by Mark Coleman
We can also explore what interferes with the heart opening. Often it is fear of feeling another’s pain or worry about being overwhelmed by someone’s distress. Other reasons might be judgments about someone’s struggles or feeling too burdened by our own or the world’s suffering to face more anguish. We need to honestly scrutinize the ways we turn from pain, as these can serve to numb the heart and lead to inaction.
We can observe and work with this dynamic anytime we meet someone who is hurting. A very common example is encountering the homeless on city streets. In San Francisco, where I work, homelessness is at epidemic levels, and every day, this intense suffering hits me in the face. It is heartbreaking to see so many people who are hungry, cold, and traumatized, or to see elderly people, thin and frail, trying to sleep on cardboard boxes, or young mothers with children in tow, begging for a few dollars so they can buy food or get a hot drink.
How open I am to their plight depends on many factors, and noticing these is key to understanding the heart’s capacity. Sometimes, I am embarrassed to say, I am too busy, distracted, or hurried, and I either don’t notice or don’t want to slow down and take in someone’s vulnerability. At other times, someone’s predicament feels like too much to take in, so I avert my eyes. Almost always, homelessness is a problem that’s beyond my ability to solve on an individual level, so I can easily feel overwhelmed, numb, and incapacitated.
At some point, everyone struggles in these ways. Whatever the reason, our heart shuts down to pain, and by doing so, we short-circuit our capacity to care, to be kind and responsive, which is the heart of compassion. What is required is pausing, taking someone in fully, and feeling the whole messiness of their situation. Once we can feel the pain of another, then we can ask the important question of how we can help and what we can do.
With regard to homelessness, I make sure I donate to homeless charities in the city. It doesn’t solve the problem, but it is one small way I can make a difference, and it ensures my money goes directly to feeding and providing shelter to those I meet on the street. I also aspire to treat everyone humanely: to meet people’s eyes and offer the simple kindness of a genuine smile and greeting. Often that human contact and acknowledgment seem the most important. I may not be able to solve homelessness, but I can relate kindly and with care to each person in the moment.
• PRACTICE •
Developing Compassion for Others
Compassion begins with the courageous turn toward pain and the desire to bring relief to it. Being open to the anguish of others is what motivates us to want to alleviate such suffering. It cannot be done in the abstract. This ancient practice is a way to open the heart and cultivate this beautiful quality.
Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and bring attention to your physical sensations. Become aware of the center of your chest, your heart area; feel your breath there. Now call to mind someone you care about deeply who is currently suffering. Take a moment to visualize this person and sense them as if they were with you. Recollect their particular woes and struggles, and let the person and their pain into your heart. Use your breath as a support both to feel the emotion and to soften the intensity of the feeling if it becomes too strong.
Then, silently offer wishes that express the heart of compassion, the sincere desire to relieve another’s pain. As you hold a loved one in your heart and mind, repeat these phrases slowly and genuinely: I care about you. May you be free of pain and suffering. May you hold your difficulty with ease and kindness. This last wish is offered because, for many people, there may not be any immediate relief from anguish, particularly if they are dealing with loss or chronic pain or a terminal diagnosis. As you sense your loved one and their struggle, gently repeat these phrases, or similar ones, that express your heart’s wish for the relief of their pain.
After some minutes, consider bringing another person to mind, perhaps a good friend who is in distress. Follow the same process: sense and visualize them first, open to the pain they are going through, and offer them the same wishes of compassion.
If you wish to stretch your capacity further, call to mind someone you may be in conflict with, or whom you find difficult or challenging, but whom you know is struggling. In the same way, repeat the process of offering them these wishes of compassion. Know that this is not necessarily easy to do but can help you heal the pain and contraction in your own heart as it relates to them.
If you are currently experiencing adversity or pain in your life, you might next apply this same practice of compassion to yourself. Sometimes we are least likely to turn this caring heart to our own suffering. Take some time to sense into your own particular afflictions, then with a kind heart, direct the phrases of compassion to yourself: May I be free of pain and suffering. May I hold my burdens with kindness and ease.
Last, turn your attention outward to the vast ocean of suffering in the world. Call to mind the pain of particular populations or of people in particular circumstances, such as the homeless, those living through warfare, or people suffering famine and poverty. Similarly, you can extend compassion to all creatures, such as livestock trapped in feedlots or species under threat of extinction. Whoever it may be, call these beings to mind, sense their pain, and offer your wishes of compassion to them.
As you end the practice, reflect on how you can take more active steps to help those in need. Ask: What is the need, how can I help, and how can I serve? Then let your response come from this tenderhearted place of compassion; listen to what action or initiative comes forth. Compassion is a dynamic force that can bring tremendous salve to any pain in life.
• • •
• SECTION 4 •
FINDING PEACE IN THE WORLD
Chapter 30
Mindfulness in Relationships
For one human being to love another, this is perhaps the most difficult of human tasks, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
— RAINER MARIA RILKE
As the poet Rilke states, though few of us need reminding, human relationships, beautiful as they can be, are also one of the more challenging places to keep the heart open. We all need healthy human connection and meaningful positive social contact, yet that means dealing with the very thing we often find the most difficult: other people! When I teach the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute’s program on mindfulness and emotional intelligence, there is a communication exercise where people are asked what they love about their work and what their biggest challenges are. Barely a workshop goes by without people reporting that “other people” fit both categories. Our colleagues are often the best and most-challenging aspects of our work life.
Many might say the same about families and intimate relationships. As the saying goes: “You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.” If you think you can escape this by becoming a monk or a nun and dropping out of society, think again. I have friends who have chosen a monastic life, and they agree that one of the hardest parts of living in a monastery is other people. Ironically, this dilemma is perhaps more challenging in a monastery because you have little choice over who lives with you — and in some cases, who shares your bedroom, dormitory, or cave!
Most people need only consider their relationship with their own parents to appreciate how difficult family dynamics can be. The spiritual teacher and former Harvard professor Ram Dass humorously suggests that, if you think you are enlightened, go home and live with your parents for a week, and then see how awake you feel after that! People often ask me why their buttons are so easily pushed when they go home to visit parents. I jokingly remind them that their parents are the ones who put the buttons there in the first place. They know where the triggers are.
One issue that usually creates the most difficulties in relationships is expectations. We sometimes have idealized or romantic notions about the way relationships should be. I know people who longed for years to have children and create a family, and they didn’t appreciate till they had kids just how difficult parenti
ng would be. Every life stage comes with its own challenges, from navigating the “terrible twos” to dealing with rebellious teenagers who resist everything you say, to grown children who can’t hold down a job. Parenting can be joyful, except for all the havoc and heartache that comes with it.
This is perhaps even more challenging in the crucible of intimate relationships. Hollywood and modern culture peddle myths about romance and marriage that are impossible to live up to and that bear little resemblance to normal life. Everyone I know in a successful marriage freely admits the hard work it takes to stay connected, to cultivate and grow love, to work through conflicts, and to deal with being triggered by the person who knows you best.
We all need an ally in the journey of relationships. Without awareness, we can blindly react to others, say things we regret, and do things that hurt those we love. It takes presence and self-regulation to navigate, and not escalate, a heated discussion with a spouse. Mindfulness practice helps us develop the necessary self-awareness to communicate clearly and honestly, to understand our intentions, and to recognize and manage our own reactivity when others trigger us.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that relationships are humbling. When we live with more awareness, we see how hard it is to live up to our ideals and principles. Take one simple quality like patience. How easy is it to lose patience with a spouse, child, or coworker who doesn’t seem to listen to our requests, though we’ve repeated them a hundred times? Then, all of a sudden, harsh words come out of our mouth saying things we immediately regret. Or conversely, we take out our frustrations on others, unnecessarily nit-picking at some mannerism, just because we feel hurt, jilted, or unappreciated in some way.
However, it is important not to give up. A discerning self-awareness shines a light that reveals many of our foibles and blind spots. Hard as that is to see, we should rejoice rather than feel bad, since once such shortcomings are seen, we can begin to transform them. François Fénelon, a seventeenth-century archbishop and theologian, put it beautifully: “As the light increases, we see ourselves to be worse than we thought.… We are amazed at our former blindness.… But we are not worse than we were; on the contrary, we are better. While our faults diminish, the light by which we see them waxes brighter.… Bear in mind, for your comfort, that we only perceive our malady when the cure begins.” The cure in this case is the wisdom of awareness.
In most interactions with people, we are not just dealing with the challenges of our present time, adult experience. Often our relationships mirror dynamics we developed with parents and caregivers in our formative years. Sustained observation can help reveal these patterns, such as when we have regressed and are acting out from a hurt or reactive place, reenacting dynamics from when we were young. These patterns are why relationships provide such potent ground for inner growth. They force us to work through unresolved childhood developmental issues. The key is whether we can stay conscious during this process so we can learn and heal. Otherwise, we risk simply repeating old dynamics and wounds.
For example, if someone felt invisible, ignored, or abandoned by their parents when they were young, they might be sensitive to signs that a romantic partner is becoming bored with the relationship or is more excited by other people or interests. With lightning speed, that person could be triggered by their partner’s new work friendship or absorbing hobby. In a flash, the person may withdraw out of self-protection or lash out in anger, driven by a fear of rejection.
During those times when we feel the volcanic urge to protest, attack, or fly into a fit of righteous indignation, it takes discernment to remind ourselves to stop, breathe, and allow our nervous system to calm down before responding. I know firsthand how important it is to breathe first when I am triggered and not act out the urge to judge or provoke! I have, like countless others, learned that lesson the hard way, by watching what happens when we don’t.
A recent story I heard from a colleague illustrates this well:
This morning at a train stop near the hospital, a man and his three young kids got on. The kids were loud and completely out of control, running from one end of the train car to the other. An annoyed passenger sitting next to me looked over at the man and fired off a snarky comment, ‘Is there a reason you’re letting your kids go nuts right now?’ The man looked up with tears in his eyes and said, ‘The doctor just told me their mother isn’t going to make it. Sorry, I’m just trying to think before we all sit down at home to talk about this.’ Of course, the annoyed passenger was speechless. And regretful. And yet how easily [it could have been] any one of us saying or thinking something similar in that situation.
With mindfulness, we can learn to monitor our internal experience, so that we are much less likely to be caught off-guard and cause harm when we don’t intend to. Over time we become less prone to say or do something we later regret. That interior awareness allows us to sense when we are repeating old patterns or when reactivity distorts our perception or negatively affects what we say. We are also more likely to hold the pain of our reaction with kindness, which in itself helps soften the intensity and distress of that experience.
Equally important, we can all grow our heart and capacity to love. That moment-to-moment training, to meet experience just as it is, supports us to embrace others — including our partner, our parents, and strangers — just as they are, “warts and all.” We tend to commit many subtle acts of violence when we demand that others conform to our likes, preferences, and desires. Yet the key to healthy relationships is the ability to profoundly accept people as they are. Awareness practice gives us the tools to learn how to do that.
This doesn’t mean we can’t ask for what we need and want; we certainly can’t avoid having preferences. However, we can recognize our own attachments and expectations and release them when others don’t agree or don’t live up to them. It is like freeing others from a confining straightjacket. It is a beautiful gift to meet someone just as they are. From this more open place, others can feel seen, accepted, and loved. This creates the optimum conditions for any relationship to thrive. And like anything, it takes practice! Over time we can learn perhaps to live our way beyond division, or in the Sufi poet Rumi’s words:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
• PRACTICE •
Radical Acceptance in Relationship
One of the hardest things in life is to simply accept another person just as they are. It doesn’t sound hard, but in practice we meet all kinds of challenges when we try. Take a moment to reflect on the ways you may want, expect, or demand other people to be different than they are.
To begin, sit comfortably, close your eyes, and turn your attention to your breath to establish present-moment awareness. Then call to mind someone you are in a close relationship with, perhaps a spouse, parent, child, colleague, friend, or other family member. Visualize this person and imagine them in all the ways you know them.
Now reflect on the ways you already accept them for who and what they are. Pay attention to how that feels in your body and heart when you fully welcome and accept someone, including all their perfectly human imperfections. Notice if this brings up any resistance.
Next, contemplate things about this person that you wish were different, that you would like them to change, improve, or get rid of. How do you react when this person acts in ways you wish they wouldn’t? As you reflect on these issues, imagine accepting or allowing these traits just as they are. This does not mean you have to like these particular habits, communication styles, or attitudes. But see if it is possible to invite a quality of openness toward them.
Ask yourself how much of the conflict, turmoil, and stress you experience in this relationship is related to your attachment to how you want the other to be. Radical acceptance is a doorway to letting people be as they are, no matter what they are like. This can bring about unexpected harmony and ease, which is what we often seek but rarel
y experience in relationships. This is not to say we must put up with or accept any inappropriate or harmful behavior. Such actions often require confronting and challenging. However, in this practice, simply look at the ways your preferences influence relationships.
As you leave the meditation, try to put this into practice in everyday life as you spend time with friends, relatives, colleagues, and your partner. Notice what happens when you access this quality of allowing others to be who they are rather than imposing your ideas, demands, or preferences. Others, too, will no doubt notice a shift in you, which often leads to openness in other, unexpected ways that can support your relationship.
• • •
Chapter 31
Freeing Ourselves from Self-Centeredness
It’s all about me!
— BUMPER STICKER SEEN IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
When I first started to meditate back in 1984, I was teased about it constantly. In the 1980s, none of my friends and family had much experience with meditation, never mind practiced it. They had all kinds of quirky ideas and faulty assumptions about what it actually meant. They asked me why I would want to do such a selfish activity. Wasn’t meditation just self-indulgent navel-gazing? Those same people thought nothing of going on holiday to a beach resort in Spain and getting absolutely drunk for two weeks straight. Yet they considered my attempts to cultivate awareness and compassion self-absorbed! I couldn’t help laugh at the irony of it all.
