Welcome back to a Secret Sangha episode.
I'm Dr.
Diana Hill and this week we are talking about love.
It's part of a four-week series where we're going to be exploring the four immeasurables,
Loving-kindness,
Compassion,
Joy,
And equanimity.
And these aren't just great spiritual ideals,
They actually have powerful effects on your brain,
On your body,
On your relationships.
We can intentionally cultivate these qualities and when we do,
It activates a caregiving and connection circuitry in your brain,
In your body,
That's linked to things like empathy and emotion regulation and quieting of threat systems.
If there is anything that we need right now,
We need more empathy,
Less fear,
We need less reactivity and division,
And more calm stress physiology.
We need more bonding,
We need more connection in a world where we feel a lot of outrage,
Maybe we feel numbness,
Maybe you feel isolation.
So we'll be going through these four immeasurables this month and today we're talking about kindness,
Loving-kindness,
Kind love,
And I'll give you a little practice to take away.
So we are in February launching into a month of love and this is actually inspired by Gil Fransdal,
Who's been working on the Brahma Biharas,
Which are the four immeasurables in Buddhism.
Immeasurable meaning you can never have enough of them.
And Brahma Bihara,
The first part of Brahma means sort of like godlike or sublime qualities,
And then Bihara is your abode,
Your dwelling.
So how can we increase our love,
Our capacities for love,
And there's four types of love that we're going to be going through over the next four weeks.
Fun?
So this week will be kindness,
Loving-kindness or metta,
And then the following week,
Don't hold this to this order,
But we will also cover karuna,
Which is compassion,
And in Buddhism there's a slight distinction between kindness and compassion.
We'll talk about that.
And then we'll talk about mudita,
Which is sharing in other people's joy.
Who are the people in your life that are happy for you when you're doing well?
Those are people that keep around,
You know?
And then the last one has to do with our steadiness of love,
Steady love,
Upekka or equanimity.
So kindness,
It's that Naomi Shihab Rai poem,
It's like before you can know kindness,
You have,
Before you can really know kindness,
You also have to know sorrow,
Right?
And in the Chinese symbol for metta or kindness,
We recognize the heart at the bottom.
We've seen this heart,
Mind many times and many different symbols,
But at the top is the symbol for abundance.
So an abundant heart,
Heart as wide as the world is a book that Sharon Salzberg wrote.
There's been a lot of psychological research on kindness.
College students,
They did an intervention where they had college students go away to college,
Which is a very difficult time,
And they gave them this assignment.
They gave them 47 different tasks that are acts of kindness that they could engage in.
So things like take notes for another person,
Hold the door for another person,
Pick up some trash on campus,
Offer to give someone a ride.
And they actually randomized these college students to do this for the first two weeks of school as they're transitioning to school.
And what they found was that the students that engage in these just very simple acts of kindness,
Independent of whether or not they were socially related or just being kind,
Like Diane this morning put out our rug and our cushions,
This act of kindness,
It helped them a lot with their transition in terms of their anxiety and their stress and their feeling of belonging.
So we know that giving and being kind is very beneficial to us,
But it's also very difficult sometimes.
I was just on a retreat,
And as soon as I left on that airplane for Costa Rica,
It was like,
I don't know if you experienced this when you were a kid,
But when you went on the roller coaster,
And they say,
You're getting on Colossus at Magic Mountain,
And they say,
Does anyone want to get off the ride?
Raise your hand now.
That was often me on the roller coaster,
And I'd be like,
Ah,
Okay,
Wait for the girl to get off.
But I felt like that on the flight.
I wanted off,
And I wanted to come back.
And part of that has to do with what's going on in our country.
I didn't really feel safe leaving.
I didn't want to leave.
And then part of that was sometimes when you go on retreat,
It's like your running shoes when they get really worn down,
And they're like,
When you're running,
Like life gets really bumpy,
And you need a new pair of shoes,
But you don't really know it yet.
And I was sort of like that,
Like I needed to retreat so much,
But I was so worn that I couldn't even handle the plane ride over.
And I got there,
And I landed in this little airport in Costa Rica called Liberia,
And soon as I got off the plane,
My ride was late,
And I went in to go get water,
Because I knew it would be a long road to the town that we were going to.
So I went into the airport and got water,
And there was Americans in line in front of me,
And they were very like,
Like they had all these bags,
That like all this stuff was falling out,
And they were just kind of being like super obnoxious Americans.
And so I'm in line behind them,
And I was not feeling kind at all towards these people.
And then I get on the road,
I get to the retreat center,
And I get delivered to the front desk,
And then this other bus drives up,
And gets delivered to the front desk,
And it's the Americans,
And I'm like,
Oh no,
Did they see the nasty look on my face?
Right?
And now we're going to be on retreat together for a week.
So kindness,
One of the obstacles to kindness is that we're so in our own self-referential world and story,
And we're checked out of actually what's going on here.
And one of the,
One of the things that can help us with kindness is to see the invisible helpers that are everywhere,
And to become an invisible helper.
Like those college students,
Can I pick up some trash?
Can I be helpful here?
Can I put out the carpet?
Being invisible helpers is a reflection of my own shadow of judgment,
Of categorizing,
Of closing off.
Along the way on this,
On this particular retreat,
There was a lot of,
You know,
Kind things that happened.
And,
And I imagine if you think about your past week or so,
The acts of kindness that you've received,
Or even this morning,
The acts of kindness that you've received.
Giving John a hug,
And he was really warm.
And I said,
Your body is so warm.
And he said,
My body is so warm because I was just in a building down that had the sun coming in,
And I love that building.
So sometimes our invisible helpers are things like the warm sun,
And feeling the kindness of warm sun.
Sometimes invisible helpers are people that are shadow figures for us,
To help us,
To remind us to be kind.
And rather than getting hooked,
They can wake us up to places where we've created our own blocks in our heart to kindness.
So while I was on this retreat,
David White was there reciting poetry,
And he had this poem,
Everything is waiting for you.
The great mistake is to act as if you were alone.
And I think sometimes we struggle with kindness,
Because to be kind is to open up to vulnerability,
Or open up our hearts to each other,
And to see the kindness that is already here,
That's existing.
So the first practice is look for invisible helpers,
And become an invisible helper.
There's visible and invisible helpers.
How can we become invisible helpers?
How can we do these acts of kindness intentionally?
And then the next practice is just the practice of a loving posture,
Because we communicate to each other as humans,
First through our tone of voice,
Through our posture,
That sends that sort of also embodied cognition,
It sends communication from our body to ourselves.
One of the things that we practiced with on retreat with Jon Kabat-Zinn was Tadasana,
And taking a kind stand,
Standing with kindness.
We're going to practice it right now.
Stand up.
This is from,
This is from Kabat-Zinn.
So you can,
The cool thing about this practice of Tadasana is you can do it in the coffee truck,
While you're waiting for your coffee.
You can do it while you're waiting in line to pick up groceries.
And with Tadasana,
We start by just noticing our own stance.
We're standing Tadasana Mountain Pose.
We can take on the breathing in,
I am a mountain,
Breathing out,
I am solid,
And feel our feet on the ground,
And the kindness of this earth to support us.
And then we can align our body so that we can rely on our spine,
This beautiful spine that,
And bone structure.
So if you play with your weight,
Moving forward and moving back a little bit,
Can you find a place where your body is in alignment,
This sort of plumb line from the sky down to your feet,
Where your body feels like it's being supported by its internal structure of bones.
And then a kind stance is also to lift the weight of the world off your shoulders for just a moment and let your shoulders drop down so they don't have to carry so much.
And here's one.
Let your belly go.
You don't have to hold it in.
And then a kind stance is to embody kindness with your face and your eyes.
And then a kind stance would be to open your eyes and see Tadasana Mountain Pose a mountain range of people.
A mountain range,
Right?
A kind stance.
Okay,
You can have a seat.
So Tadasana is a standing meditation,
And it's one of our postures,
A loving posture.
And oftentimes when we're in our threat system,
We don't take a loving posture with each other.
We cross our arms.
We close off.
We're hostile.
Or we're one foot out the door.
You know,
One foot out the door.
Sometimes our hostility is that we just bolt because it's uncomfortable.
And then we can practice kindness through wise speech.
Oftentimes the kindest thing to do is to not say anything at all.
Just to stop.
As opposed to the tendency of the mind,
Which is just to categorize and label and judge and categorize and label and judge.
And then there's these acts of kindness.
So I talked about the college student study,
But there's another study out of the Greater Good Science Center called the Big Joy Project.
And what the Big Joy Project is all about is basically just doing seven minutes a day for seven days of things that bring you joy.
And on that list are seven minutes a day of kind acts.
This will be our homework.
Sometimes we give homework here.
I can't remember what the other one we did.
We did one once that was,
What was it?
Acts of generosity.
Okay,
So this will be kind acts.
Maybe it's similar to generosity,
But we have seven days.
And this one will be seven minutes.
Just like the Big Joy,
We're kind of part of their experimental design,
Where our homework will be to do seven minutes every day,
Acts of kindness.
But it could be acts of kindness for the planet.
It could be acts of kindness for others.
The key is that it's without expectations.
Acts of kindness without expectations.
And the opposite of that,
The obstacles to our acts of kindness is this sort of urgent doing that we can get caught up in.
And the possessive,
I'm doing it so that I get something from you,
Which is different than pure metta.
And thank you to Bengal at Bell and Branch for our music.
This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only,
And it's not meant to be a substitute for mental health treatments.
