LOVINGKINDNESS

LOVINGKINDNESS

“THE CURIOUS PARADOX IS THAT WHEN I ACCEPT MYSELF JUST AS I AM, THEN I CAN CHANGE.” Carl Rogers

One unhelpful brain highway is the self-critical interstate. If we are not mindful of this highway, it can bring us down and sow feelings of doubt and insecurity within. It is not necessarily our outer life circumstances that determine how we feel about ourselves. It is our own minds. Here are two historical examples of what I mean.

Mahatma Ghandi was a dark skinned East Indian who grew up in the British Empire when racism was rampant. He was treated as an inferior. He was arrested many times for seeking equality and justice. He was imprisoned three or more times and for years at a time. He experienced three assassination attempts prior to the one that killed him. He was hated and abused in his lifetime.

However, let’s hear the words of this man. “A man is but the product of his thoughts; what he thinks he becomes.” Ghandi knew that our mind is very important in determining what we do. If we are not mindful of our unhelpful thoughts and brain highways, they can determine how we feel about ourselves and what we become.

Gandhi said, “Nobody can hurt me without my permission.” He is not talking about his body. He experienced hard labour in prison and 4 attempts were made on his life. He knew he could be killed. What he means is that it is his own mind that determines his personal experience. It is along these lines that he also said, “You can chain me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.”

Ghandi also said, “They cannot take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them.” If we give our self-respect to others, we will live in anxiety and frustration. If we worry about what others think of us, we give them more power to determine our feelings than ourselves. However, if our self-respect is something we hold within ourselves and nourish like a precious garden, then we are holders and caretakers of our self-respect and self-acceptance.

There is another historical example I want to give you today. Victor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist. In 1942, he married. By September of that year, his father, mother, brother, wife as well as himself were sent to concentration camps. They died there. He survived. When he was imprisoned in Auschwitz, he lost his name. He was referred to as number 119,104.

In the concentration camps, the prisoners lived in filth, wore rags and were routinely beaten and whipped. They were severely undernourished. They knew that many people were being sent to the ovens. Every day prisoners died. There were vermin in their overcrowded huts and each day they were insulted and forced into to various degrading situations.

However, in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl says, “…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” 1 He is saying that in the midst of the torturous life in the concentration camp, he could still choose his own attitude.

Frankl writes, "In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp… They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches … " (1963, p. 56). His inner garden was well tended. The outer circumstances of his life were brutal and demeaning, but he was mindful of his rich inner space.

Frankl says, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

When we are mindful, we do not have to let our automatic emotional reactions determine what we do or some one else’s actions. An event happens, mindfulness creates the opportunity to consider a response.

Frankl says, "When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves". This morning we will be listening to a new meditation cd. It is a loving kindness cd. As such, it is a vehicle for planting seeds of loving kindness towards ourselves in the quiet of our own brains.

Buddha said, “The person most deserving of your benevolence is you.”

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Jesus said, “Love your neighbor AS you love yourself”. Our first responsibility is to love ourselves before we attempt to love our neighbor because if we do not have a healthy self-love, we are unable to love others.

Today we will begin the practice of LOVINGKINDNESS. I believe it is one of our most important mindfulness practices and that the harvest from this practice can be immeasurable. Let me cite a recent finding found in TIME magazine.

When experienced meditators practiced mindfulness of compassion, the fMRI showed a greater activation in a brain network liked to empathy and maternal love.

“Also, activity in the the left prefrontal cortex (associated with happiness) swamped activity in the right prefrontal (associated with negative moods). Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison concluded that the positive state (of mind) is a state that can be trained. 2

As we practice loving-kindness, we impact the functioning of the brain. We begin to create a new inner highway of loving-kindness.

1. Frankl, V. E. (1963). (I. Lasch, Trans.) Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. New York: Washington Square Press.

2. TIME: JANUARY 19, 2007 ‘How the brain rewires itself.’