January 11 – An appropriate response

Dear Friends,

When we start with the practice of mettā, we start with people or scenarios where we can feel the warmth of kindness – a benefactor, a friend, a pet, maybe ourselves (though often not!). We develop some skills and start to trust that our hearts can be open. As we gain confidence, we can start to expand the circle to include more and more beings. We begin to trust in our capacity to cultivate goodwill, friendliness, and kindness.

But then you get off your meditation cushion… and the guy down the block didn’t pick up after his dog; an acquaintance posts some offensive drivel on Facebook; the person on the bus is talking loudly on her phone; someone at the your table is slurping their soup; …

Pema Chödrön writes,

Because they challenge us to the limits of our open-mindedness, difficult relationships are in many ways the most valuable for practice. The people who irritate us are the ones who inevitably blow our cover. Through them we might come to see our defenses very clearly.

The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times, by Pema Chödrön, in chapter 7

Marcia Rose talks about and leads a practice in a mettā practice for the difficult person:
https://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/112/talk/48842/

In her talk, Marcia shares a story of a monk who visits a Chinese meditation master, Yunmen, and asked, “What’s the work of the Buddha’s whole life?” Yunmen replied, “An appropriate response.”

When we cultivate goodwill and kindness towards the difficult person, we aren’t giving them a free pass for the unskillful ways that they may have hurt or harmed us or others. We won’t suddenly become soft and let them trample all over us. Christina Feldman speaks to this care:

An embodied kindness in our lives must necessarily also be a skillful kindness, which can be protective of our own well-being without being a fearful defensiveness. Metta engages with discernment, knowing how close we may stand to the difficult people in our lives. … Metta allows us to act with courage to intervene skillfully whenever suffering is encountered.

pages 45-46

When we start expanding the reach into the realm of the difficult, every book and talk I’ve reviewed reminds us – we don’t start with the most difficult person in our lives, but rather someone that is perhaps mildly irritating.

Even with that, should we find the practice gets too intense or triggers fear or aversion, we can turn our attention back to a benefactor, friend, pet. Christina states it this way:

The cultivation of metta is fluid and responsive; it is learning to dwell within kindness in the midst of all relationships—freeing our heart of the moment from ill will and fear.

page 51

Warm wishes,
Andrea