Think about a time when you had a negative first impression of someone that changed as you got to know the person. A friend, Rachel, admitted, “I was horrified the first time I met my friend Judy in the ladies’ room at work: ‘Why on earth did they hire this loud, wildly dressed woman with the shrieking laugh?’ Turned out she was just what I needed, and we now have almost forty years as BFFs.”
I have seen this, too, again and again. When we start to look beyond our conditioned responses and recognize that many of our perceived differences are built on social constructs forged in the mind, we clear a pathway to love.
CHANGING HOW THE STORY ENDS
ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2015, performer, storyteller, and stand-up comedian Aman Ali posted an entry on Facebook about what happened in his high school classroom on the afternoon of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. It was already clear that these were terrorist acts, and there was talk about which country the United States should bomb in retaliation. When the teacher left the room, one of Ali’s classmates stood up and proclaimed, “We should bomb Afghanistan back to the Middle Ages where they belong.” Then he turned on Ali and said, “I bet it was your father flying that plane.”
“And as if it was some kind of Pavlovian reflex,” Ali recalls, “I grabbed him by his shirt and came inches away from punching him in the face so hard that I probably would have altered the structure of his face. The only thing that stopped me milliseconds before doing it was the look he gave me.
“He had a smug smile on his face as if he was telling me, ‘Yep, I knew it.’”
Ali stopped short of reinforcing the kid’s stereotype of violent Muslims, but his reactivity haunted him for years.
“To this day I randomly have nightmares about this incident, thinking about his smile telling me, ‘Yep, I knew it,’ again and again and again. What if I was the only exposure to Muslims he ever had? What if that’s the opinion he carries about Muslims for the rest of his life?”
It was on September 11, 2015, that Ali awoke to find a Facebook message from his high school nemesis, apologizing profusely for the hurtful things he’d said back in 2001.
The two men spoke on the phone later that day for the first time since they’d graduated. It turned out that during the intervening years, Ali’s former classmate had served two tours of duty with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. “The endless supply of love, hospitality and goodwill he got from people there were a constant reminder of that hateful moment as an ignorant teen [when] he wanted to bomb this country mercilessly and the hurtful things he said about my dad,” Ali wrote.
“I deserved to be punched,” the classmate told Ali over the phone. “Sometimes I really wish you did.”
“And that’s when I realized I’m really glad I didn’t,” said Ali. “Because we never would have been able to have this conversation fourteen years later.”
REFLECTION
A LOT OF the way we look at and think about others—especially those who are different from us—is encoded unconsciously. We adopt behaviors and attitudes based on what we know, and oftentimes, we don’t push back on it.
A friend tells me, “Growing up in western Mass, I heard a lot more anti-Catholicism than anti-Semitism. And I still shudder to think about the experience of the lone black girl who was enrolled in my high school senior year. We were all called together by the headmistress before she came and lectured about behaving ‘properly.’ But she was given a single room, and there was no discussion that I remember about including her or making an effort to get to know her. Maybe she did make a couple of friends, but I still imagine her surrounded by a wall of cool politeness.”
Today, consider the following: What did you hear about other groups growing up? What was implied by the behavior of your family or school toward other groups? Do you think that conditioning affects you now?
CHAPTER 20 PRACTICES
Intentions as everyday practice
Each day in the morning, write down your intention for the day, built on the foundation of challenging your assumptions with love. Perhaps your intention is “I will notice every time I judge another.” Perhaps your intention is “I will notice every time I judge another, and explore why.” You may resolve to practice generosity by offering a small possession to someone unexpected. The options are infinite, but some helpful prompts are listed below:
–I will notice every time I judge another.
–I will send thoughts of lovingkindness to those who challenge me today.
–I will notice my judgments of others and reflect on them.
–I will smile at someone on the subway / in the grocery store / on the street.
–I will act kind toward someone at work who challenges me.
–I will make a list of my most common judgmental or biased thoughts and spend time reflecting on them.
Taking a walk in someone else’s shoes
There are plenty of times in the day when we encounter people who are different from us—checking out of a store, engaging with servers at a coffee shop or restaurant, riding the subway, taking a taxi, giving a ticket to the clerk at the mall parking lot. Often, many of us simply don’t engage with these people or even look them in the eye—not out of ill will but because we don’t take the energy to tune into our interactions with intention.
This practice can be done every day, all day, as much or as little as you want. The following “steps” are not meant to be done in one sitting or session, but provide a guide to taking a metaphorical walk in someone else’s shoes with different levels of engagement.
1. Start by noticing people you see around you each day, and take a moment to consider their stories. Ask yourself questions about them. Be curious—consider that all people have memories of childhood, foods they may like and dislike, colors they prefer, or times of day that feel evocative. Opening up to people who could otherwise be faceless passersby is a powerful practice.
2. As you consider the stories of others, you may want to offer them phrases of lovingkindness: May they be happy, peaceful, healthy, strong. You can choose your own version of these sayings.
3. As you look around in an everyday setting and take the time to consider the shared human experience between yourself and others, even those who are very different, you may find it both fun and useful to imagine their lives. If you are sitting on the subway, for instance, perhaps you choose to create an imagined life for the person across from you rather than playing a game on your smartphone. We do this not to form conclusions about someone but to remind ourselves that all lives contain joys and sorrows.
Meditation: Lovingkindness for someone that we find difficult
Offering lovingkindness to others who have behaved badly doesn’t mean that we condone their actions or that we’re trying to pretend it doesn’t matter. It may matter very much, but we can have the courage and the willingness to open, to remember the potential of change, to realize that we ourselves are freed by wishing them well.
We usually begin with someone who is only mildly difficult for us, somebody we find somewhat annoying or irritating, or someone we’re a little bit afraid of. We don’t begin right away with the person who has hurt us the most in this life. It’s common to feel resentment and anger, even toward a mildly difficult person, but we undertake this practice in a spirit of adventure. What happens when instead of going over and over our old grievance, we pay attention to this person in a different way, wishing they could be free of some of the suffering that binds them, wishing they themselves could be filled with the spirit of lovingkindness and compassion?
So if there is a difficult person that comes to mind, you can visualize them, say their name, see what happens as you offer the phrases of lovingkindness to them, phrases like, “May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you live with ease.” Remember, you’re not trying to manufacture any emotion or feeling. And if you feel swamped or strained, then go back to simply offering lovingkindness to yourself. Think of yourself as deserving of l
ove and care, and generate the phrases for yourself. But over time, try to spend some time with this difficult person, even if you need to change the phrases to seem less jarring, like, “May you be filled with lovingkindness. May you find clarity and well-being” (after all, they would be less difficult if they themselves were happier!).
And for the last few minutes of this sitting, you can be spontaneous and just see who comes to mind: someone you care about deeply, someone you have difficulty with, a stranger, someone you just met. Allow them to arise in your awareness one at a time and make the offering of lovingkindness to them, people, animals, whoever it might be.
And once you have ended the session, pay attention throughout the day to see how this meditation practice may be having an effect.
21
LOVE EVERYBODY
The more you understand, the more you love; the more you love, the more you understand. They are two sides of one reality. The mind of love and the mind of understanding are the same.
—THICH NHAT HANH
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?
Neither Myles Horton nor the friend who raises an eyebrow whenever I talk about love for all others is alone in their skepticism. A student once told me that she hates lovingkindness practice because it seems so phony: “It reminds me of a forced Valentine’s Day when we’re actually angry or fearful, but cover over our true emotions with false sentiment.” I explained that true compassion requires honesty and insight. It’s not a matter of feeling sorry for someone or denying our own emotions.
Many other people regard wholesale kindness and love as signs of weakness. They think, If I love indiscriminately, I’ll lose my ardency, my power. Other people will take advantage of me and I’ll be seen as a pushover. Worse, I’ll become a pushover. Why should we send wishes for happiness to those who oppose us, disagree with us, and stand in our way? Hasn’t it been drummed into our heads that we should stand up for ourselves, whatever other people think?
The answer is yes—because this is what we’ve been taught and conditioned to believe. There are no popular TV shows, movies, or books that depict heroes who respond to villains non-violently; we are taught to think about ethics of good/bad, wrong/right in terms of force, power, and often clear-cut violence. We don’t have many contemporary role models of cultural figures who have been able to come up with peaceful models of opposition, ideological approaches to protest that are backed by powerful forces, other than violence.
Loving everybody is part of the lovingkindness practice, and certainly something we can think about when it comes to dealing with difficult people in our everyday lives—a cranky boss, a demanding friend, an unfriendly server at a restaurant. But this chapter is meant to show outstanding examples of love for all, people who have found a new vocabulary, approach, and set of behaviors for how to respond to urgent and real instances of violence and threat. 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.
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.”
CHOOSING LOVE OVER HATE
MALALA YOUSAFZAI IS 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. The Taliban explained that their real target was Malala’s father, but her assassination attempt was still a part of their larger plot to secure power in Swat by demoralizing advocates of education and peace—such as the members of the Yousafzai family. Fortunately, Malala ended up making a full recovery in England, and has since become an inspiring advocate for the rights of women.
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 safety. Her peaceful form of protest showed the Taliban—and the rest of the world—that her activism had nothing to do with ego, but rather those who could benefit from her sacrifices. With stories like Malala’s, we have living proof of how such acts of love can be fiercely powerful.
INCLUSION IS THE FACE OF LOVE
SOMETIMES THE ACTIONS committed against individuals or a group of people are so agonizing that the idea of including the perpetrators in those we wish to be free seems not only impossible but an outrageous mockery of justice. Yet we can find people who show us that anger and compassion are not mutually exclusive in the brave and willing human heart. In these cases, a determination not to be defined by the actions of others does not sacrifice a fundamental loyalty to justice—it bolsters it.
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a powerful example of this in action on a historic scale. The commission was established in 1995 under Nelson Mandela’s government to investigate the violations that took place during apartheid, as well as to provide support and reparation to victims and their families. The chair of the commission was Archbishop Tutu. At the core of the commission’s work was radical honesty—victims told what had been done to them or their loved ones in the presence of the perpetrators, and the perpetrators had to acknowledge what they’d done with the victims present. Now most people credit the commission with preventing a nationwide bloodbath of retaliation.
On his Web site, the Forgiveness Project, Tutu explains how this kind of letting go, or forgiveness, benefits those who have suffered: “To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. It is also a process that does not exclude hatred and anger. These emotions are all part of being human…”
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