Tag: love

Cultivating Compassion

During our Q&A session last week, we discussed how difficult it is to cultivate compassion toward others. As I mentioned, it is a learned skill. So today, let’s talk about how we can develop compassion toward all living beings.

Before we develop compassion towards everyone, we first need to have love towards them. If we have a love for someone in our heart, developing compassion towards them becomes easy. So how do we develop love towards other random people and even people who do not care for us. Well, let’s start with types of love. There are three types of love. Affectionate love, cherishing love, and wishing love.

Here is from the book Universal Compassion: We can understand these by considering the following example. If a mother is reunited with one of her children after a long separation, she is very happy and feels great affection for her. This special feeling of affection is affectionate love. Out of affection, the mother considers her child to be very precious and wants to take special care of her. This special feeling of caring is cherishing love. Because she has affectionate love and cherishing love for her child, if she sees that she is unhappy she immediately wishes to restore her happiness. This wish for others to be happy and to help them to achieve happiness is wishing love.

So let’s break this down. In simplest terms, affectionate love is to like someone. If we are in a family and we have affection towards each other, life would be much smoother. Similarly, if we have affection towards our community, we will try to make sure that everyone in our community is free from suffering. This affectionate love brings harmony and peace in the community. The easiest way to develop affectionate love is to think about how no one wants to suffer. We know that we don’t want to have any suffering in life. Similarly, no one wishes to suffer for themselves. Once we understand that all beings want to be free from suffering, we will develop affectionate love towards them. A warm feeling in our hearts towards them. It is difficult to practice this by trying to show affectionate love towards everyone at once. So one should start by showing affectionate love towards a select few that would be easier – members of your family or close friends. Then expand the circle once you are comfortable.

Cherishing love is to cherish other beings. We touched on this in one of our previous sessions. How so many people are trying to help our day go by smoothly. If we think about how many people were involved in the house we are living in or bringing the water we drink every day or food we eat every day. It is countless number of people. Just imagine how many people are involved in getting this meditation session live to all of us. Someone had to build this microphone, computer, and so on. Once we realize this, we will start cherishing others for all they do. Developing this cherishing love is what helps us develop compassion towards others.

Wishing love is our wish for all living beings to be happy. This is a natural outcome once we develop affectionate love and cherishing love towards others.

A fast-track way to develop compassion towards others is to think about all living beings as our mothers. If we believe that we have had countless lives, then we also must accept that we have had countless mothers. That means any of the living beings could be our mother in our previous lives. One can argue but that does not mean they are our mothers right now. Well, when someone’s mother passes away, she does not stop being their mother. So by that logic, since they were our mothers once, they are still our mothers. If we can begin to bring this point to our hearts, we will naturally develop compassion towards them. If for some reason you are not comfortable thinking about all living beings as your mother, you can think of being a mother to all living beings. The result is the same as you would begin to develop compassion towards them since all mothers have great compassion towards their children.

So as you can see there are a couple of ways we can train our minds to develop compassion. This is a very profound practice. It is certainly not easy but it is a fast-track way to get towards enlightenment. I hope all of us can begin to practice this in small ways in our daily life.

Equalizing Self with Others

Let’s talk about an extension of a topic we have covered earlier. We talked about how one can equalize self with other meaning how we should consider that the happiness of others is as important as our happiness. Today, let’s go one step further. That is called exchanging self with others. To look at this I am going to give you an example of a mountain.

Let’s imagine we are on a mountain top. We can see another mountain top from our vantage point. For us, the mountain top we are standing on is this mountain and the other mountain top is that mountain. Now let’s say we get off the mountain top and climb to the other mountain top that we were seeing. At this time, the mountain top we are on is this mountain, and the original mountain top that we were on previously becomes that mountain top. Everyone with me? So the words “this mountain top” and “that mountain top” are just imputations based on our vantage points at the time. It is not attached to a specific mountain top.

Our attachment to ourselves and our happiness is very similar. We all are on this mountain top where our happiness is more important than everyone else. We see everyone else as that mountain. Meaning their happiness is less important than our happiness. If we think about it, that is how most of us are living our lives. All of our problems come from this basic belief that our happiness is more important than everyone else. Think about it. We get upset when something does not go our way. When someone charges us more than what we think we should be paying. Or when someone says something that offends our ego. Or when someone does something different from what we think is right. All of these scenarios bring up delusions in our minds. Anger, hatred, jealousy, frustration, and so on. All of our delusions have their root in this belief that somehow our happiness is more important than others.

Now, if we get down this “me mountain” and start climbing the “they mountain”; we would cherish their happiness more than our happiness.  Think about this, if we value their happiness more than our happiness, delusions will not arise in our minds. A classic example is a mother’s love for her children. A mother would save her baby over her life. Obviously, she cherishes the happiness of the baby more than herself. So when an infant is hungry in the middle of the night, she is happy to get up and feed the baby. The same mom would get upset when someone else wakes her up in the middle of the night. What does that tell us? It is clear that in both cases the inconvenience is the same. She is up from her sleep. In one case she is happy to do it and in another case her delusions flare-up. In the scenario of feeding the baby, our mom is on “they mountain” – the baby’s happiness is more important than my happiness. In the other scenario, she is on the “me mountain”.

So as you can see, if we try to get off the “me mountain” and get on the “they mountain” a lot of delusions go away. Not only that, there is no friction in our life. Life just becomes smooth. The more formal name for this exchanging self with others.

Another way to look at this is to accept defeat and give them victory. A friend of mine recently said something that caught my eyes. She lives in a small town with her family. On the main street, she was going to a neighborhood shop. After she entered the shop, someone came behind her and was visibly upset. He said thanks a lot for cutting me off back there. She did not realize that she cut this person off. So she apologized to him and said she was sorry that she cut him off. He continued, you should be sorry for driving like a maniac. At this point, most people would have lost their patience and got into an argument. Not my friend. She said I am truly sorry that I did that to you. I could see you are upset and please tell me what I can do to improve your day. At that point, the person calmed down. My friend to her credit did not let the person upset her mental equilibrium. She also turned around the mood of the other person. Accepting defeat and giving them victory. I know it is very difficult if not impossible to practice but please try to do this next time you find yourself in a tough situation. It will brighten everyone’s day.

Conquering Anxiety

I have been reading a lot of news articles about how our entire population is suffering from anxiety due to COVID. Everyone is talking about how Anxiety is disproportionately affecting our young adults. It is a real problem. So let’s try and tackle this problem in today’s meditation session.

Let’s start with what causes anxiety. We live in a fast pace world. People have way too many balls in the air so stress, in general, is at an elevated level in our society. When COVID came about, additional stressors came into our lives. A lot of people lost their jobs. People who were displaced from employment were the people who were least likely to have a financial safety net of their own. They for the most part became dependent upon the social safety net. That had its own added challenge. A lot of the systems we have in place as a safety net were not designed to intake everyone at once (unemployment reporting systems in most states went down in the initial days of COVID). Then came the social distancing and shutdown of societies. Human beings are social animals. We are not programmed to be confined – and let’s face it; no matter what we call it, it was confinement. No social interaction, even when you can go out for necessities, no looking at someone’s face – I mean how do you judge facial expressions with a mask on?

The lack of social interactions especially hit the younger generation hard. Their go-to source for stress reduction was hanging out with friends and that was taken away abruptly without any notice. So-called health experts did not realize what negative effects their action would have on this group of the population that was least affected by COVID but is most affected by mental health crisis resulting from COVID lockdowns. A recent National Institute of Health concluded that almost 20% of young adults are suffering from anxiety. That is a very high number.

Now that we have figured out what it is that causing this epidemic of the mental health crisis, I think it may be a blessing in disguise. Two things are happening; 1) mental health is no longer a taboo subject – even Michelle Obama is openly talking about the mild depression she is going through; 2) people are taking actions to take their mental health in order and these actions will hopefully have long term positive outcome.

So how do we address the anxiety that flares up any time of the day with no warning? Anxiety comes because we provide inappropriate attention to a subject. What is inappropriate attention you might ask? It simply means we are exaggerating a problem we may be facing or blowing out of proportion the negative impacts of that problem and so forth. This actually happened recently. A friend’s son called me in panic. He had recently received a full-time job and his employer asked for a drug test. He went for the drug test and they took his social security number and date of birth. When he was leaving the facility, he noticed that they had a piece of paper with all his personal information in plain sight for everyone to see. He could not say anything but as soon as he went home he told his parents he was worried about his personal information being out there. They asked him to call me. Anyway, we started to talk and his anxiety was flaring up. So we went about breaking it down. And this is very important to get rid of anxiety. People who are going through anxiety episodes tend to talk about generality and how everything is going to be bad or worse. After talking it through, I asked him what the worst-case scenario? Another useful technic is when you know the worst-case scenario, it defines the problem and you can begin to address the problem. So he said the worst case is someone can steal his identity. So I asked him to put a freeze on his credit report with all three credit bureau.  As soon as he completed this step, his anxiety disappeared because now he knew his problem was solved. The point here is that if we break down the problem and begin to work on it, it reduces or eliminates anxiety.

This is what I call short term solution. Longer-term, we must learn how not to let our outer problems disturb our inner peace. This is where meditation comes in. If we have a meditation practice that allows us to find our peaceful selves, it can become our go-to solution.

Generosity

Have you ever seen when you do a good deed something good happens to you? That is the benefit of generosity. Today I want to focus on this unique quality of generosity. There are actually three kinds of generosities. The beggarly kind, the friendly kind, and the princely kind. Let’s look at each one of them individually. The beggarly kind generosity is when one gives away the things that they do not need anyway. This is similar to when we give away old clothes to Goodwill. Nothing wrong with it but not really generous per se.

The friendly kind generosity is when we share the bounty that is given to us. We share it with people who we come across we share it with people who we see are in need. We keep some and give some away. This is what most people practice.

The princely kind is a rare breed. It is when we give away more than we keep. We keep less than what we need.

There are many benefits of generosity. When we give away material things, it reduces our attachment to the material world. According to a Canadian research study, generosity can reduce blood pressure, reduce depression, reduces stress, decreases anxiety, and more. Generosity also improves our relationship with the people around us. When we give, we are creating positive momentum and hope it catches on and other people carry on with that torch.

I saw an interesting research piece from the John Templeton Foundation on generosity. They found that people who give on their own accord, tend to be happier. Happy people tend to be more generous so it creates its own ecosystem. They also found that donating money releases the same neural pathways in our brain that are activated by other pleasure activities such as food, sex, etc. People tend to be more generous when they see other people giving. As Americans we are the most generous nation on earth. We donate more than $500 billion per year. That is a staggering amount.

Giving also needs to have the right motivation. For example, if we give something expecting something in return it is not really giving. It is just bartering. Giving also should be without pride. If we give with pride that washes away the benefits of giving. Buddha said that having pride for our giving is like eating a feast of a meal with poison sprinkled on it. It does you no good.

Giving for the sake of giving is what we need to learn to practice. When we begin to that, we do it out of contentment, and as a result, happiness follows.

And we have touched on this before but giving does not mean giving material things only. One can give our time, our skillsets, our compassion and care, our attention, and so forth. Giving away one’s skill and abilities without any thought of return is giving out of compassion. That is what true generosity looks like.

There is a lot of aid by governmental and quasi-governmental agencies nowadays. That is not really giving because people who are doling out the aid are not doing it out of compassion for the most part but they are just doing a job they are getting paid to do.

Why is generosity important you might ponder? Generosity by definition diminishes one’s ego. If we cultivate generosity, we will slowly take a stab at reducing our ego. Reducing ego is the first step towards experiencing emptiness – it is a very deep topic we will cover in a few months.

Gratitude

Every week we practice our gratitude attitude at the beginning of the meditation session. So today, I thought we would actually discuss the benefits of gratitude. Believe it or not, the guy who started the gratitude rock movement was my coach and is a personal friend. Lee Brower based in Utah and all around an amazing guy. Lee Brower tells about gratitude rock in the movie ‘The Secret’. He took a little rock and decided that every time he touched it he would think of something he was grateful for. So when he puts the gratitude stone in his pocket in the morning he goes through what he is thankful for, and when he empties his pocket in the night and finds the rock he goes again through what he’s thankful for.

Lee started every meeting we had with a gratitude attitude and he kind of rubbed off on me so about 15 years ago, I started conducting every meeting with a gratitude attitude.

Let’s look at why creating a gratitude mindset is important. Gratitude creates a mindset of abundance. If you look at life from a scarcity point of view, life will eventually become measurable. An abundance mindset allows you to not chase things for the sake of chasing them. Oprah Winfrey once said: “If you look at what you have in life, you will always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you will never have enough.”

Do you notice some people have this victim mindset? If something bad happens, they always ask why me? They blame everyone and their siblings for their problems including their co-workers, the government, family members, and so forth. People with a victim mindset are never happy no matter how much material wealth they accumulate.

On the flip side, people with a gratitude mindset focus on abundant opportunities available to them. It’s like a classic saying “why didn’t I think of that?” When we are grateful, we tend to focus on the positivity around us. That in turn brings abundance. People who are successful know there are enough resources in the world and stay away from competing for the same resources. A gratitude mindset allows us to leverage the resources we have as opposed to competing for them. It also creates awareness for the resources around us – develop an eye out if you will.

We have talked about this in the previous sessions I believe. But if we think about where we are in life, we are extremely lucky. If you have food, shelter, and clothing (roti, kapada or makan) and you are in good health, you are luckier than most people on this planet. Once you realize how lucky you are and begin to appreciate that, you will start noticing the opportunities around you. Because as they say; when a perspective changes, everything changes.  

So how do we develop a gratitude mindset? The first thing to do is to develop a daily practice. Every morning when you wake up or before you go to bed or at a dinner table, spend five minutes thinking about what you are grateful for and why. Why is as important as what here. Why allows us to dig deep and create a meaningful experience.

Another way to develop gratitude is to major our success. No matter how small, be thankful for it. Some people live in what I call a “gap” – the distance between where they are and where they want to be. I used to be one of those people. Once I started developing gratitude practice, I began to appreciate the abundance that I already had. So it is very important to not live in the gap.

And the most important way to develop a gratitude mindset is with intention. Be sure to make it a habit to appreciate everyone who you come across from your family members, coworkers, essential workers you come across in your daily routine, and so forth.

They say it takes 21 days to make a habit. So for the next 21 days, give your best to develop a gratitude mindset. You will see changes in your life for the better.