A Short Meditation on Compassion

Your experience of life is not based on your life.  It’s based on what you pay attention to.  Let’s suppose you get up one morning to find that you have no hot water, you get in a huge traffic jam and are a little late for work and then one of your clients is really short with you.  You get home and your spouse asks how your day was, what are you going to say?  “Well, let me tell you how my day was….there was no hot water, I got into a huge traffic jam and one of my clients was a total jerk.”  Thing is, it would be just as valid to say, “My day was great…The coffee maker worked, the car started, and most of my clients were really nice.”  Of course, we’re not wired to think that way but there’s no reason we couldn’t be.

In Naikan therapy, we meditate on all of those people who have given support, who have helped you over the years.  The technique is generally to start with an individual person, say your mother or your father and work first on the first nine years of your life and then ongoing in three year increments. 

One asks three questions:

• What did I receive from this person during this time?

• What did I give to this person during this time?

• What troubles did I cause this person during this time?

We specifically ignore the “silent” fourth question, “What trouble did this person cause me” because it’s such a distraction.  If someone has done something to you, you hope that at some point they will reflect on their actions, but it doesn’t really help for you to…and you’ve probably spent too much time reflecting on it already.

The problem with self-help is that it’s about assigning blame…who is responsible for your troubles.  Is it your parents, siblings, society, racism, sexism….what?  If you assign that blame to your hearts content, what do you then do with it?  Do you water a seed of anger or resentment?  As Thich Nhat Hanh says, expressing your anger doesn’t eliminate it from your system, it only exercises your ‘anger muscle’ and makes it stronger.  It only accentuates those neural pathways and makes them a more likely response to stimuli.  It can work the same way with compassion.  By dampening my blame response and accentuating my response of compassion, I not only present a more beautiful face to the world, but I remove poison from my heart.  Anger is like taking poison and hoping someone else dies.