Session 6: verses 14 to 17

The question we started with

• How do you usually react to conflict or harm?
• How do you wish you would react?

Teaching notes

Framing: builds on the idea that we are trying to master our emotions, the true source of suffering. All these things trigger anger. Analyzing specific examples of how to unwind that reaction. Non-violent movement through the world. How to interact when non-violence, non-harm, and compassion are your truest values. We must be unafraid of experiencing pain and harm on this path, which will be touched on more explicitly later in the text. These are really hard. How can we make them work for us in our daily life? I notice it is easier when I can expand my own view beyond my own hurt, holding my pain while acknowledging that the other person is reacting from their own pain. Finding compassion for all pain.

Verse 14: When slandered

• Slander helps defeat our pride. If it’s true, it’s good medicine. If it’s not, it’s essentially empty.
• Our reaction to slander betrays our own attachment to reputation: the eight worldly concerns.
• It is not worth perpetuating harm, but may be worth maintaining our innocence.
• His Eminence Garchen Rinpoche: identify yourself as the friend of the slandered and praise the slanderer.
• Feel the discomfort and understand where it comes from and why. Decide for yourself how you want to proceed. How to move compassionately through the issue.

Verse 15: When publicly humiliated

• Our practice is to master our afflictive emotions. When someone triggers them, they give us the opportunity to really face them clearly.
• Avoiding our own faults keeps us trapped in the same patterns. In a way, this person gives us a gift.
• Acknowledge the harm for what it is (feel it) and accept it: personal strategy.
• Don’t perpetuate the cycle.

Verse 16: When betrayed by one you raised

• See the person who is causing harm as a sick person, helplessly overcome by karma and afflictions. It is easy to slide into blame, but if you truly see the person as helpless to their own reaction, compassion can blossom.
• The mother example as the most accessible image of unconditional love and generosity. Though not always the truth, she opens her arms wider when attacked and experiencing harm.
• The sickest need the most care.
• Grounded approach: deal with your own anger and hurt before trying to extend that loving embrace.

Verse 17: When treated with contempt

• Examine your own pride. Were you showing off? (Garchen Rinpoche)

• The Dalai Lama recites a prayer on holding oneself the lowest and literally bows to the person to reverse the mechanism of anger: the Eight Verses for Training the Mind by Geshe Langri Thangpa.

  Whenever I’m in the company of others, I will regard myself as the lowest among all, and from the depths of my heart cherish others as supreme.

• All beings are buddhas in pure view. Also exposing our pride, which is a powerful teaching.

• Pride is really hard to cut through and to see, but easiest when someone we see as below us treats us as less than we think we deserve. Look at the reaction, but keep your judgement. Allow the question: were they right? Or were they cruel? Not so easy to see.

Analytical meditation

Settling

Find a way to sit that you can stay with for a while. Eyes closed, or lowered toward the floor. Take a few slower breaths, then let the breath go back to whatever it does on its own.

We explored three verses today. For our analytical meditation, I’ll read each one, walk through it briefly, and leave you with a question. Let’s try to check each step against our own experience and see whether it matches.

Verse 14

First, verse 14. The verse says that when others slander you, you answer by speaking well of them with a loving mind.

I thought we could explore the idea of how we gossip and tell stories about each other. Let’s see how this common practice of humans impacts us as individuals. Let something come to mind that’s been said about you in your life that stung. It might be true or it might be exaggerated. It doesn’t have to be the most serious thing ever, just words that were said that got back to you and still leave a charge.

pause

Notice what part of it actually stings. Often it isn’t the words. It’s who else heard them, and what they think now. What it might mean about us and our relationships.

pause

And notice what our response is. It’s common to have a correction going in the background, a version of events we’d give if we ever got the chance. A defense of ourselves and our actions. We’re trying our best after all, and everyone deserves a little grace.

pause

The verse asks us to experiment with another approach. It asks us to say something good about the person who’s slandering us, and to imbue the kind words with authenticity and sincerity. So see if you can find one true thing about this person who’s spreading things about you. Not a generous reading of what they did. One real quality they have, that you’d have agreed with before any of this happened. If it’s harder to find a specific person it’s great to just connect with the general idea of people who gossip. For example, people who gossip tend to value community and want people to have information about the people in that community for reasons of safety. These are admirable virtues.

So, let’s see if we can connect with a genuine positive quality of our specific or general person and notice what happens in our mindstream.

quiet, one minute

Verse 15

The verse says that when someone exposes your faults and insults you in front of others, you treat them as a spiritual friend and bow.

This one has a detail in it that’s easy to miss. The verse doesn’t say they lied about us. It says they exposed our faults. They might have had a cruel tone, not taken into account the social context, or had a bad bedside manner. But unlike blatantly untrue gossip this person is pointing to something that stings because there’s truth to it.

Let’s reflect on an ordinary human situation underneath this scenario. Most of us keep some things out of view out of embarrassment and self-preservation. There’s a version of us that goes to work, another one for family, another one for places like this where we do spiritual practice. Let’s try to be gentle about this because it’s one of the main ways people manage to live near each other, and a lot of the hiding we do is meant to be kind or respect someone. But it does mean there’s always something true that could be said about us in front of others that we’d rather not have said.

Let a time come to mind when someone said something about you in front of other people, and it hurt because it’s something you recognized as true.

pause

Let the two halves come apart. There was how they said it, and there was what they said. See if you can hold them separately for a moment. We’re allowed to think the delivery was cruel before we connect with the other part of the equation.

pause

And let’s be gentle here. This isn’t an invitation to go looking for everything that’s wrong with us. One thing is enough, and we can set it down when we finish.

pause

The verse calls this person a spiritual friend, which is a strange thing to call someone who humiliated us. But a spiritual friend is someone who tells us what we can’t see, and nobody else has the bravery (or lack of social graces) to tell us. Maybe hearing about it now and dealing with the pain of it all is preventing some larger consequence in the future? Either way, we’re confronted with a hard truth and the verse wants to help us make the most of that experience.

So the experiment is to bow. Inwardly, in your own time, the way you’d bow to a teacher whose method you didn’t care for. We don’t have to be grateful and we don’t have to decide they were right about everything.

If a specific person is hard to find, it’s fine to connect with the general idea of people who call others out in public. People who do that often can’t stand pretense, and want the group to see clearly, and are willing to pay a social cost to say the thing nobody else will say. Those are real virtues, even when they arrive in a cruel form.

Let’s see what happens in the mindstream when we connect with the underlying virtue of telling the truth.

quiet, one minute

Verse 16

The verse says that when someone you cared for like your own child comes to treat you as an enemy, you love them even more, the way a mother loves her sick child.

Let’s start with the general situation, because it’s so common. Relationships that were once central and fundamental break down. It happens between family, between friends who invested a lot in each other, between mentors and the people they trained. And it usually isn’t pure disrespect and ingratitude. Being helped means being seen in a state we’d rather nobody had seen, and some of us would sooner ditch the relationship than be reminded of how vulnerable we once were.

Let someone come to mind that you once helped, who disappeared. Maybe they went cold. Maybe they see you in a completely different light now. Perhaps you literally don’t relate with them anymore. It doesn’t have to be dramatic; it can be anywhere on the spectrum.

pause

Feel the particular flavor of this one. It isn’t quite the same as the pain in some of the other verses. There’s also often a lack of closure or bewilderment in it, and sometimes a kind of grief that’s hard to name because we don’t learn rituals for this kind of death.

pause

And notice our response. It’s easy to keep a kind of ledger for these kinds of situations. An accounting of all the things we did, itemized, ready to be produced if anyone ever asks. That ledger is fair. We really did do those things. But the verse is asking us to explore the cost of holding on to that list and what it feels like to try something radically different.

pause

The verse hands us an image to work with. A mother whose child is sick. The child is not being reasonable. The child may be saying cruel things to the one person in the world who is trying to help. And the mother doesn’t take the cruelty as the final word about the child, because she can see where it’s all coming from.

So the experiment is to look at this person and wonder what they might be sick with. Fear, maybe. Shame about what they owe us. Something that happened to them that has nothing to do with us at all.

If a specific person doesn’t come, connect with the general idea of people who push help away. Most of them are protecting something, and usually it’s their sense of being someone who can manage on their own, which is not a small thing to lose.

pause

And then, if we can, let our care for them be larger rather than smaller. Not safer. Larger. Let’s see what the mindstream does with that.

quiet, one minute

Turning outward

These three have all been about our own name and our own people. Let’s turn them around once.

Somewhere right now, someone is being talked about. A person a whole room has decided about, or a whole town, or a whole timeline. Let one person or one group settle into mind.

pause

They have a version of the story too, and nobody is asking for it.

Wish for them what you generated for yourself today. To be heard. To not be reduced to some of the most challenging moments of life. Let’s wish it for them, too.

quiet, one minute

Closing

Before we stop, one small thing we can take with us from our analytical meditation today.

The verses tonight used enormous examples. Slander broadcast across a billion worlds, public humiliation, a child who becomes an enemy. The practice mostly happens in much smaller rooms. Group chats. Somebody correcting you in a meeting in a confusing tone. Somebody you’ve helped before who doesn’t want to reciprocate.

Let’s reflect on this throughout the week when we can remember. Is there a conversation coming where your name, or someone else’s, is going to be on the table? Picture it for a second. When it comes, see if you can remember these practices and see what you decide.

pause

We can let it all go now. You can notice the weight of your body in the chair, the sounds in the room, the other people sitting here with you. When you’re ready, ever so gently we can return to the room.

Questions for the week

Choose one or more of these questions to take into the week ahead:

• Which situation do you feel most vulnerable or hurt by? Slander, embarrassment, betrayal, or status and pride?
• Can you bring the associated practice into the week ahead?
• Upon practicing it, how do you feel?
• Does the practice change your perception of the issue at hand in any way?