Sharon Salzberg has trained people, on a global basis, in the art of loving kindness and compassion. She offers ways to undertake loving-kindness meditation in her books, videos and blog posts. For example, in a blog post for mindful.org, she described a practice that helps people connect with kindness in a world where people increasingly feel disconnected.
In discussing mindful connection in a recent presentation, Sharon alluded to potential barriers to loving kindness. The following barriers can be identified from her presentation:
Centrality of ourselves
Sharon describes “centrality” as a serious impediment to loving kindness as the primary focus is on ourselves, our needs, our priorities and our happiness. Jon Kabat-Zinn refers to this barrier as “the story of me” – where I am the producer, the central character and actor in the story about me.
Sharon suggests that we can overcome our tendency to “centrality” when we gain insight into the pain associated with this positioning of ourselves. We can come to this realisation through meditation or reflection on a challenging life event – when we begin to understand that placing ourselves at the centre of everything is the root cause of our loneliness, sense of disconnection, boredom and frustration.
Disconnected worldview
We often hear media reports that state that it was fortunate that the flood, cyclone or bushfire did not strike “here” but passed us by and struck “over there”. This worldview conveys a sense of disconnection – as if what happens “there” has no impact or implication for us “here”.
This worldview is extremely narrow even taking into account our economic, ecological, financial and political interdependence. It does not recognise the interconnection at a human level with families, friends, colleagues and relatives involved. At a deeper level, it fails to recognise our interdependence with nature and the interconnection of all humanity.
Loving kindness and compassion meditation can open us up to recognition of these interdependencies and interconnections. We can also monitor our own words on a daily basis to ensure that we do not unwittingly promote a narrow, distorted worldview.
Beliefs about love
There are many connotations of the word “love” but it has become synonymous with “romantic love”. This leads to the belief that love is a feeling and that to love someone you have to like them or approve of them. If you view love as connection, then love is seen as a capacity to connect -something that can be cultivated. Love, then, is independent of whether you like a person or not.
The belief that compassion is solely an inner state
It is true that compassion is developed through loving-kindness and compassion meditation. However, as Sharon points out it is actually a “movement toward” rather than a “movement within”. The latter can lead to “empathetic distress”. Compassion is the recognition of someone’s suffering and the desire to act to alleviate it in some way, while recognising that in many situations we cannot act directly to affect the pain and suffering of another person.
Compassion in day-to-day life can be expressed through active listening and what Sharon calls “spy consciousness” – where we turn our attention to our own thoughts and motivation in a situation to assess whether we are acting from a compassionate, considerate stance or from one of “centrality”.
Judging ourselves
We all carry a degree of prejudice and unconscious bias but there is nothing to be gained from beating up on ourselves, disliking who we are or belittling ourselves. What is needed is compassion for ourselves and recognition that these deficiencies are a part of the human condition. Sharon argues that self-loathing does not lead to transformation whereas compassion for ourselves is transformative.
As we grow in mindfulness through loving-kindness practices, we begin to recognise at a deeper level that we are connected to everybody else and we start to cultivate love for others that is a true form of connection.
By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)
Image source: Courtesy of brenkee on Pixabay
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