The following a a guest post by Jesse Cardin. Jesse is a member of PZI and the practice leader of Living Room Zen, in Santa Barbara CA. This was originally posted on the prodigious PZI talk mailing list which is available to PZI members. I liked it so much I asked Jesse if we could post it here. Enjoy, and if you are in Santa Barbara, stop by to sit with Jesse's group.
---- It turns out that I don't have to like someone to enjoy eating lunch with them. I don't even have to like someone to be their friend. It might be a very satisfying relationship, even if everything they say or do seems wrong. It reminds me of a pattern that I noticed a long time ago, that there is a connection between how I treat myself and how I treat others. As long as I can remember (which is not far, maybe 10 years), I have not been my own biggest fan -- certainly my biggest critic by a long shot. One of the beautiful, functional aspects of meditation is that as I sit with myself for extended periods of time, I am able to stand being around myself for extended periods of time. I consider this compassion for myself. Isn't that nice? And as I grow to allow myself to be itself without judging it, I can allow others to be themselves without judging them. And when I do not judge others...well, I find it much easier to be kind. And the less I am judging, the less I am suffering. And it seems to work the other way as well. Even if I am judging myself and others rather harshly (and suffering!), if I can find a little compassion for someone else it somehow translates into compassion for myself as well. Maybe it's some crazy universal energy thing, or maybe it's just noticing, "oh, well...if I can be nice to someone even though I'm unhappy, maybe I'm not such a lout after all. Maybe there's hope for me." I'm not sure how this all ties in with my little thesis statement at the top, but as for that...in 1914, during World War I, there was a strange happening that no doubt you've heard of: The Christmas Truce. On Christmas Day, 1914, German, French and British troops in the trenches of the Western front stopped being German, French and British troops for a day. Instead of trying to kill each other, they played soccer. Instead of trading bullets, they traded cigars and liquor. It's really neat when I forget that I dislike someone, when all those tired old justifications that I hold so dear drop away. It works like that toward myself, too. Isn't that nice?
4 Comments
Ish
8/8/2010 01:47:43 am
I really enjoyed this. Twice now. So true, that discovery of the relationship of how we greet the world is how we greet ourselves and visa versa. Which then begs the question of how those two differ.
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mike
8/10/2010 02:27:45 am
Sitting alone with ones self teaches compassion for all self.
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Jesse
8/10/2010 02:37:19 pm
Hey Mike...you could just erase my post and put your first sentence up there. Much more concise!
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Author(s)“A Course on Koans” is the delusion-riddled work of Chris Kufu (“Wind in the Void”) Wilson, who began practicing Zen in 1967. He regards Taizan Maezumi, Robert Aitken, and David Weinstein as his root teachers. Each of them pecked at his shell until he “completed” the never-ending koan curriculum of the Harada-Yasutani lineage. Get posts as they are published:
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