The Need for a Caring Heart & First Quieting the Mind

Unless we really want to change and we see that we really need to change in order to improve the quality of our lives, we’re not going to do anything about it. What we always have to work on is overcoming feeling like not doing anything, because that is what is going to prevent us, really, even if we feel motivated, “I just don’t feel like it.” We can see this very clearly with the example of, for instance, going to do physical training. We all know that for our health we need to do exercise, but most of the time we just don’t feel like doing it, do we, despite wanting to do it and understanding that we need to do it.

The way to work with that is to analyze what are the reasons why I don’t feel like doing it? What are the reasons – the emotions – behind why I want to do it? Then you use your discrimination to see, which is more important? What do I want to be under the influence of? Do I want to be under the influence of laziness, which is why I don’t feel like doing it? Or do I want to be under the influence of a state of mind in which I want to improve myself? Which is more important to me? Laziness or wanting to improve?

This is what the great Indian Buddhist master Shantideva was always emphasizing. He’s saying that these disturbing emotions, like laziness, they’re the real enemy. These are the things we have to fight within ourselves, and not be a slave to them. Even if you don’t feel like doing it, do it anyway. Doing it anyway, once you actually get into it, you find that training yourself is really worthwhile. If we’re doing this training in order to improve our relationships with others, especially if we are interacting a lot with others, then the motivation and the drive is much stronger.

If you have a baby, you don’t feel like getting up in the middle of the night to go feed the baby. You don’t feel like getting up at all, but you do it anyway because of the need of the baby. It doesn’t have to be in terms of a baby. If you have a dog, you don’t feel like taking the dog for a walk twice a day, but you need to do it and the dog is really going to complain if you don’t, so just do it. It’s the same thing at work, most of the time we certainly don’t feel like going to work and we certainly don’t feel like doing the work, but you do it anyways.

Then you can experience doing that work either with complaining, either out loud or in your mind, and be completely miserable while doing it, or you could try to get involved with it. See that there is some benefit to doing this, either to yourself or to others, and then you can immerse yourself in it. And after a while it becomes okay and maybe it’s even enjoyable. I have a friend who is very, very fat and doesn’t do exercise, but he has a dog. And even though he doesn’t feel like taking the dog out, that’s his exercise. When he actually is going for the walk with the dog, he understands that he is benefitting from it himself as well, because at least he’s getting some exercise.

We saw that sensitivity training is something that, actually, when we examine ourselves and see, “How do I pay attention to others? How do I respond? How do I pay attention to myself and how do I respond?” we find that there’s a lot of imbalance there and we develop some sort of motivation that, “I really do want to change; I need to change.” And when we do the training in a group, even if it’s a very small group, usually people find that they feel like going much more than if they’re just doing it by themselves at home, because of the social interaction. It shouldn’t just be a social club in which you come together and just gossip and drink tea, that type of thing. But you’re doing something constructive to be of help to each other. It gives more energy to the whole group and to each individual who’s participating.

We then saw in our general overview that any type of training that we do is progressive. This is the case when we learn to play a musical instrument; it’s the case when we train ourselves in a physical type of way. It’s also the case here, when we train ourselves with sensitivity issues. It’s important to understand the structure of how this training works in terms of gradual steps so then we have a little bit more confidence in what we’re doing; we see where it’s going. We see that the issues are paying attention and responding; those are the basic issues.

We see that the foundation for being able to deal with these issues is to quiet our mind, so that we’re not judgmental and we’re open, and to care about others and to care about ourselves. We’re going to follow basic ethical principles and we understand that we are capable of gaining this balance, that we have the abilities. Then we learn how to uncover those abilities, how to access those abilities by understanding the way that the mind works and the emotions work. Then what is preventing us from really using these basic factors that we have effectively is that we have all sorts of projections. We’re not paying attention to the actual situation because we’re just paying attention to our projection and we’re responding to the projection, not to the actual situation. We learn how to deconstruct these projections and get to reality, and then we learn how to cultivate these basic talents of our minds and our emotions to be able to develop balanced sensitivity.

That’s the training, so you see that it is in steps, it makes logical sense and we have some idea of how it’s going and how it will work. When we have that understanding of the structure of what we’re doing, of how we can do it and of what the goal is, then you can put your heart into it.

What I’m explaining are basically the instructions of how to successfully meditate. Meditation is all involved with how to bring about a positive transformation of ourselves, of our personalities and so on. That’s the whole point of meditation.

These basic instructions of knowing what you’re doing, how you do it, how it’s going to work, what are you aiming for – they’re applicable in any type of training, because there are two ways of approaching any type of self-development.

One is based on just faith. “I really don’t know what’s going to be and how it’s going to work, but I have faith and I just do it.” For some people that works, but it’s not very stable because if a teacher, or whatever, turns out to be abusive or they act in some strange ways and so on, you lose all your faith.

But if you approach self-development, whether it’s in a spiritual way or whether it’s just in an ordinary secular way, based on understanding and confidence, then it doesn’t matter whether the person who is leading is a good example of what you’re doing or not, because you’re confident in the method and you know what you’re doing. Of course it’s helpful if the person who is leading is a good example of this, but it’s very hard to find really very inspiring, highly developed people; they’re rare. They exist, but they’re rare. There’s a difference, when you think in terms of therapy, psychotherapy, and a spiritual teacher. A therapist doesn’t need to be a living example of what they’re trying to help you to achieve, a spiritual teacher should be a living example.

But it’s when the spiritual teacher is not a living example that there’s really a problem. It’s very disappointing. Since it’s not so easy to come by a really good living example, we need to place more emphasis on gaining confidence in the method, because this training in balanced sensitivity could be done in the context of a spiritual path, but it could also be done in the context of a therapy.

Now, today we are only able – because we have a short time – to have a taste of what these exercises are like. The one that I’ve chosen is “Developing the Caring Heart,” or “Caring Attitude,” or whatever you want to call it. I think with the current social development that’s going on in the world, with social media and social networks and so on, that the need for the caring heart is getting stronger and stronger.

So much of our interaction with others is now through the media of some sort of technology, rather than person to person. That tends to be very dehumanizing, because people start to become like characters in a virtual reality computer game. At best, you see them on – let’s say Skype, a Skype telephone call – but often you don’t even see them if you’re text messaging or just interacting through Facebook and so on. You just see maybe some photographs from when they’re on holiday.

We judge people by their profile on Facebook and we lock them into that profile and we ourselves get locked into our profile and you don’t really see the person behind that. That’s why this caring heart is so important, because this conditioning that we get from the social media to dehumanize others makes us more and more insensitive in real life as well – real life, meaning not in front of your computer or cell phone.

It’s very interesting to observe a group of people on a bus or on a subway. So many people are lost in their own little worlds with their earphones and they’re playing with their cell phone. Either they’re texting other people or they’re playing computer games. But there’s no real sense that there are other people sitting next to you or sitting in the subway car.

Now we had this phenomenon already, before all this social media and cell phones, in terms of traffic. We’re stuck in traffic and we don’t really consider the people in all these other cars as real human beings with feelings and they’re as uncomfortable and unhappy as we are. So traffic dehumanizes others as well, doesn’t it?

What is the result of this dehumanizing process? The result, the effect of it emotionally, is that we feel more and more isolated and more and more lonely. In order to compensate for that, then we have this tendency now that, “If I tweet, if I put this tiny little message up and broadcast it to the world or put it on my Facebook page, somehow it makes me significant.” We’re very alone, we feel very isolated and somehow broadcasting what I feel will connect me with others. But it doesn’t really, does it? The response that we’re looking for is such an unsatisfying response, which is the number of “likes” that we get on our Facebook page. That’s totally inhuman. It’s not a human response, that’s a mechanical response. It doesn’t mean anything, when you start to really think about, “Does it satisfy me? 100 likes don’t satisfy me; but if it’s 101, it will satisfy me?” It doesn’t work, does it?

This caring heart is so helpful to open us up from our isolation, from our feeling of loneliness to the realization that, “Everybody else is a person, is a human being and has feelings just as I do.” So we’re not alone and we’re open to others and to interaction with others – and not just a business interaction, but an emotional, positive interaction with others.

What is the basic idea here for the caring heart? First we have to quiet down; the caring attitude comes second usually in the process. If we’re distracted, if we’re listening to music or even without the earphones, if music is going on in our heads or mental chatter or things like that, it’s very difficult to develop this caring heart. If we’re not focused, we have so many other things going on in our head. If we’re being judgmental in our interactions with others, or bringing up old history or old stories about people or prejudgments, preconceptions, that also interferes, it’s a problem in developing this caring heart. So we have to quiet all of that down, which actually can be a bit frightening.

If you think about it, all this music that people are listening to and so on is in a sense a shield or a protection, so they don’t have to think. They don’t have to face this situation or face difficulties in life. You just drown it all out with music. The music usually is one that is going to create a certain mood that you want. It could be techno type of stuff, so it gives you a lot of energy, or something like that. Again, we are now relying on some external mechanism to be able to develop any feeling, even. So we are dehumanizing ourselves even further. Here in our training, it’s not that we want to have some music of some caring ballad with some beautiful voice singing, “Love, love, love,” this sort of thing. In order to develop a caring attitude, it needs to come from our heart.

Once we have quieted down, which as I say is frightening because you don’t have that shield up, you don’t have the protection up, then you can start to develop this caring heart. The basis for it is to recognize what absolutely is reality. The reality is, “You are a human being and you have feelings, just as I do. The mood you are in will affect our interaction, just as my mood will affect it.”

You have to reflect on that, is this actual reality? And it is, isn’t it? You’re a human being, I’m a human being. In a real interaction, real life, not virtual interaction, your mood will affect it like my mood will affect it. In virtual reality, if you’re in a bad mood you just shut the machine off, don’t you? But that’s not real life. Your mood doesn’t really get communicated very well, even with an icon of a smiley face, if it’s on the basis of an SMS message which has to be just very cryptic and short, or a tweet, which is 160 characters. The mood, the feelings, are not really essential. All you’re doing is transmitting some basic information. As I say, it’s very frightening, when we’re so used to being behind the shields of our technology, to actually encounter somebody in real life. We may not be experiencing this yet, but we can see that this is the trend that is happening in the world.

Why am I afraid to actually encounter another human being? This becomes a very interesting question. We feel vulnerable or we don’t know what to do. We’ve lost our social skills and so this caring attitude, this caring heart, becomes even more essential to see that there’s nothing to be frightened of. You have feelings, I have feelings, we’re going to affect each other, but the next point here is how I treat you and what I say will further affect your feelings. So now a sense of ethics comes in that we don’t want to make this an unpleasant encounter with another human being; so “cause and effect.”

You’re in a certain mood, I’m in a certain mood. I have to respect that, acknowledge that, but how we interact with each other will affect each other. How I treat you will affect your mood and how you treat me will affect my mood. I care about that. Care (I’m using a Tibetan word, a Sanskrit word actually that I’m translating here) has the connotation of not that I’m worried, but that I take it very seriously.

What do I take seriously? That you’re a human being that has feelings. That how I treat you will affect you, so I take that seriously. And I therefore am concerned about what will be happening in our interaction and how it will affect you and how it will affect me. This word also has the connotation of being careful. “Care” and “being careful” – the two words are related. I’m careful in my interaction with you. That doesn’t mean that I’m stiff, it doesn’t mean that, but careful like you’re walking on a very, very narrow path and you’re concerned not to fall, so you’re careful. That concern and care and being careful work together.

The conclusion that we have here is therefore, “Just as I hope that you will care about me and my feelings in our interaction, I hope that you’ll be like that and not in the middle of our conversation just go off into an SMS or speak on your phone and ignore me. I care about you, I care about your feelings; I take you seriously. I’m actually with a human being, I’m not by myself in front of a computer screen.” Okay, you get the general idea?

Then when we go through this line of reasoning, “You’re a human being and have feelings just as I do,” etc. – through this line of reasoning you would come to a conclusion. In order to generate a state of mind and a feeling, there’s a process. Of course, eventually we don’t need to go through the process and the stages for building it up, we’re just able to always be like that. We just need to remind ourselves and then we generate that state of mind.

But initially it doesn’t come to us so easily, so you work yourself up to having a certain feeling. That’s why I call this a “line of reasoning.” “You’re a human being. You’re a human being and have feelings just as I do. The mood that you’re in will affect our interaction just as my mood will affect it.” So this is a line of reasoning or steps of thinking that will lead us to generate a certain feeling. The conclusion, the state of mind that we’re trying to generate and feeling is, “I care about you, I care about your feelings.”

Then in the instructions on concentration that we find in the great Buddhist meditation texts, we have the following guideline concerning, specifically, mindfulness. Mindfulness is a mental factor that is basically like a mental glue. Nowadays the word “mindfulness” has been taken over by the vipassana and mindfulness movement and there it has a different meaning from its original Sanskrit term, namely just being aware of the breath, situations, body sensations, feelings, etc. That’s a different word, actually, in Sanskrit and Tibetan. Very good, but the terminology tends to get a bit mixed up and you lose some of the precision. The original, actual term for mindfulness is the same word as “remembering.” It means to keep something in your mind. It’s like mental glue. When you are actually focusing on something, it’s the glue that keeps you there so that you don’t forget.

This mental glue is essential when you are trying to gain concentration – that once you generate a state of mind or a feeling, that you don’t lose it. That’s this mental factor of mindfulness. It keeps you glued there so that you don’t lose that feeling or that understanding or that focus, whatever it is that you’re practicing. How do you maintain that mindfulness? This is the guideline that we find from the ancient Buddhist texts and it’s by using keywords.

The texts say that using keywords is not mental wandering; this isn’t starting to go, “Blah, blah, blah,” in your head again. That would be just a distraction, you’re not paying attention. But using keywords is just to help remind you to stay focused. So from time to time you use a keyword to keep that mental glue there when you notice that your mental glue is going and you’ve lost it or it has degenerated again.

First you build up, through a certain line of thinking, to a state of mind. It doesn’t come naturally yet. And then as you try to maintain that state of mind and that understanding: “You’re a human being and have feelings just as I do,” then occasionally you remind yourself with a keyword: “human being,” “you have feelings,” just like that.

If we accustom ourselves to that – which is actually what the word “meditation” means, namely to accustom yourself to build up a positive habit – then in our ordinary life we will remember this. Again, that’s this word “mindfulness.” We will start to actually interact with others on that basis of you’re a human being and have feelings. So we take others seriously and how I treat them, how I speak with them has an effect; it’s not that I’m in some virtual reality computer game. You will have feelings in response to this.

And during that interaction, when we find that we are dehumanizing the other person, use a keyword. If we accustom ourselves to this kind of practice, the keyword will come up if we start to become annoyed with a person and feel: “I can’t be bothered to talk to them and I wish they would go away and leave me alone,” all of this stuff. Use a keyword – “human being,” “feelings.” Remind yourself. This guideline is just so, so helpful if you really understand it and apply it.

For instance, you have a child, you have a baby, and you get really annoyed. It’s crying and complaining and so on, but you remind yourself, it’s a baby. What do I expect? What’s happening is that you’re projecting onto the baby that the baby should be an adult, and that’s ridiculous. You have to remind yourself, that’s this practice of mindfulness by using keywords. It’s a very profound guideline, really.

The keyword can be a phrase, it doesn’t have to be just one word. The first one is from the first preliminary, “I’m not going to make up or tell any stories about you.” In other words, not be judgmental, not complain and criticize you in my head, “Oh you’re so stupid,” and stuff like that. We remind ourselves, especially when we start to go off into judgmental stories about the person in our head while we’re interacting. We could just use the words “quiet down.” Make up your own keywords, whatever helps, whatever works.

Then, “You’re a human being, you have feelings,” so you just say “human beings,” you just say “feelings,” whatever you want to use. Maybe that’s enough, maybe you need to say more, “I care about you; I care about your feelings.” Eventually maybe you need only one word to remind yourself, “human,” “human being.” It’s like for instance to remind yourself of your posture. When you’re with somebody and you have some horrible look on your face and your shoulders are all up at attention and you’re tense and so on, just to remind yourself: “let go,” “posture,” “relax.” I find this very, very helpful actually.

Now we’re getting a little bit off topic, but I find it very helpful during the day when, for instance, I find that the muscles on my face are tense – my forehead is scrunched and my mouth is tight – to just remind myself “relax.” Like this, you relax the muscles of your face. Or if your teeth are very tightly clenched, “relax.” You use a keyword to remind yourself. And you’ll only remember to use the keyword if you have accustomed yourself to this. That’s what meditation is about, thinking about it over and over again.

Concentration is a mental factor that is part of meditation. But concentration can be found in any activity, not just meditation. Meditation is literally to build up a positive habit, a positive habit of the mind and the emotions; we’re not talking about a positive habit of playing a musical instrument or a sport. To build up a habit means to habituate or accustom ourselves to something, and that means through repetition. You generate a certain state of mind, a certain understanding or love or whatever it might be and you do it over and over and over again so it becomes a habit, a natural habit. Or quieting down over and over and over again until that becomes a natural habit, that you’re quiet in your mind.

Concentration is the mental factor that keeps your attention in place when it has been directed to something. It makes your attention stay there. You have that in various levels. It’s just part of how our mind functions. You’re chopping vegetables: you need concentration, otherwise you’re going to chop your finger. That’s not meditation. So whatever we’re doing, we need to be concentrated so that our attention stays focused on what we’re doing. It will vary in strength from very, very little concentration to perfect concentration.

When we’re practicing to develop concentration in meditation, we’re working on basically avoiding two hindrances. One is that your attention flies off to some alluring object so you get distracted: mental wandering. The other one is becoming dull, so you’re not really paying attention, the hold of your attention on the object becomes too loose or can even be lost.

Concentration is absolutely essential in this sensitivity training. You’re talking with somebody or somebody is talking to us, you need to be able to concentrate. You have to continue to pay attention to what they’re saying and not have your mind start to think about something else and wander off, or make comments in your head. You also have to watch out not to become so dull that you’re just sort of spaced out and, “What did you say? I wasn’t paying attention,” You’re not even lost in your thoughts, you’re just dull because you’re bored or whatever.

Another indication of the mental hold being too weak is that you hear the person’s words, but the English expression is that, “It goes in one ear and out the other.” You’re not really giving any meaning to what they’re saying.

The concentration meditations that you have with so-called “mindfulness training” have you focus on the breath. As one of my teachers said, it’s not that you’re training to be a lizard on a rock just sitting there and breathing. But it’s to develop a skill that you will use in your interactions with others, so that you are concentrating and paying attention to the other person, to what they’re feeling, to what they’re saying, to what they’re doing and paying attention to how we ourselves are acting.

Proper meditation has to have concentration. You use it to develop your concentration skills and then you use that concentration in daily life. We all have the basic mental factor of concentration, otherwise you can’t do anything. Animals have concentration when they’re hunting or when they’re digging a hole or whatever; they have concentration. This general mental factor of concentration is one of the basic talents of the mind.

Now getting down to the training, in any particular exercise, we train first with people who are not here because that’s easier emotionally. Then it really is dependent on the culture, whether you first do interacting with others in person and then with yourself, or yourself first and then with others. In some cultures it’s very difficult for people to interact with others, they’re very shy, like Germans. So it’s easier for them to work first with themselves and then with others. Whereas Latin Americans are very open and at ease with others, but it’s much more difficult for them to look at themselves. Training always needs to be adapted to the culture and the individual people in the group.

Considering the current widespread trend of interacting with people via digital devices, I think that the first stage in the exercises, working with people who aren’t present with them, is especially relevant. In this context, it’s extremely important to understand, “You’re a human being, I’m dealing with a human being here; I’m not just dealing with pixels on a screen.” It’s a very interesting question: is this person just pixels on a screen or is this an actual human being? Is there an actual person behind this? This gets us into voidness (emptiness) meditation: are we identifying the person with the pixels on the screen of the SMS or instant message? Is that the person? Who or what is the person? 

It’s essential to realize that when we confuse the person with the pixels on a screen and consider them to be just pixels, then it’s easy to develop the cold-hearted attitude of “who cares about them and their feelings?” If I’m not interested, I can just press the button and turn it off; it’s just pixels.

Let’s work then with these photos of strangers that I’ve pinned up on the board. These are just taken from a magazine. There’s a variety of different people, men and women of different ages and different races. First, we need to be able to look at them without commenting in our head. That’s not so easy. We try to do that looking at just one person at a time, going from one photo to the next. 

Most people find that they make more mental comments about one type of person than another. You might have more comments about the small children, the women, the men, those of a different race or perhaps those you find sexually attractive. Noting this not only reveals a lot about ourselves, but also helps us to understand the type of verbal noise that goes on in our minds.

In order to generate a caring attitude, we need to spend some time first on the foundational practice that needs to precede it, which is “the quiet mind.” If you’re making up story lines about these people in the photos while looking at them, you’re never going to generate a caring heart. The simplest method for quieting down is the letting go method. Just let go of the verbal noise that’s going on in your head. What we do as an aid for that is to make a fist. It doesn’t have to be a very tight one. Then as you release the fist and open your hand, let go as well of your extraneous thoughts. To remind yourself, you can use the keyword “let go.”

Try that for a moment looking at the photos and just quiet your mind, with no judgments, no comments, just be open to the person. Let’s do that for just a few minutes. Start the practice with focusing more on one photo and then if you’re able to quietly look at that person, then focus on another person in the next photo. If your mind is very noisy, you can focus first on your breath to quiet down before starting to look at the photos.

[pause]

Some people find that when they quiet down, they don’t feel very much. That’s why we have the two legs that all the subsequent practices stand on. One leg is the quieting down and the second leg is the caring heart. You can’t just quiet down, because then, exactly, the person becomes totally irrelevant, they’re just pixels. On the other hand, if you try first to develop a caring attitude, you tend to be judgmental and comment about the person. You can’t really develop the caring heart, so you need the two. There’s a balance. It’s very helpful to realize through your own experience in this exercise that just to quiet down is not enough. But it is the basis for then being able to develop some positive feeling.

Sometimes when looking at these photos, we start to feel the same emotion that the person is showing. The same often happens in life. This is the effect of so-called “mirror neurons,” a biological mechanism, so “nothing special.” That’s why when people you’re with are laughing, you laugh; when people are crying, you cry. It is a feeling of empathy, which is okay, but if the other person is depressed and then we just get depressed, that’s not going to be very helpful.

If you recall in the sequence of our training exercises, there was one that dealt with feelings, which is when you’re with somebody who is depressed or very unhappy, you need to feel that unhappiness in order to empathize with it and so not be afraid of it. But if we have already trained ourselves so that we can quiet down and gain access to the deepest level of the quiet mind, then we let that sadness and depression that we feel of the other person quiet down internally in ourselves. Then we’re able to access the natural warmth, understanding and other positive factors of our minds that will allow us to comfort the person. That’s the secret of how you do it. Obviously, to be able to do that requires quite a bit of training, but at least the fact that you feel something when you look at the people in the photos is a very important first step.

But you need to watch out for an extreme imbalance of being oversensitive. If that’s the case, we just get emotionally carried away. If the person is hurt, screaming and in a state panic, then then we also panic and then can’t help them. It’s like, for instance, when you’re with a nervous person, if you also get nervous, it’s going to make the situation worse. You can feel their nervousness, but if you’re well trained, you have the internal ability to calm down any nervousness you might feel, and then your calmness will cause a mirror effect to help calm the other person down. It works.

That’s very different from when you’re with a nervous person and you yourself just don’t feel anything. Not feeling anything, just being a blank, doesn’t help the other person to calm down. If you’re able to access the basic calmness of the mind, together with that will be other helpful qualities, such as warmth, understanding, and affection.

Some people, of course, can affect you more than others. That’s because of the relationship and history that you might have with that person, karmic reasons, there are so many different factors. Not all penguins are the same! It’s usually members of our family that are the most challenging.

In some cultures, it’s rude to be calm while you’re speaking with other persons. For example, with Latin Americans you have to be more emotional. But how to keep the balance between being calm and being emotional when it’s proper? I’m reminded of a type of training that I used to do for a martial arts group in Berlin. It was a group that practiced ninjutsu, which is a very aggressive, fighting type of martial art. What I tried to train the people to do was to be very calm inside, but very strong outside. I had them try to make a very strong gesture or shout “Hah!” while maintaining calm energy inside. That’s the only way to succeed in a martial art: remaining calm inside, while forceful on the outside. But that requires a lot of training and practice. 

As for needing to be emotional with Latin Americans, I also have quite a lot of experience with such people. What I find is that there’s a difference: you have to differentiate between being calm and being stone-faced. Being calm actually helps them; it makes them feel comfortable. When they’re all excited, if you’re calm, but still showing expression in your face, you’re in fact showing emotions – but they’re calm emotions. You’re not all excited the way that they are.

But your emotions have to be sincere. If you’re just pretending and they can sense that you’re pretending, then it becomes really quite unpleasant. And again, the more relaxed you are, the more able you are to generate emotional feelings. This is the art that’s involved: the more relaxed you are, the easier emotions come, the easier for instance that you can cry if you’re somebody that doesn’t usually cry. Plus you’re relaxed; you’re not tense and holding everything bottled up inside you. 

This caring attitude is very important especially with members of our family. They tend to be the ones who can make us the most nervous and the most upset. If we can have a little bit of calmness with them, it will help enormously. And concerning that calmness, we’re just talking on a superficial level here, which nevertheless is not a very easy level: stopping complaining in our heads and calling them bad names, etc. If we can just quiet that down, we might not be emotionally calm, but if we at least stop that, then we can develop this caring attitude. Directing it toward my mother or father or aunt or uncle or whoever it is that really gets on our nerves, we think, “You’re a human being and you have feelings. You want to be happy, you don’t want to be unhappy. You’re just trying your best. What you’re doing to try to make yourself happy might not work, but you’re still a human being. You’re just trying your best like I am.”

In one of the later exercises, where we quiet down on a much deeper level than just quieting the voice in our head, one of the things that we really have to let go of are preconceptions, particularly in terms of what role we expect the other person to play and what role we expect that I’m supposed to play. “You’re supposed to be the mother, you’re supposed to be the father. Mothers and fathers should be like this and like that, but you’re not,” and so that’s very annoying. That’s why people who are in our family annoy us more than strangers or just friends, because we have expectations of the role that we project onto them. That’s something you have to let go of in order to have a real human interaction with the person.