Radiating Kindness
How Compassion feels in your body
A meditation/Dharma talk entitled Radiating Kindness highlighted the 11th annual Global Buddhist Conference in the last weekend of June 2019. Leading was Khenmo Konchog Nyima Drolma of the Vajra Dakini Nunnery.
The focus of the meditation was generating and concentrating on the sensation of compassion/kindness residing within our bodies. This was not an intellectual exercise. We were invited to recall or invent an act of extreme kindness, note where the feeling manifested in our bodies, and “forget the story”.
What does this have to do with relationships?
A friend of mine with whom I work on a large project sent me an email detailing their objections with just about every point in my new proposal. They ended it with the threat to walk away from the project if I did not capitulate to their demands.
My blood boiled! Hitting the reply button with all alacrity, I began dashing off a tirade worthy of Nero. Five minutes into this reply, I paused. I noticed the feeling of compassion was not present in my body. I took conscious breaths. And, as I sat at the keyboard, I slowly recaptured the bodily sensation of compassion growing in my chest.
Returning focus to the keyboard, I deleted my angry point by point rebuttal and replaced it with this: I’m asking for room to breathe and explore before we commit. At this point, that is all I’m asking.
I now realize that I returned to the present and expressed what most mattered to me at that time, letting all extraneous issues go.
Their reply so touched me:
We are having a bit of a dust-up right now.
In the midst of all this, I’ve had a wonderful memory of the night you and I rousted about Portland so many years ago.
Maybe we’ll get a chance to do that again someday.
Mindfulness transforms relationships. How did this transformation take place? I didn’t “do” a damn thing!
Apparently, returning to my center, holding compassion in my heart and expressing my authentic self effected a shift. The tone of the conversation changed without a direct intention to do so.
I will leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions to this tale and perhaps comment below if so moved.
Tim Tapping is a long-time community member of Sakya Monastery of Tibetan Buddhism in Seattle. He is President of the Northwest Dharma Association, a group of over 130 Buddhist communities in the Pacific Northwest and enjoys sponsoring events bringing people together to celebrate diversity in the local Buddhist world. Tim is soon to be a certified Qigong teacher and fuses his Buddhist practice with that ancient Chinese Internal Art. Married with 2 wonderful grown children and a funny dog, he resides in Sammamish, WA.
