings can go through so much and still be kind. They can create, or care, or act in a way that belies an ordinary sense of constriction or limitation. They can know love is a power, and work toward being free. We can see a path, a way, and say, “If there is a path, I, too, can walk on it.”
About our fears that feeling lovingkindness toward dangerous people can turn us into patsies or enable bad behavior:
Happily, in forty years of practicing and teaching lovingkindness, I’ve discovered that instead of turning us into pushovers who lack clear boundaries, this practice makes us stronger so that we live more in tune with our deepest values. Loving all others asks us to open our hearts and embrace our shared humanity with people we don’t know well (or at all). However, it does not require getting personally involved with everyone we meet. It does not require us to agree with their actions or views—or to confess our love to strangers on the street. It never requires that we sacrifice our principles or cease standing up for what we believe. The primary work is done internally, as we cultivate love and compassion in our own hearts. (p 250).