(normal text is Rebecca, italicized text is Lama Willa Miller)
Here we are at week four of my “Everyday Dharma” challenge. For those of you just tuning in, check out my previous posts to get caught up. I’m at the halfway point! I hope you’re all finding my journey amusing and enlightening. I’ll admit, it’s a lot harder to bring the funny when discussing this stuff than I thought it would be when I set out. Sorry folks! On the other hand, I’m halfway to getting my Buddha on! Let’s focus on the positives. With no further ado, let’s look at week four.
This whole week was about growing love. As Lama Willa says, “A spiritual journey takes courage and vision at the outset, but to sustain such courage and vision you need fuel: a love that is correspondingly courageous and visionary.” With day one we considered love. The exercise was to find out what love means to you. You finished the following sentences, what was in the text is in bold.
Love is (list some adjectives) exhilarating, liberating, and compassionate.
Love is never needlessly cruel.
I find it easy to love my husband.
My definition of love is that love is a thing that allows you to be your authentic self.
I like your definition! Why is thinking about how we define love useful? For one, we carry around, and therefore act on, definitions that we rarely evaluate. Assumptions about love, and other aspects of our affective life, often remain hidden from us. Many of these definitions are cultural, and some may be related to our personal history. We rarely bring these to light and then as: is this assumption useful? Is it even true? When we figure out how we define love, we can begin think about whether the assumptions therein are useful and true.
Once we have some definitions to work with, we can begin to think about how we might redefine love consciously in a way that is true, and that is useful. We can explore a deep definition of love that we feel great about living by. Another reason to think through our definitions is to discover the vision of universal love’s fruition, such as the qualities you mention– exhilarating, liberating, compassionate. If we look at what we mean by ‘love’, we often find something liberating there, but we may not have worked hard to cultivate love’s liberating power. Spiritual practice should help us grow love in order to unfurl its ability to free us from suffering.
Day two discussed two myths about love. Lama Willa explains that “you cannot effectively accept and love others unless you initially accept and love yourself”. The first myth was that you do not deserve to be loved, when the truth is everyone is worthy of love. The second myth was that no one ever really loved me or loves me now, when the truth is that you have been loved in the past and are loved now. The exercise for the day was to identify benefactors. In this context a benefactor is someone who has loved and cared for you. That one is easy, my husband.
Benefactors can be found in the most unexpected places. Even a pet can be a benefactor. If you have felt loved by someone or even an animal, just once, they are a benefactor for you and have reminded you that you are loved. Pets do a great job of ‘benefacting’ non-verbally! (Was that a neologism?) The term ‘benefactor’, used in this sense is inspired by some of the practices developed by American Buddhist teacher John Makrasnky. He does a great job of discussing benefactors thoroughly in his book Awakening through Love.
Day three addressed two more myths about love. Myth one was that love is something that “happens” to people, the truth is that love needs to be cultivated. When I first read this I was ready to call B.S. I mean, my love for my husband just “happened”. However, further reading has Lama Willa explaining that “love is a choice that sometimes happens to people. Even when it “happens” to someone, it will quickly “unhappen” without cultivation.” And she’s right, my love for my husband just happened, but what if we had never carved out time to spend together when I worked my crazy retail schedules, what if we didn’t take the time now to let each know that they mattered? I suspect Lama Willa is right, our love would potentially “unhappen”. Myth two was that you say to yourself, “I gave everything I had to him/her/it and now I have nothing left to give,” when the truth is that no matter what your personal history, you are capable of love. The exercise for the day was to forgive small harms. You attempt to make a commitment to forgive a person who made you feel harmed, angry, and/or hurt. Since I try to keep The Magical Buffet a positive place, and the fact that anyone anywhere can read this, I’m not going to share with you all who I’m attempting to forgive. I’m a woman, I have a laundry list of people, who as Kathy Griffin would say, can suck it. I’ve picked a few who I will endeavor to take a little less of a Kathy Griffin philosophy with.
Forgiveness is one of the most powerful spiritual practices around, and Buddhism is deeply concerned with its cultivation [touché, Brit Hume!]. Buddhism teaches that forbearance—or patience—is an essential key to enlightened living. Forbearance includes the practice of being tolerant and forgiving in the face of harm. Forgiving runs contrary to much of our cultural conditioning: we are taught that by putting other people down [especially those that have—in our view—harmed us], we become stronger. But the opposite is the case. By forgiving, we become stronger. Many of us also are inclined to believe that those who forgive are weak. But that is not true, because forgiving is not easy. Anyone can hold onto a grudge. It takes a strong person to forgive.
But being forgiving does not mean tolerating the continuation of harm. There is real injustice in the world, real falsity, and real cruelty, and wherever injustice, falsity and cruelty exist, they need to be addressed and challenged. But anger and spite may not be the most stable place from which to challenge the world’s injustices. Forbearance, an attitude that includes an element of forgiveness, is a more stable ground to start from. Forbearance is not an attitude ‘what this person did is okay’. It is rather the recognition that people are not merely what they do. They act under the influence of a lifetime of conditioning. Forbearance also means entertaining the possibility that our own reactivity plays a big role in ‘harm’. Therefore, it is usually not enough to blame a person for harm—the picture is much more complex than that. If you acknowledge such a possibility, you create a space where challenge and arriving at justice can take place effectively.
Day four discussed universal love. Lama Willa examines universal love by outlining it’s qualities: universal love melts boundaries, universal love evens terrain, and universal love tears up contracts. The exercise for the day was assessing boundaries. I’m going excerpt the whole exercise here because honestly, the exercise really puts things into perspective.
“Consider: What kind of boundaries do you place around your feelings? Are there people whom you do not love because of what they do or have done? What kind of “ifs” do you put on love? Now consider, is it possible to love someone with no “ifs”? Consider whether it is possible to love without agreeing with or condoning another’s actions. Are there any valid reasons to withhold love?
Now think of one person from whom you withhold the feeling of love, not entirely but somewhat. Can you imagine what it would be like to push your boundary out with this person and let yourself feel a love with fewer conditions, at least sometimes? Visualize for yourself what this would be like. What do you gain by withholding love? What do you lose by giving it?”
Again, I’m not going to share with you the individuals I’m thinking of, but I will tell you that the exercise did resonate with me. If you think I’m being nicer to you, it’s totally a coincidence….I would never think of you that way.
I have found it to be life-changing practice to push my boundaries around love (always understood here to be platonic!). This can be done in the simplest of ways, by noticing how we approach people every day, especially those who we don’t necessarily cherish. What would happen if we tried to be a little warmer, and a little kinder? This kind of constant attention to our attitude pays off, because we discover that it actually feels really good to be kind. It is much more enjoyable than being cold or neutral. We can work on this in so many small ways.
Day five continued examining the idea of universal love. Universal love is nonjudgmental, selfless, compassionate, and joyous. The exercise for the day was to contemplate overcoming the judging mind. “Consider: In what ways does judgment get in the way of loving those closest to you? Is your love clouded by judgment? What is worse, the tendency to find fault in others or the faults you judge others to have?” I know that I judge people, but I am definitely more harsh in judging myself. Does that make me slightly more enlightened than those who judge others but find no fault in themselves? Here’s hoping!
I’m glad you brought up self-judgment. I did not address that in this section of the book, but self-judgment is also something to work on. In fact, if we are harsh on ourselves, we tend to be harsh on others too. These two are of a piece. When you begin to soften your judgment of others, you discover that others—even those people we have not previously considered special– are very precious and special in many ways. We cannot discover that special treasure in others if we put all of our energy into judging them. Once we begin to discover the preciousness of others, we can entertain the idea that we too are precious. It can go the other way as well: we can also work on letting go of self judgment, and use that as a door to letting go of our judgment of others.
Day six discussed four ways of perceiving others. Every person is your only child. Every person is your parent. Every person is your best friend. Everyone is a sage. Essentially the exercise for the day was to try and view your social interactions with this new angle of perception to attempt to widen the scope of love to include more people.
In the context of Buddhist doctrine, this practice is sometimes expressed within the context of reincarnation. From the point of view of reincarnation, this is not the first or only life we have lived. When we meet someone, we are never meeting them for the first time. We have met many times before, over the course of many lives. From this wider perspective of many lifetimes, people around us have literally been our mothers, fathers, sisters, best friends, teachers and helpers before. From that point of view, they are not strangers, so we should not treat them that way. We should reserve a place in our heart for all of them.
Even if you do not believe in reincarnation, it can be a helpful exercise to imagine the web of relationships that connects all of us in this life. From the point of view of being connected to everyone through degrees of closeness [I prefer that to degrees of separation], we are all of one human family.
Day seven was “Growing Your Love through Contemplation”. The text for the day was basically detailing the meditation that was the exercise for the day. To sum it up, you focus on someone you love, so that you can feel the love, and then let the feeling grow and radiate out of you. Now I was honest about my difficulties with meditation, well it’s worse when I’m supposed to follow a progression of things. It’s much easier for me to think in, out, with my breath than to go through a whole mental script. However, I made my best attempt here.
It can take many repetitions [perhaps 20 times] sitting down with a practice to memorize it and become really relaxed with it, without needing to rely on instructions. It is worth the effort. The key is to take a considerable time to do each step, really relaxing into each instruction for a few minutes so that you can get its flavor and meaning. For those readers out there encountering these meditation practices for the first time, guided meditations for the book are on iTunes! It can help to have a voice guiding you through these meditations at first because then you do not have to keep glancing at the book.
Week four, done! See you next week!
Congrats on finishing Week 4: You are more than half-way!
About Lama Willa:
Lama Willa Miller is a meditation teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. She has studied and practiced meditation for the last twenty years, training with Venerable Kalu Rinpoche, Venerable Dilgo Khentse Rinpoche, Lama Norlha Rinpoche, Khenpo Tsultrim Gyatso Rinpoche, Bokar Rinpoche, and other teachers.
She completed two seminary trainings [three-year retreats] at Kagyu Thubten Choling in upstate New York, becoming authorized as a lama, a Buddhist minister, upon completion of her training. Before and after her retreats, she spent time in Nepal, Tibet, and India, studying Buddhism and engaging in service work.
She currently lives in Arlington, MA with her husband and two dogs, where she writes, teaches Tibetan Buddhist practice and meditation, principally with Natural Dharma Fellowship. She is also working towards a PhD at Harvard University.
Lama Willa is author of the book “Everyday Dharma: Seven Weeks to Finding the Buddha in You” (2009, Quest Books), a practical guide for getting started on the spiritual path. Visit her website here.
To follow Lama Willa on Twitter, go to http://twitter.com/lamawilla.
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