Mindfulness Meditation Intro For Parents - 6. Heart Quality

In this talk I'm going to talk about heart qualities and how everything starts with love.

This talk goes hand in hand with loving kindness meditation that is in the tracks just before.

I'm going to talk to you about why heart quality is important and I will focus especially on love and kindness and then I will also talk to you about how you can cultivate love and kindness and what some of the barriers to it are.

So there are many heart qualities that if we cultivate when we are parents we get a lot in return.

Those might be love and kindness,

Compassion,

Joy and equanimity and I hope to record another class with a lot of those heart qualities in a few months.

I have decided here to introduce the simplest one yet the one I found key.

Love and kindness also known as Metta in Pali or Maitri in Sanskrit and it can also be translated more simply as love or I think Sharon Salzberg's translate it as connection too.

The reason why it's so important is because like my teacher Jack Cornfield says with mindfulness meditation the idea isn't to perfect yourself the game is to perfect your love so if you start anywhere starts there.

In our age and society to be honest I think it probably shifted already with our grandparents we see love as this mushy soft feeling we see we think love is weak it's unhumanly and manly and it leaves us too vulnerable too out of control and really what we need is strength but this is because we misunderstand love.

Love doesn't have to say yes all the time it doesn't mean that you get trampled over and sometimes love means saying no like when my boys run across the road or when I tell them that they can't have sweets for dinner or that bedtime is now not in two hours.

Or more obviously like when we stand up for all humanity like Martin Luther King after the bombing of his church he said we will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering.

We will meet your physical force with soul force with love.

We will not hate you but we cannot in all good conscience obey you unjust laws and we will soon wear you down with our capacity to suffer and with our love and winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win your freedom as well.

And I found that love and kindness is the key thing I found that so true over the last few years I have spent practicing.

The biggest shifts in my behavior and being able to deal with challenges in my life they have happened when I found a way to grow my capacity to love.

To love others like my teammates like my children like my family but also to love myself more and I'm not talking about a narcissistic love looking at myself in the mirror and inflating myself with the latest certification I obtain.

I'm talking about loving the one that shouted at the kids when she promised herself that she would not today or the one that goes to bed at 8 p.

M because today was just too much or the one that recoils from going out with the girlfriends because I'm afraid that I'm not truly belonging there.

Simply loving who I am when I am good and when I am bad because when I embrace all this I feel whole.

So loving yourself is important because when you love yourself you return to who you are and you might be thinking the same as this woman Nora from Sharon Salzberg's book Real Love.

She says you always hear you need to practice self-love in order to love others but no one tells you how to love yourself.

On the one hand it feels like a cure-all.

I need to love myself to find a lover.

On the other hand I think a lot of people seek out romance as a way of not loving themselves.

In some sense self-love is the most difficult.

You are also the most convenient person to hate.

One day when I was in my late 20s a dear platonic friend said to me,

Do you know how much I love you?

I instantly felt a wave of sadness.

No,

I said,

I don't know how much you love me.

I know,

He replied gently and at that moment I became aware that I'd never even thought of myself as being lovable and I realized that it was not then possible for me to really receive love either.

I'm sure a lot of us are feeling that like this woman Nora.

And when we love ourselves we are more open to accepting others as they are and as they come to us.

Frank Ostaseski in his book called The Five Invitations tells the story of Jillian.

She had brought her mom home to live with her as her mom had dementia and she found all of her library book packed in boxes when she came back home from work.

In the book Frank writes,

Her mother announced,

I'm tired of all these dusty old books.

I'm going to give them to my dentist.

Jillian was momentarily trapped by her anger.

She scolded her mother's attendant.

How could you let this happen?

And the attendant who was not caught up in the drama replied,

Ma'am today I pack the book up and tomorrow I will unpack them.

If this gives a sense of control to a woman who has lost so much well then it's okay with me.

It doesn't matter so much.

I just love being with her.

You can feel in that story the shift that we encounter when we move from the small perspective of our problem where our heart is closed to an open generous heart.

You've probably felt that way with your children when you're able to shift from they're making it difficult because they're refusing to eat,

To get dressed,

To do their homework,

To stop playing a video game,

To leave the park,

To go to sleep and you're shifting to they are finding it difficult.

How can I help them?

It happens to me often in the evening.

Charlie,

My six years old,

Is asking for cuddle after cuddle,

One more drink of water and trying to chat away.

Most day will eventually become quiet as he falls asleep but some days though his demands escalate.

He starts shouting and whining and in this time I can feel my heart shutting and yet if I bring attention to it,

Breathe through it and let it open,

I'll go and give him that last cuddle and he will fall asleep against me and I know then and there we are okay.

Archbishop Tutu said in Africa when you ask someone how are you the reply you always get is in the plural.

Even if you're speaking to just one person a man would say we are well or we are not well.

He himself may be quite well but his grandmother is not well so he's not well either.

The solitary isolated human being is really a fiction.

We are social being,

We know that intellectually but emotionally we wish so often we could separate our heart from those of our close ones.

So let me tell you a little bit about the barriers to love and kindness.

Why do we find it so difficult to practice love and kindness and not just the meditation you have done or you will do after listening to this talk but just in general love.

The first one is self-judgment.

Like I said in the example of the lady who didn't love herself,

We're full of self-judgment.

We don't think we are deserving of love and it has often appeared at an early age that we started to feel that.

It helps to practice the love and kindness meditation with a picture of ourselves when we were little.

The second barrier is boredom.

The practice can be quite repetitive and boring but there is a reason we do it because at some point we will see the change.

Like the rabbi teaching the Jewish mystical tradition said,

He asked that his disciples memorize,

Reflect and contemplate and place the teaching of the holy words on their heart.

One day a student asked why the rabbi always used the phrase on your heart and the master replied,

Only the divine can put the teaching into your heart.

Here we recite and learn and put them on the heart hoping that sometimes when your heart breaks open they will fall in.

That's an extract from The Wise Heart by Jack Kornfield.

We do the same with love and kindness.

We repeat,

We do the same with love and kindness.

We repeat,

We plant seeds and one day they will sprout.

The third barrier is grief or sorrow.

When we are very sad it is difficult or even impossible sometimes to practice love and kindness.

So we might want to switch to compassion and in place of wishing to be loved,

Peaceful and happy,

Just wishing the pain to go away.

We change our phrases and we say may I be held in compassion,

May I be free from suffering.

Another barrier is dryness or numbness.

Sometimes we just don't feel.

And although it is hard,

The key is to hold that too in love and kindness.

Striving an expectation,

We think that we will always have our heart open and we can keep at it and we can just force it open.

But the heart is like everything else.

It has its rhythm,

Its cycle.

Sometimes it's open,

Sometimes it's closed and you can just observe that with love and kindness again.

And one of the last barriers is fear.

This was one of my big barriers to love and kindness.

We fear that we'll be too vulnerable or we'll feel that we'll lose ourself or lose our ground.

Or lose our strength.

Or mine was,

I was fearing that all of those wishes would never happen.

So how do we practice like you have or you will practice in the meditation?

We repeat the love and kindness phrases.

There are many phrases that you can use for love and kindness and the one that I shared with you were a variant on Jack Kornfield's meditation,

Meta-meditation.

There are some from Christine Neff that are much more simple.

May I be safe,

May I be peaceful,

May I be healthy,

May I live with ease.

And there are some more complicated and I'll say complete maybe by Thich Nhat Hanh for example.

May I be peaceful,

Happy and light in body and spirit.

May I be safe and free from injury.

May I be free from anger,

Affliction,

Fear and anxiety.

You can meet what works best for you and you can create your own.

And it can vary from day,

Period of your life with what you need and what you think other need.

Your position when you're practicing this meditation is important.

Your position in meditation is always important but this,

For this one you really need to feel comfortable because if you're not you will struggle focusing on generating the feelings that goes with the words.

Like I said in the meditation what works best and really it's in the western world is to start with someone or something that is easy to love.

Like I said it can be a person,

A pet,

Even a place.

Whatever generates a strong feeling of love in you so that when you are ready to turn the love towards you,

You can feel that this person or place can be the source of this love for you.

Once you have done that,

You turn this love onto you and wish it to yourself all this love,

And wish it to yourself all this love,

Peace and joy.

Once you're more practiced at it,

You can drop starting with your loved one and start with yourself first before choosing your loved one after.

And then you will extend it to others.

You first will extend it to people you love like friends and family,

Then your community,

Then people you don't mind,

The neutral people,

People that you don't necessarily know.

And finally the key point there is you will turn it to the hardest.

Like I said one of my kid's teacher called him rude and selfish and I practiced love and kindness toward her a lot.

You know,

Children that bully your own child or even some politics figures.

At some point you will encounter some difficulties.

It might be when you start with yourself or it might be when you get to those difficult people.

And all you do is you hold that in love and kindness or you bring compassion.

You can bring your hands to your heart for support.

And you can remember that it is your intention right now that matters.

If you're not feeling the love and kindness toward a difficult person,

It's okay.

You are practicing with this intention too and that's enough for now.

Finally,

You can bring that practice to your life.

It's not about just sitting in meditation and wishing the whole world love and kindness.

I remember the many days I've spent going to pharmacy when the boys were little and waiting in line for some antibiotics.

Already stressed by the illness,

Tired,

Deprived from sleep,

And worried about what's going to I was lined up in the pharmacy behind countless people.

But I had this intention and I would just focus on all the people in the pharmacy,

The one behind the counters,

And the one like me,

Lined up,

Waiting.

And one by one,

I would look at them and I would think,

May you be held in love and kindness,

May you be peaceful,

May you be happy.

And moving from one to the other,

I would continue my practice.

And most of the time when I left the pharmacy with my order,

I would feel lighter than when I got in.

Jad Cornfield says,

Love is not a small thing.

It's an act of bravery.

It has an enormous power.

Thank you for listening.