A few weeks ago I was housesitting for friends who live along a river. The river snakes around the edge of the neighborhood, providing sanctuary for eagles and foxes and muskrats. Each morning I would sit on the levee with my tea, watching the water ripple over rocks in the shallows. The chatter of birds and the distant hum of traffic awakened my senses. Streams of thought flowed toward the river as I pondered what I’ve learned over the past several years.
One of the primary revelations has been just how much compassion for myself had been missing. I never would have pegged myself as particularly harsh but what I discovered—as I dug through the mud of my inner life—was a driven, perfectionistic, judgmental and impatient gal who was trying her darnedest to get distance from a deeper pain. That gal was also fairly demanding of others, in subtle ways, wanting to be right much of the time and wanting life to conform to her needs to feel safe and valued.
Part of my newly emerging self-compassion is to recognize that this is the human condition. We want to feel secure and loved. We develop coping mechanisms that uniquely reflect our childhood conditioning and individual temperament. We want the “rightness” of our point of view and the “necessity” of our wants validated.
At an intellectual level, I’ve known that all along. But lately hard knocks and hours of therapy have brought that knowing into my bones. And that’s another thing I’m having compassion for: we can’t get there until we get there. A deeper level of self-insight only comes when we are ready. And so we can be patient and kind with ourselves, trusting that everything comes at the right time for our spiritual and psychological awakening.
Buddhism talks of maitri. From the Sanskrit it is a view toward changing our relationship with pain and difficulty:
“It means unlimited friendliness toward ourselves, with the clear implication that this leads naturally to unlimited friendliness toward others. Maitri also has the meaning of trusting oneself—trusting that we have what it takes to know ourselves thoroughly and completely without feeling hopeless, without turning against ourselves because of what we see.”
—Pema Chödrön
Or as Thich Nhat Hanh says, maitri is the intention and capacity to offer joy and happiness, so by deduction we have to start with ourselves.
You are probably familiar with the story about the Dalai Lama and maitri? When queried many years ago by a Western practitioner about the topic of self-hatred, he was befuddled: “What is self-hatred?” The concept was so foreign to him that he couldn’t begin to fathom this common experience of personal shame and self-loathing that many Westerners feel. We suffer when we don’t feel connected with our basic capacity for self-oriented lovingkindness. This is particularly true in societies like ours where not being enough and not having enough drive the spend-and-acquire economy.
It’s been a long, winding journey to be tender with myself, even to be tender with my tendency to beat myself up. When I was on retreat a few years ago, I had an interview with one of the teachers. We sat across from each other on our cushions without speaking. She looked at me intently. Then she calmly said, “Dina, I really encourage you to practice maitri.” It took me three years to understand what she had intuited but I am joyful now to dip my feet into this river of compassion and feel its cooling, calming effect on me and, with luck, on everyone around me.
For a lovely and good-humored five-minute teaching on maitri by Pema, click here.
Photo Credit: Dan Axler
