Loving-kindness

Ken: At the level of emotion, loving-kindness is simply the wish that others be happy. In keeping with the way that we’re approaching this, we engender that wish for ourselves. The meditation process is exactly what we’ve done with equanimity, except you’re going to work with these four lines. I suggest you do the same thing the first week: just work with them with respect to yourself. The next week, start extending them so you get the feeling of that. May I be happy, well, and at peace. What happens when you say that line?

Student: Relaxed.

Ken: It’s a relaxation that takes place. Anybody else? Darren.

Darren: The reaction of regret.

Ken: A reaction of regrets, because it’s a pretty short step to seeing all the ways that we’re conducting our lives so that we’re not happy, well, and at peace. This is where we get caught up in the world of shared experience. Because in the world of our actual experience, how available is being happy, well, and at peace? That’s pretty available.

Next line: May I open to everything that arises. What’s that like? This is very important. The reason we react in any situation is because we aren’t able or aren’t willing to open to what’s arising at that moment. And so we react either to take it over, which is attraction, or to get rid of it, which is aversion. It’s by cultivating the ability to open to whatever arises that we eliminate the need for reaction. May I experience the world wishing me happiness and peace. Janneke?

Janneke: Third lines elicit a kind of discomfort for me because it seems awfully selfish. And in my experience of the practice, it isn’t directed inward. So I’m having a little bit of a strain there.

Ken: Well, this particular approach, the four immeasurables, actually applies the principle in mind training: start the sequence with yourself. It’s not that we’re actually wishing this. We’re using these lines in order to be able to come in touch with what prevents us from knowing this.

May I be happy, well, and at peace. Well, an awful lot I’m doing prevents me from doing that. You with me? And: May I experience the world wishing me happiness and peace. How often do I regard the world as an enemy when it isn’t an enemy? How often do you regard the world as an enemy when it isn’t an enemy? Occasionally?

Janneke: Occasionally. Self-loathing doesn’t include that particular kind of paranoia.

Ken: No, I disagree a little bit. It’s the internalization of that paranoia, that is self-loathing.

Janneke: Well, it doesn’t. That’s irrelevant. That’s just words.

Ken: May I be happy, well, and at peace. That kind of runs counter to the self-loathing, doesn’t it?

Janneke: Yes.

Ken: Self-loathing is always a learned behavior. It never occurs naturally. We internalize someone else’s negative image of ourselves. And we were taught, usually in that connection, that trying to feel good about ourselves was selfish.

Janneke: I’ll just start a dialogue there, and then it’s pointless. But from what you’re saying, the way I, we, experience that third line is more like accepting.

Ken: Yes. And don’t forget that in the second week, you’re going to be saying: May those close to me be happy, well, and at peace. May those close to me open to everything they experience. May those close to me experience the world wishing them happiness and peace. So it doesn’t stay confined on ourselves forever. But, what’s it like to be loved by the world?

Janneke: First word? Excruciating.

Ken: Okay, that’s good enough. May I appreciate things just as they are. That also bites quite deeply, doesn’t it? We always want things to be other than just as they are. We want it to be the way I want them to be, not just as they are. First, Steve, then there.

Steve: How does may I be happy, well, and at peace differ from the preference that Kate was talking about, about “May my leg not be hurting”?

Ken: There, there’s a definite preference. May I be happy, well and at peace. As I say, we use these lines in order to come in touch with what prevents us from experiencing being happy, well, and at peace. In the knowing that I was referring to earlier, there’s peace, there’s wellbeing, there’s no reaction to pain or pleasure. So in a very profound sense, there’s happiness but not a relative happiness. And you can use these lines to elicit a sense, an echo of that. And that’s a very different quality from saying, “I just want this pain to go away.” You follow?

Steve: Not exactly. If I’m wishing to be well, why am I not preferring to be well?

Ken: It’s not about changing what you experience now. It’s changing how you experience it. If you are happy, well, and at peace, what happens when pain comes up?

Steve: In theory, you would just experience it.

Ken: Yeah. You’re less likely to react to it. On the other hand, if you’re unhappy, feeling sick, or very disturbed, what happens when pain comes up?

Steve: That’s what happens.

Ken: That’s what happens. Gets worse, doesn’t it? Yeah. Do you see the distinction? Okay, Darren.

Darren: I’m just wondering if you would care to comment on … there’s a subtle difference between the fourth line of equanimity, which is: May I see things just as they are, and the fourth line of loving-kindness, which is: May I appreciate things just as they are. Is that for us to experience? Why is that loving-kindness? And also it seems like a bit of the same. It’s a loaded question in terms of by appreciating something you’re not just experiencing it? Is it qualitative?

Ken: There is a qualitative difference between seeing things just as they are and appreciating. There’s a more intimate relationship with appreciating, and that’s why it’s loving-kindness.

Okay, one point on the first line of the joy meditation: take out the words success, and I decided I didn’t like those. So, May I enjoy the fulfillment of my aims. Also, you’ll find on the website, there’s a PDF file now with these meditations and along with them guidelines. If you go to the page which has the class description on it, you find you can download a PDF file from there if anybody’s interested. And we’re going to be getting a PDF file of the chants up on the website, but not just yet. Sean?

Student: Are these verses by degrees? By what you just said about equanimity and loving-kindness, is compassion also deeper than loving-kindness? And then joy deeper than compassion?

Ken: Are these by degrees? Yes and no. They’re more different facets of things. And the reason I say, “yes and no,” is that there is a progression, but the progression isn’t absolute. You can work through the immeasurables in two or three different progressions, actually. And they all work. They have different intentions, and I describe that in Wake up to Your Life. So yes, there’s a steady deepening of experience. But it doesn’t mean that compassion is always deeper than, well actually, in some sense, compassion is the deepest of all of them. But the way we’re working with them here is that they’re all different facets.

And so seeing things just as they are is one way and then appreciating things. And then as you move on to acceptance and then enjoyment, and they’re very different flavors in each of those. And all four are important. Some people can enjoy things, but they can’t see things clearly. And we’ll be getting into that one next time when we’re discussing decay and corruption, how they interact with each other.

Student experiences with loving-kindness meditation

Ken: So this is our third class in this series of six on the four immeasureables. I think we’ll begin following basically the same format that we did last time. What was your experience with loving-kindness? That is what you were working on last week, wasn’t it? Anybody have any insights, challenges, or questions? Lisa.

Lisa: Unlike equanimity—which I struggled more for doing it with others—with loving-kindness, it was the reverse. It was more difficult to do for myself or with myself, and it became easier with other people, so suspicious of something there.

Ken: I think it’s a very interesting point. Later this evening, we’ll talk about loving-kindness in a rather deep way as Uchiyama describes it. But right now, I’m just going to ask you a rather blunt question.

Lisa: Okay.

Ken: Why don’t you want you to be happy?

Lisa: I think I still believe a lot of the voices. One of the other things that I noticed was morning practice was a lot more difficult to get through. I had to keep coming back and coming back.

Ken: That’s with working with the energy?

Lisa: Mm-hmm, the morning tummo, and then as I’d moved through the day, I really felt face to face with some really dense material. One of the voices that goes by after I’ve done a cutting or an insight or a resting is, “but what I’m saying is true.” This voice is asserting its plausibility, it’s pointing to plausibility. So I think I’m still pretty hooked into some …

Ken: What do the voices say?

Lisa: It centers around uncertainty and a real discomfort with uncertainty and wanting to nail things down and get things organized.

Ken: We started with, why don’t you want you to be happy? What do the voices have to say about the idea of you being happy? I imagine they have some rather short and pithy comments on that.

Lisa: I don’t deserve that. I don’t know what it is.

Ken: That kind of thing.

Lisa: Those sorts of things. Yeah.

Ken: Okay. What do you experience in your body when those kinds of voices are running in you?

Lisa: Like a Geiger counter going kind of bzzzzzzzz.

Ken: So agitation.

Lisa: A lot of agitation.

Ken: And underneath the agitation?

Lisa: Really churned up water, kind of choppy waves.

Ken: So very, very agitated.

Lisa: Very, very agitated.

Ken: What’s the temperature of the water?

Lisa: Hot. It’s hot water.

Ken: How hot?

Lisa: Just hot enough to be comfortable.

Ken: Hot enough to be comfortable or hot enough to be uncomfortable?

Lisa: Well, a little of both. It’s right on the edge there. If it were more uncomfortable, I’d probably work a little harder on, I don’t know, something.

Ken: You’re dancing, you know?

Lisa: Yeah.

Ken: What are you dancing around?

Lisa: I have really felt the absence of capacity, and very difficult in the agitation to rest in it or cut it.

Ken: I’m going to go back to something we discussed in the very first class. It came out of a question that Agnes posed. Sounds to me like you’re trying to minimize suffering.

Lisa: Yes, absolutely.

Ken: What would it be like just to end it right now?

Lisa: That’s where the voice says, “Impossible. That’s impossible.”

Ken: Yeah. Okay. But how do you feel right now? Physically what happens?

Lisa: Much more calm.

Ken: That’s right. So this is the kind of attention. When we find ourselves doing this dance, then we get very, very confused because we’re trying to approach something, edge it, but not really get there. And it never works because it’s a way of avoiding meeting what’s actually there. And that’s why I wanted to pose that differentiation between minimizing suffering and ending suffering. And it’s equivalent to cutting. So okay, I’m just going to be right with it. Then the agitation disperses, and now you get the voice going, “This is not possible.” Now that’s not true, of course. But that’s what’s running in us.

Another way of looking at this approach is what Uchiyama is saying, “Whatever we encounter is our life.” And when we have that kind of disturbance coming up, we desperately want to believe that it isn’t part of our life. And so we go into this whole dance, which is just trying to avoid it. And this is the power of Uchiyama’s approach.

We say, “Okay, this is part of my life.” And parts of us may go, “This is not the life I’ve bargained for. This is not the life I wanted.” But we say, “No, this is part of it.” And both equanimity and loving-kindness come in here. The equanimity is, “Yes, this is part of my life.” And so the whole idea of liking or disliking or preferring is out the window. It is just there. And the loving-kindness aspect is, “This is part of my life and I will accept it. I will open to it.”

I know a lot of what he talked about in the chapter on loving-kindness sounds like equanimity. But if you read a little more closely, you see it’s all about opening, opening and opening. Opening to what’s ever there. It’s not just about meeting it, it’s now about opening to it. It’s that extra quality. So for you here, there’s this voice in you says, “It’s impossible for me to be happy. It’s completely impossible for me to be happy.” And the way you respond to that is you open to that. “Okay. That’s interesting.” Right? And what happens when you do that? Again, physically what happens?

Lisa: Resting in that. It’s calm.

Ken: Resting in that. Okay. Because what the voices are saying are the expressions of feelings. They’re not actually facts. Though they sure feel like it sometimes.

Susan: In the first line, I don’t know if it’s a language quibble or if it’s about meaning, but May I be happy? It seems to be kind of at odds with what Uchiyama was saying, that you can’t really be happy all the time. Some experiences aren’t pleasant. It’s got nothing to do with whether you meet them or open to them. It more has to do with the quality of the experience. So what is meant by happy?

Ken: I brought up with me, but I don’t know where it is. Do you know what it is to be happy?

Susan: I’ve been happy, yes.

Ken: Yeah. So that’s your answer. [Laughter]

Susan: Okay, wise guy,

Ken: You’ve known me for many, many years, Susan. Why do you expect anything else?

Susan: What does happy mean in this context?

Ken: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You know what happy means. Your question isn’t about the language. Your question seems to me more: Why am I wishing myself to be happy if Uchiyama says we can’t be happy all the time?

Susan: If he says all experiences won’t be happy ones or make us happy. Yeah.

Ken: Well, last time we talked about mind of the body, mind of emotion and mind of awareness. Uchiyama is coming from this almost exclusively at the level of mind of awareness. It’s very, very powerful and very deep, which is why I wanted us to have that perspective in this. But we also have a body and they also have emotions. Now, as Lisa was describing, what happens in you when you say, “May I be happy,” what happens in your body?

Susan: Lightens up.

Ken: Anything wrong with that?

Susan: No.

Ken: No? Okay. And if a friend of yours or someone that you’re close to in some way just looks at you and says, “You know, Susan, I really want you to be happy.” How does that make you feel?

Susan: Happy.

Ken: That’s being on the receiving end of loving-kindness. And what receiving loving-kindness does for us is it precipitates an experience of not being separate from the world of our experience. That’s the transformative quality of loving-kindness. Each of them has its own transformative quality, and the transformative quality of loving-kindness is that it reduces the sense of separation. It reduces the sense of alienation from the world, from experience, etc., etc. Okay?

So that’s why we say that. It’s not because we think we can be happy all the time, or we’re trying to be happy all the time. But that line is about reducing the sense of separation. Now, as practice deepens, and we can start approaching it from the level of mind of awareness, then just as I was saying to Lisa a few moments ago, it’s about opening to whatever’s there. But not all of us can go immediately there.

That’s why I encourage people to work at the level of the body, because the body is always awake. The mind of the body is always awake. It always tells you exactly what’s going on. It’s overlaid by the conditioning at the level of mind of emotion. But by paying attention to the body, we can come into connection. We can come to know and experience what is operating at the level of mind of emotion. And then by building a capacity and attention, we can bring a level of attention from the level of mind of awareness to that conditioning. And that’s what breaks it up. So we work with all three levels, all three minds.

So if you go through the verses, if somebody could lend them to me, I don’t know why they aren’t here. Thank you.

May I be happy, well, and at peace. When we hear that something relaxes in us, because we’re actually on the receiving end of loving-kindness at that point. And we know what that’s like. And when we actually feel that way about somebody else, that’s what it’s like for them.

And then, May I open to everything that arises. What’s that like? Susan?

Susan: Sometimes it’s easier than others.

Ken: Yes. May I experience the world wishing me happiness and peace. What’s that like?

Susan: Well, I had another question about that one.

Ken: Fire away. Go ahead.

Susan: It just seems like realistically speaking, unless everybody’s enlightened, then they’re not going to be doing that. But I mean, yeah, it would feel great. I would like it.

Ken: Yes. Go on.

Susan: I’m just feeling like an idiot.

Ken: No, it’s nothing to do with being an idiot. You’re right. Realistically, it’s a pipe dream. Most people are so caught up, they don’t have the time to wish us happiness and peace. They barely have time to open a door for us. But none of these lines are about trying to make the world a certain way. Each one of the lines is aimed at eliciting a certain experience or putting us in touch with material in us.

So, May I experience the world wishing me happiness and peace. Well, for some people, the prospect of the world wishing them happiness and peace would be like heaven on earth. And they can just feel themselves open wonderfully. For other people, the prospect of the world wishing them happiness and peace is completely intimidating. They wouldn’t know how to function. It puts them right in touch with all of that conditioning.

And there’s no right or wrong here. One is not the right reaction and the other’s not the wrong reaction. I imagine we could find people, particularly here in Los Angeles, saying, “May I experience the world wishing me happiness and peace. Well they do, don’t they? I mean, what are you absurd? Of course, they do.” You know, somewhat narcissistic people.

And each of these lines are designed to put us in touch with whatever’s operating in us. For some, it allows us to open at a deeper level. For others, it puts in touch with what blocks, such as Lisa’s, “Well, that’s impossible.” Okay.

And then, May I appreciate things just as they are. That’s that opening, just as they are. In fact, I got an email from someone today who is asking me for a book on how to work with teams. And the questions that were coming in the previous emails weren’t making any sense to me. So I said, “What do you really want here?” And it was a way that people can work together who can really appreciate the differences among each other.

Now, when you get a group that works that way, it’s very, very powerful. But it’s extremely difficult because you’re asking people to appreciate in others what drives them nuts. But if you’re able to get that in any group, then it becomes very, very powerful. So these are quite non-trivial things. I mean, you’re somewhat artistically inclined, right? What’s it like sitting down with a computer programmer?

Susan: I admire their ability to know things I will never know.

Ken: Yeah, that’s very nice. What’s it actually like? [Laughter]

Susan: What do you mean? To try to talk to them about a computer?

Ken: Or about anything?

Susan: It’s an exercise in patience and presence.

Ken: Are you appreciating them right at that time?

Susan: It depends on what they’re saying to me.

Ken: But you see what I mean? What would it be like to appreciate them even as they’re driving you nuts? Because they have a different way. Or to put it a little more pointedly, what prevents you from appreciating them?

Susan: An inability to connect with them.

Ken: Yes. Yes. And I want to say, a seeming inability to connect, right? Because there may actually be connection there. But they don’t fit into how you see and understand the world. So that’s what we’re really working with here. So these are elements in your experience that don’t fit into your experience. It’s really difficult to appreciate. Okay, very good.