📿 Tiny Offerings of Love

Whispering loving-kindness into a hurricane of chaos

Every month as part of The Basic Goodness Collective, the online community I lead, the group gathers for an hour to reflect on recent talks, readings and our individual meditation practices. This week we were fortunate to have a dear friend (and The Laundry subscriber!) Sharon Salzberg with us.

To say that I admire Sharon is an understatement. She has single-handedly done more for introducing Buddhism to the West than just about anyone I know. More so, the attitude she takes toward this work is always one of kindness - humbly showing up where invited and offering her full presence. 

The first time I invited her anywhere, I was the leader of a small Buddhist commune at Wesleyan University; I had petitioned the school to give us meditation practitioners our own living space and somehow had actually convinced the administration that it was a good idea. When Sharon received an email from me, a complete stranger with a Buddhist-sounding name, inviting her to sit down with us college kids she immediately said, “Yes.” 

Mind you, this wasn’t me organizing a massive auditorium and showering her with a giant honorarium; it was a few dozen of us on the floor in the Buddhist House common room and our paltry guest budget. And yet she offered her presence whole-heartedly. This session deeply impacted many of us; years later I know several of the people present there that day continue to meditate daily.

Fast forward twenty-plus-years and a few dozen invitations later, I felt honored to host Sharon for our community gathering online this week. To get the ball rolling on our discussion, I asked her which meditation practice she would recommend people focus on these days, in the midst of us emerging from a global pandemic and working with the chaos around us. Unhesitatingly she replied, “Loving-kindness.”

The image that accompanies this week’s piece is one I call, “Moments before disaster.” It depicts a common scene in our household. Often when playing with our baby, Ruby, I will stack cars or blocks one on top of another, creating an offering to her of simple beauty and order in an otherwise messy and chaotic environment. Quickly she will reach over and knock it down.

This is reminiscent of larger endeavors in my life. For example: I build a network of meditation studios throughout New York City. A pandemic ensues and the last thing people want to do is gather in small spaces and breath together. The meditation studios come crashing down like a pile of blocks.

Or a smaller set of offerings: I make a habit, in the small windows available to me when I’m not working or holding a child, to call my friends. Some of them I haven’t talked to in…maybe a year or more. I leave them loving voicemails that disappear into the ether. Often, because they are also busy, I don’t hear back. I make the loving offering and the silence knocks it back down.

Loving-kindness is a phrase you may have heard before. It’s translated from the Pali word metta, which can also be translated as “kind friendliness.” In essence we are saying that the root of love for ourselves and others is kind friendship. A 15 minute guided recording of this practice can be found here. 

In brief, you sit in meditation and bring various types of people to mind (people you like, dislike, don’t know, yourself and more) and make aspirations that they be happy, healthy, safe, and in general free from suffering. I myself frequently offer the aspiration, “May you feel loved” because, while not in the top ten traditional aspirations, I believe that if more people genuinely felt loved they would not act in harmful ways toward others. 

Doing a meditation practice like loving-kindness can, at times, feel as futile as stacking cars for my baby. Every morning I read the news and I meditate. Particularly if the former occurs before the latter, I find that my heart is heavy, having taken the time to bear witness to the suffering of others. To sit down and do a practice like loving-kindness, where we offer aspirations that beings out there suffer less, while sitting in the comfort of our own homes, may seem strange to some. Yet it is a tiny offering, a whisper in a hurricane, saying “May all beings feel loved.”

I believe that tiny offerings of kindness and decency is what the world needs. Over a typical day, for me this might look like holding the door open for someone (especially while I’m running late), scooping the baby up so my wife can do things other than work or childcare, or bringing my full presence to a conversation with a student or friend, so that they feel truly seen and heard. Tiny offerings. Yet at least one of them might make a difference in the chaos of these individual’s lives.