This Mother Day’s - try a little kindness

“Between Us #3”; watercolor, gesso on handmade paper 

Foxy, a pal on Bluesky, posted a pleasant message earlier this week to commit random acts of kindness and it inspired no small amount or reflection on my part. I dedicate this piece to all mothers and to Foxy for bringing the inspiration.

To be kind may feel like being a leaf buffeted about in the harsh winds of our present. However, I have found that being kind draws on and builds a kind of resilience, a kind of strength. If you can be unconditionally kind, if you can help lift someone who’s fallen without thinking of who they are or thinking about their views or wondering if they harbor will toward you, you discover something. You learn that you can let go of your views, your judgements, your othering of that person.

I find myself thinking about this a lot these days because I can be quite sarcastic and salty and write some pretty condemnatory things about certain public figures that I see as having committed grievous acts against much of the country and for that matter, the world. I will admit that anger and frustration fuel these words but here’s a funny thing; if any of these people were on fire or being set on by people who would do them harm, I would intervene. I would intervene because I really do believe that showing kindness, sympathy and acting from a place - however imperfect - of lovingkindness, is the only thing that makes sense.

This is not to infer that I believe that people who have brought great harm to the nation and the globe should be allowed to go scot free; justice is required, the scales need balance, and ultimately, my judgement of their character is moot. At some point, the pendulum swings in the opposite direction. In the meantime, I still see even the most flawed among us as human beings that - whether they accept it or not, know it or not - deserve love like the rest of us. 

Yes, deserve. Love is as essential to life as food and air. I don’t mean some treacly, Valentine’s Day gift card quatrain kind of love; real love that is absent of ego or desire or need is what I have in mind. It isn’t “unselfish”, but rather “unselfed”; it is free of clinging or expectation of reward. “I’ love most purely when the “I” is quiet. 

This does not mean that one should go through life denying oneself of one’s aims or pleasures or desires, but it does mean that one should be aware of how those are pursued or manifest. The self is a slippery proposition. We are relational beings and to the degree that we grow over time, so too, do our realigns and how we relate to others.

Ubuntu: “without you, I cannot be” or “because you are, I am.” There is something similar in Buddhism’s pratitsya samudpada/dependent origination, where the web of action and reaction lead to phenomena in our lives. Ultimately, our existence relies on others. In Tibetan Mahayana, it is understood that all sentient beings have been one another’s mother throughout the interconnectedness of causes and conditions since beginningless time. We are born, die and reborn according to the karma generated in our previous lives and before both are born again based on latent habitual tendencies that have left their imprint on our midstream. This is not a matter of a “soul” but rather, an impersonal aggregate of emotional and/or for lack of a better term, psychic energies of clinging and aversion. 

Of course, this is just another way of saying that we are largely ignorant of our habit-energy, of our psychological habit patterns and many of us go through life unaware of why we do what we do. We simply chalk it up to “that’s the way I am” as if the ego was the self and as if both were not subject to change.

But subject to change we are. It may be of dubious to value to debate “free will” here, but I think the words “intention” and “motivation” may suffice to give voice to the idea that we can change more consciously and more conscientiously than we give ourselves credit for. We can choose to be selfish; we can choose to be not so.

How does one do this? It has been my experience that if I do not worry about the “how” and simply abide by the resolve to be - for our purposes here - kinder, that is where it begins. This requires openness and awareness; it requires looking at oneself as one is and recognizing that the ability to change is right there in you and to change into a more kind, more loving approach to existence is possible. 

I could go on about how different traditions and paths provide tools for furthering this approach, but sometimes we find that merely in the act of stopping our rush to judge self and others, in not clinging to our views about how things are (when they really are only based on how things appear to us), and in simply openly listening to what is going on at the moment - again, without accepting, without rejecting - something happens. A switch goes on and we are somehow lighter.

This may happen and the results are incremental, at first. But we find ourselves less reactive, less likely to get angry, to judge, to condemn. This may even seem effortless at first, for a while. However, we will still find ourselves getting angry, maybe even blowing up. Even in this, though, a deeper understanding obtains. Emotions are energy; they reside somewhere in the physical fabric of our being and they express themselves from a place of need, of desire, or of aversion, or trauma. We have, though, a new perspective with how to understand our emotional energy. 

If we routinely come back to that desire to be open, to be kind, to love, though, we find that alongside the unconscious roiling of emotional turmoil is a concomitant subsidence of same. We again find ourselves growing less reactive, and more relaxed; we may find ourselves acting with more generosity toward those whom we did not care for or to whom we held great antipathy. We develop patience.

You don’t need a god or a religion for this. “My religion is kindness”, as His Holiness the Dalai Lama is fond of saying. 

Even so, there are some techniques for behavioral modification that can assist in growing a more open heart, a more generous way of being-in-the-world, that traditional practices offer. Buddhism has various forms of “metta” or lovingkindness meditative strategies. One approach is to visualize people with whom you have close ties, the people closest to you, and wish them to be liberated, to have happiness, to be free of suffering, to have joy and equanimity. This often begins as sub-vocal recitation of phrases, but the idea is to translate that into a general heart-felt desire for others’ well-being. Then you become another cohort: people to whom your are indifferent. The clerk at the store perhaps, or that guy at work on the second floor that you pass in the hall every so often; in other words, a large swath of the population. Again, hold the wish as genuinely and deeply as possible for them to be free of suffering, to have their needs met, and so on. The last group are those with whom we have adventitious relationships, to whom we hold great antipathy, maybe even great enmity. You may reasonably say, “why the sincere holy fuck should I give a shit about their well-being? Why should I want them to be happy?” 

That’s only a reasonable response if we want to remain as we were. In some very profound ways, this isn’t about them; it’s very much about us. Just try it and see what happens. See if you can sense their fears, their ignorance, the way that their world may be more constrained than your. You might even take a page from Gurdjieff and keep in mind that they, too, must die someday, and that may be the most terrifying moment of their lives, particularly if they have spent their lives harming others. If you say, “fine, they deserve it”, then you’re missing the point of all of this. Maybe even the point of what it means to be more fully human.

Lastly, at least as I was instructed, you radiate good will and a felt-sense of genuine compassion and love to all beings throughout the universe. 

In the Tibetan Mahayana, there is a similar and at the same time, the more intense exercise of tong-len. This is literally exchanging self and other, in which we you visualize the person or persons and with as full intention as you can, with as much altruism as you can muster, you build on the desire for others’ happiness and well-being but you visualize them attaining it and in at least a couple of methods I’ve received, see those people sitting on moon and sun-disks like fully realized buddhas and bodhisattvas. While you’re working on that, you draw in all the negativity, all the suffering from their lives, visualized as black smoke. Breath goes out, they are seen as glorious beings, breath comes in, you draw in the impediments to their full awakening into your heart center and hold it all there. At the conclusion, you dissolve the visualizations and resolve the inky smoke being held into light. Let the visualizations fade and rest in a relaxed state of love, warmth, and compassion or if you’re there, in the non-dual nature of mind. 

Another exercise to try that might be less challenging comes from a Daoist whose name I do not know. I read and interview with this worthy in Parabola Magazine fifteen years ago (I think). If memory serves, he might have been a difficult fellow when he started out, so his teacher had him go into the world, and start with doing just three good deeds a day, unseen, unrecognized, and add to those over time, taking a tally of each one to ensure that his beneficial actions grew over time. I’ve done this a couple of times and it’s far more challenging than you might think. I had to be aware of the moment; was I actually doing something good or is this simply part of my job? Indeed, you may at some point, figure out that “doing something good” is kind of what all our actions should be. I wouldn’t get too stuck on details and just see what happens. 

In not-so-esoteric Christianity, there is the admonition to love others as ourselves and to do good to those who use and abuse us. Taken as mere sentiment, these admonitions have been debased and reduced to both “nice thoughts” and indicators of a “slave morality”, and not without reason. But we are dealing something unreasonable here. Genuinely caring about and for others is not some self-improvement or self-help strategy. It moves us to more refined degree of Being. There is much in Christ’s teachings that are intended to be implemented, not merely recited on Sundays so you feel good before heading out to do the opposite during the rest of the day and week. 

Some will say, what about oneself in all this? Aren’t we supposed to lover ourselves first? Of course! You are not separate from others and this intent we’ve been discussing begins with you! In the metta exercise, you can begin or end with yourself. Personally, I prefer ending with myself as a way of “bringing it all back home.” In tong-len, you de facto conclude with yourself as everything is drawn back into you and dissolved. 

The kicker, though, is that ultimately, there is no self or other. When you see yourself in others, when you contact that commonality, that through line of Being that we all share and manifest from, then there is space to see self and other as expressions of “all this.”

In Sufism, the Lover is absorbed into the Beloved in a supernal flame. We could find similar images and directives all across the world. At the end of it all, this is inside you all the time.

Returning for a bit to Buddhism, and more specifically to Tibetan Buddhism, a recurring phrase is “all mother sentient beings”; This is a way to call to mind that all beings have been our mother at sometime or another. Some people have issues with their mothers. I know I did for much of my life until, as I got older, I saw the immense amount of work she had done to keep my head above water. Being a single mother in the sixties was no one’s idea of a cakewalk and I was in my late twenties before I started getting a clue.

I offer all of this in the spirit of recognizing the “mother spirit” in this world of phenomena. We can express it regardless of gender; indeed, it would profit us greatly if men would recognize and exercise the nurturing potential within them.

I have talked a good game here and will be the first to admit that I fall short and will continue to do so for as long as I remain a benighted human being. Nevertheless, what I’ve laid out here is sort of my operating manual for how I navigate the world as I encounter it. I won’t say that I will refrain from writing caustically and critically (and yes, saltily), about the injustices in the world, particularly, those that beset us increasingly domestically; but it comes from a sense that the frustration comes from knowing that we have so much potential within us and that if we are to survive as a polity, let alone as a species, it will behoove us to cultivate compassion and goodwill toward all as best we can.