Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 424. Today I’d like to talk about what feels to me like a paradox in the law: making a deliberate choice to be friendly to everyone.
I have to make the choice to be friendly, a lot. I need to pay attention closely, mindfully, moment to moment. If I don’t, aversiveness creeps in. Irritation, frustration – all of that’s there when friendliness doesn’t arise naturally, which sometimes it just doesn’t.
I had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that this is true, for me: that friendliness doesn’t just arise, naturally and spontaneously, in each moment. It was something I didn’t want to look at because I was afraid to confirm my own suspicions: that it was true. In her book, The Places That Scare You, Pema Chodron asks, “What is it that allows our goodwill to expand and our prejudice and anger to decrease? Traditionally it is said that the root of aggression and suffering is ignorance. But what is it that we are ignoring [I love the way she uses “ignore” to work with “ignorance’]? Entrenched in the tunnel vision of our personal concerns, what we ignore is our kinship with others. That feels right to me: when I’m not spontaneously friendly, it’s almost always because I’ve forgotten that kinship. Forgotten that we breathe the same air, inhabit the same earth. Belong to one another.
Making the deliberate choice to turn in the direction of friendliness, or maitri in Tibetan or metta in Pali towards everything and everyone? The neuroscientists say that as we do that, we’re carving new neural pathways that will, eventually (theoretically), one day become our default pathways.
I’d say, “yes and,” for me. Yes, and, even though I’m dedicated to this practice, and practice a lot, this mind still skids out of a friendly pathway and back into an aversive one or as Pema would say, an ignorant one.
This past weekend I was in a ceremony for the ten of us who’ve been studying in a teacher training with James Baraz for the last five years. James decided to officially authorize us to teach, so now I’m authorized to teach in his lineage, which is Insight Meditation and also bhakti, or celebratory devotion practice. Which feels kind of amazing.
In the ceremony, each of us delivered a talk. One friend, Eve Decker, a wonderful teacher, delivered a talk about metta or this quality of unconditional friendliness. And as you probably know, there are various ways to talk about this quality, but Eve talked about it in a way that feels so powerful to me. She said, it’s the deliberate choice, moment to moment, to befriend whatever arises.
I love that. It’s why I’ve been using that word, deliberate. It’s the concept – and practice - of nothing left out, no one left out. Deliberately befriending people I care about but also people who drive me nuts. Deliberately befriending the moment when there’s no traffic and the one where I’m stuck in a jam and for sure will not get where I’m going on time. Deliberately befriending the people on “my side” and the ones who are not. Deliberately befriending the politicians who speak for me and the people I love, and the ones who don’t.
As Pema is reminding us, this is the path of a warrior, and it’s about friendliness but not only friendliness. In The Places That Scare You, Pema introduces what she calls the Four Limitless Qualities (which I’ve studied as the Four Brahmaviharas or Heavenly Abodes); friendliness; compassion; empathic joy; and equanimity. She says, “It’s up to us. We can spend our lives cultivating our resentments and cravings or we can explore the path of the warrior – nurturing open-mindedness and courage.” Sounds like a simple and obvious choice and for most of us maybe it is - simple and obvious but also not easy.
I don’t know about you but I know how it feels to spend my life cultivating resentment and cravings. I did it for years before I encountered mindfulness and I’ve done it too many times to count, since. But I aspire to nurture friendliness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. I’m guessing you do, too.
As I mentioned last WUC, aspiration is everything. Pema contrasts aspirations with affirmations, saying, “affirmations are like telling yourself that you are compassionate and brave in order to hide the fact that secretly you feel like a loser.” Ouch. she advises not to affirm but to aspire towards the Four Limitless Qualities. Aspire to be kinder, more compassionate, more joyful, more balanced, knowing these are aspirations we’ll need to – or get to – practice for our whole lives.
So the first aspiration, kindness, or lovingkindness, or the Tibetans call it unconditional friendliness. Pema says we work on this in seven steps.
The first is to train to deliberately choose to befriend whatever arises in our own experience. Yesterday it was joy, for me – it was the first day of class at Berkeley and it felt like it went well. But then it was stress because there was electrical work going on at my house and I was concerned that I’d lose power and not be able to finish my work. There was also equanimity, but then there was frustration, due to different conditions. It’s not easy to deliberately choose to befriend absolutely everything that arises.
But this training is so powerful. Because the more I can do that, the more I remember to deliberately choose to befriend my own experience, the more likely I am to be friendly towards whatever I see in others. Why? Because whatever I see in them, I’ve already seen in myself, in one way or another. And already befriended in myself. This is what it means, to me, remember the kinship I have with everyone, with all beings.
The next six steps will probably be familiar to you: we train in deliberately choosing to befriend those we love, our friends, strangers or neutral people, the really difficult people in our lives and in the world; all of those people together; and all beings. And I would add an eight – I am adding an eighth – when practicing: the earth. Because I feel like the earth could use all the love she can get.
And last thing: make no mistake. This is not a “doormat” practice. I was listening to Dan Harris’ 10% Happier podcast and Pema was on, and Dan asked her about that. And Pema was very clear: this practice is fierce. We are not rolling over and acquiescing and putting our hands into prayer position and closing our eyes and saying yes to everyone. No! We are fiercely and deliberately choosing to befriend whatever arises so that our aversion and ill will doesn’t obfuscate our ability to see what is needed in order to change the world. Full stop. We are training to be warriors.
Let’s sit.