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Be grateful to everyone
Feb. 4th, 2025 07:21 amTwo chapters today: one on not blaming people, and one on being grateful to everyone. They have similar themes, though, so I'm focusing on the one on gratitude.
Just the title makes me think of the popular wisdom that you will be a happier person if you spend part of the day thinking about what you're grateful for. I agree that's a good mindfulness practice, especially when you're going through hard times; there are always good things in the midst of bad, and focusing on them can help you be less overwhelmed, but that is not the sort of gratitude Chodron is talking about. "The slogan 'Be grateful to everyone' is about making peace with the aspects of ourselves we have rejected. Through doing that, we also make peace with the people we dislike. More to the point, being around people we dislike is often a catalyst for making friends with ourselves. Thus, "Be grateful to everyone."
"If we were to make a list of people we don't like--people we find obnoxious, threatening, or worthy of contempt--we would find out a lot about those aspects of ourselves that we can't face. If we were to come up with one word about each of the troublemakers in our lives, we would find ourselves with a list of descriptions of our own rejected qualities, which we project onto the outside world. The people who repel us unwittingly show us the aspects of ourselves that we find unacceptable, which otherwise we can't see. In traditional teachings on lojong it is put another way: other people trigger the karma that we haven't worked out. They mirror us and give us the chance to befriend all of that ancient stuff that we carry around like a backpack full of granite boulders."
I find this easy to accept when it comes to people I merely find obnoxious or irritating--rude people on the bus, obnoxious students, people who are wrong on the internet--though even trying to think of examples I realize how insulated my life is. At the moment I can't think of an individual who's really driving me crazy, perhaps because my social circle is so limited. (I am NOT claiming to be beyond irritation! Quite the opposite.) It's just harder to apply these gratitudes to the people I really hate right now: Trump, Musk, that whole cohort, who seem to be deliberately tearing down everything good about the nation. I guess the meditative practice is to try to see the fears that drive them; in the blame chapter Chodron talks about nations at war and the need to "use the tonglen practice to see how you can place the anger or the fear or the loneliness in a cradle of loving-kindness; use tonglen to learn how to be gentle to all that stuff...Experiment with dropping the object of your emotion, doing tonglen and seeing if in fact the intensity of the so-called poison lessens." I have to say I am finding that quite challenging at the moment.
Just the title makes me think of the popular wisdom that you will be a happier person if you spend part of the day thinking about what you're grateful for. I agree that's a good mindfulness practice, especially when you're going through hard times; there are always good things in the midst of bad, and focusing on them can help you be less overwhelmed, but that is not the sort of gratitude Chodron is talking about. "The slogan 'Be grateful to everyone' is about making peace with the aspects of ourselves we have rejected. Through doing that, we also make peace with the people we dislike. More to the point, being around people we dislike is often a catalyst for making friends with ourselves. Thus, "Be grateful to everyone."
"If we were to make a list of people we don't like--people we find obnoxious, threatening, or worthy of contempt--we would find out a lot about those aspects of ourselves that we can't face. If we were to come up with one word about each of the troublemakers in our lives, we would find ourselves with a list of descriptions of our own rejected qualities, which we project onto the outside world. The people who repel us unwittingly show us the aspects of ourselves that we find unacceptable, which otherwise we can't see. In traditional teachings on lojong it is put another way: other people trigger the karma that we haven't worked out. They mirror us and give us the chance to befriend all of that ancient stuff that we carry around like a backpack full of granite boulders."
I find this easy to accept when it comes to people I merely find obnoxious or irritating--rude people on the bus, obnoxious students, people who are wrong on the internet--though even trying to think of examples I realize how insulated my life is. At the moment I can't think of an individual who's really driving me crazy, perhaps because my social circle is so limited. (I am NOT claiming to be beyond irritation! Quite the opposite.) It's just harder to apply these gratitudes to the people I really hate right now: Trump, Musk, that whole cohort, who seem to be deliberately tearing down everything good about the nation. I guess the meditative practice is to try to see the fears that drive them; in the blame chapter Chodron talks about nations at war and the need to "use the tonglen practice to see how you can place the anger or the fear or the loneliness in a cradle of loving-kindness; use tonglen to learn how to be gentle to all that stuff...Experiment with dropping the object of your emotion, doing tonglen and seeing if in fact the intensity of the so-called poison lessens." I have to say I am finding that quite challenging at the moment.
