Kindness; Spiritual Progress
Yes, kindness counts. Yes, you should be kind to your neighbors, your co-workers, everybody, even and especially yourself.
When a good friend comes over to spend time with you do you treat them kindly or harshly? I hope you answered kindly. It would be nice, ideal in fact, if we treated everyone who visits us kindly. If you’re like me though, you probably have some work to do.
It is a bit more challenging to treat a stranger to your house kindly, yet if we could we might discover some interesting things. It is the same with our life experiences or the events that occur in our lives. They are like strangers coming into our house unannounced and perhaps without an invitation.
If instead of treating those surprise guests, the events in our lives, as unwelcome guests, if we could treat them kindly we may see opportunities there we never imagined. We may learn something about ourselves, we may learn that we may need to make adjustments in order to experience different results.
Yesterday I talked about curiosity, well if we can open our arms, welcoming life events both good and bad, and treat those events kindly we create space to be curious about what were the causes for the situation. If you befriend your life events you are setting the stage for future growth. If you slam the door on life events then we deny chances to get to know ourselves better.
Every experience is an opportunity to learn an interesting story about ourselves. But the experience will only linger and open up to us if we are kind enough to let the lesson it seeks to teach be taught.
“‘How can I leave the Dharma unexpounded? Listen to me attentively, and think over my words! Now I will expound the Dharma] to you.’ When he had said this, five thousand people among the bhiksus, bhiksunis, upasakas, and upasikas of this congregation rose from their seats, bowed to the Buddha, and retired because they were so sinful and arrogant that they thought that they had already obtained what they had not yet, and that they had already understood what they had not yet. Because of these faults, they did not stay. The World-Honored One kept silence and did not check them.”
Sometimes our experiences try to teach us things we do not want to learn, and so we send the lesson away as an unwelcome guest. Or we may choose to run from the lesson thinking we don’t need to learn it, it doesn’t apply to us it must belong to someone else. Befriending our experiences, treating the kindly, inviting them to stay so we may enrich our lives is also staying present with the Buddha.
