The law (and the world) divides us: good & bad, our side & theirs, friends & enemies. Hopefully it's not difficult to be happy for our friends, and to wish them well. But, what about the other side, or the enemy? Today's Wake Up Call explores whether it's even possible to have goodwill for the "bad guys" and for those we just flat out don't like. Plus, why would we want to? What gets in the way? What makes it possible? Happy listening.
The law (and the world) divides us: good & bad, our side & theirs, friends & enemies. Hopefully it's not difficult to be happy for our friends, and to wish them well. But, what about the other side, or the enemy? Today's Wake Up Call explores whether it's even possible to have goodwill for the "bad guys" and for those we just flat out don't like. Plus, why would we want to? What gets in the way? What makes it possible? Happy listening.
Today's Wake Up Call is about the quality of sympathetic joy, exploring what it feels like to be happy about someone else’s joy, success, win, progress, happiness. How do we cultivate the ability to be happy for others, when it’s truly their moment and not ours? And why do we even want to?
The why is probably the most important question, in the sense that at least for me, I often need some kind of understanding of why I would want to do the work of opening, and sometimes prying open, my mind and heart. In this case, this idea of sympathetic joy – of being happy for others and wanting their joy to increase – is more obvious than it looks at first. At first, to me anyway, it looks like a lot of work, and almost counterintuitive. If someone else gets something and I don’t, and jealousy arises, or I compare myself to them, the thought arises, well of course! I wanted that, or I’m not doing as well as they are and I’d like to be doing that well.
What is obscured for me is the tightness in my heart and mind, when that natural jealousy or comparing mind arises. When I really take a look, what I see in those cases is that it doesn’t feel good to me to walk around being jealous, or comparing myself to others. And that it does feel good to be happy for others. And that when I can express that happiness – sometimes “faking it till I make it” – there’s an increase in general happiness and wellbeing. It’s like an atmospheric change, and no one is bracing against each other anymore, in that moment anyway, everyone can relax. And then more gets done, there’s more ease, and I feel better about myself for having been a small part of all that.
We’ve been exploring being happy about the joy and success of people we love, or like, or who are just acquaintances. Today let’s explore being happy for the joy and success of someone we consider to be in our out-group, or on the “other side,” or just someone we don’t like. In traditional mindfulness, this is called cultivating sympathetic joy for the “enemy.”
Just one word about this practice, though: today, I’m not going to address how to work with someone who is causing real harm, whether to you, or to the community, or to the world. I think that’s a different question, a different way of practicing, and I’d like to look at that another time. Today, I’d just like to explore cultivating sympathetic joy for someone you just don’t like, or are resentful of, or jealous of, or is on the other side, or the other camp, things like that.
When I first got to this practice of sympathetic joy for the ‘enemy” – after I kept forgetting about sympathetic joy altogether, as I mentioned a few weeks ago – it seemed like a lot. And actually it didn’t even seem like a good idea. Or at the very least, it seemed like a waste of time. But here’s where a closer look was helpful for me, and maybe it’ll be helpful for you.
Take a moment right now, and call to mind someone for whom, until this moment, it’s never even occurred to you to cultivate sympathetic joy. Someone who, if you knew they were happy, almost by virtue of that, you would be irritated. Or maybe jealous. Or you would feel it was unfair. Or maybe you would even wish that they weren’t happy at all, or weren’t having much success thank you very much, or that whatever was causing their happiness would actually just evaporate, or had never happened in the first place.
Let’s allow for the possibility that you don’t have anyone like that in your life, in your mind, which would be wonderful, but just in case you do, call them to mind.
I have a couple. One is an old friend who’s been tremendously successful, and kind of pulled away a little as they climbed higher & higher up the proverbial ladder. Not that I couldn’t have pulled back. But I just got into this comparing mind with them. I started to think they were smarter than me, more attractive, taller, made more money…and then I noticed I wasn’t feeling happy for them, or wanting them to continue to have more & more happiness. Instead, I was jealous.
The other is a friend who pulled rank on me once. It wasn’t the end of the world but it hurt. So whenever I thought of them, I noticed that old, scratchy feeling, and meanwhile they, too, had become successful. And instead of my natural response – when I would hear something great about them – being, “How wonderful, I love this, I hope this keeps happening for you,” my crusty, barnacled, heart kind would go, “grrrrrrrr,” and I would turn away.
With both of these people, it’s not just that I’ve had a hard time being happy for them. It’s worse: it’s that I feel kind of cringy hearing about their joy. And I experience a kind of hardness in my own mind and heart. It's also been like a shoehorn and a tight shoe, prying open any joy when I heard about their happiness and success.
Then it hit me how ridiculous this was. So I worked with that, and got to the point of laughing at myself. But for the life of me, I could get beyond that. So I used one of my lifelines – I called a dear friend and colleague in the mindfulness in law teaching world, Emily Doskow – and she asked me, “Well, have you considered forgiveness?”
An interesting moment. Because, NO, I had not. It hadn’t even occurred to me.
Which was pretty funny.
So I started a forgiveness practice, with the aspiration to be able to wish both of them well, be joyful for them, and wish for their happiness to increase.
I won’t say it’s been instantaneous. But I’m definitely noticing a loosening in my heart, and an opening in my mind. And a LOT of relief. And I have a long way to go.
Next week we’ll look at forgiveness specifically, but just to say, forgiveness isn’t just about forgiving someone else. It’s also forgiving ourselves. In my case: forgiving them for pulling away and pulling rank, and forgiving myself for not continuing to reach out anyway, and for holding onto resentment.
And ultimately, forgiving myself for wasting so much time – years – not being happy for these friends. And not only wasting time, but missing the point, which is that sympathetic joy, just like lovingkindness and compassion, is boundless. There are no limits on it, other than the limits we place on it – whether we learn to do that as lawyers or as humans or in our families or growing up or whatever – and it’s always available, and all we really have to do is let go of whatever is hindering or obscuring sympathetic joy, and allow it to show up, and then tend to it, cultivate it, tend to our own hearts and in doing that, realize we’re also tending to others.