unconditional kindness + the welcoming prayer
Charlie Awbery, one of the founders of the Evolving Ground community, recently recommended to me the book Already Free by Bruce Tift.
Unlike many other authors who write about Buddhism and western psychotherapy, Tift practices in the Vajrayana tradition, a life-affirming rather than renunciative path. In the book, he gives an excellent but simple description of what it means for a path to be life-affirming:
We can practice—in therapy—setting boundaries, working with our self-image, understanding our history. In spiritual work, we can practice returning to our breath, living a decent, respectful lifestyle—but all of those practices tend to be based on an idea that our immediate experiencing is somehow problematic—it's not quite what we want. What we want is in the future...
So, I often invite people to consider these practices, these unconditional practices, as ways to relate directly to their immediate experiencing.
He goes on to give basic instructions for a handful these of "unconditional practices,” my favorite of which is certainly "unconditional kindness":
Unconditional actually means unconditional—we practice kindness toward everything that arises in our awareness. Whether we like it or don't like it, or feel neutral about it. Often, in our culture, my experience is that people doing spiritual practices tend toward clarity more than heart-centered practices. So awareness often is approached through sort of a more mental experience of clarity.
But in my opinion, the practice of unconditional kindness often is much more powerful even than clarity. It has to do with an active, heart-opening attitude toward our experience, where we feel a sense of, "Yes." Not just say yes, but feel a sense of, "Yes." That's much more disturbing for most of us, to feel "Yes" to horrible feelings than just to be aware of them. And even beyond the kindness, it's even more powerful to practice a sense of sweet love, as if we're actually holding what we don't want to feel in this sense of sweetness.
Tift goes on to explain that engaging this practice doesn't make unwanted feelings go away; it just makes it more possible to stay with our immediate experience and not make it a problem, because it's being held or submerged in a feeling of love.
Philosophically, it was exciting for me to read this because it also marks a point of overlap between Vajrayana Buddhism and contemplative Christian practice—there really is some there there—I'm not inventing these connections myself!
The Christian version of this practice is called "The Welcoming Prayer." Pith instructions are to:
pay attention to experience in the present moment
welcome what you are experiencing as an opportunity to consent to divine indwelling, to consent to love coming for you
pray: "I let go of my desire for security, affection and control, and embrace this moment as it is."
Praying this prayer, and also remembering to hold unwanted experiences with as much kindness as I can muster, is helping me greatly to soften toward life. I'm also noticing how many small moments there are in the day when I'm fighting against what's happening in some way—where I want to feel different, look different, or become a slightly different person.
I still believe deeply that it's possible to make positive change in the world, including in my own subjective experience. But to do that, I also believe that I need to fundamentally get on the side of reality and be able to face the world as it is right now. These practices seem to help.
Photo by Juan Salamanca
