Cultivating Warm Relationality
Yesterday I was really tired. I recently started coaching my son's soccer team, it’s the third season I’ve done it, its extremely rewarding but it does take some energy, especially when a new team is forming for a new season, kids are coming back to the game, and I’m coming back to this type of coaching. I noticed that my heart was cold, and a little empty. My line of work, innovation coaching, is all about relationships, but I can fall victim to putting practices ahead of relationships; paying too much attention to “more effective ways of doing things” and not enough to first who’s doing them, what’s going on in their lives, and what my relationship is with those people. When my heart gets empty I can become brittle and oversensitive.
But I remembered, there’s a way in Buddhism to fill your own heart up, and warm its cockles. This is a practice called cultivating compassion, and I just found an excellent article that goes deep into different aspects of this practice by Thich Nhat Hanh. I’m recently noticing how I’ve done a lot of mindfulness practice but not as much compassion cultivation practice, and I probably needed the compassion practice more. Mindfulness practice can reveal to us the infinite spaciousness of existence, but on its own can sometimes leave us with a feeling of cold, vacuous spaciousness. Compassion practice can reveal to us the infinite connectedness of existence, and warm our hearts.
But one thing I’ve noticed, as I engage more in this cultivating compassion practice, is that compassion assumes an ego subject who feels the compassion. But actually, everything is imbued with this warm connectedness. So, if we take this practice beyond words, beyond “may I/he/she they be well/happy/free of suffering/progress”, or beneath those words, or before those words, we can meditate wordlessly on the warm relationality of all things. Personally I do this by lying down, with my eyes open, my knees bent and my feet flat (this helps not to fall asleep), and just focus on my heart. Don’t ask it to cultivate compassion. Just see what is there. How does it feel? Does it feel tired? When I observe this tiredness for a while, it will soon transform into warmth. Then I’ll start to notice warm connections to lots of things in my life. Notice the warm connectedness. Then eventually, gravitate towards a sense of unconditional, general, warm relationality. A sense of warm connectedness beyond any specific connection. What I am finding compassion really to be is the intrinsic connectedness of all things, the feeling of mutual warm connectedness and relationality that exists between all things, including but not limited to living beings. Māori friends taught me that all things have mauri(life force); when I went to the breaking of the ground of Takaanini Library and Community Hub, we all were there at 5 in the morning, walking around the interior and running our hands along the walls to feel the mauri of the place.
This warm relationality is a capacity that we all need more or less I think. How might/do you cultivate warm relationality?
