Kindfullness is Spiritual Friendship

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Sunday morning meditation and Dharma talk - Tanya Wiser - Kind-fullness is Spiritual friendship. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Tanya Wiser at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 18, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Kindfullness is Spiritual Friendship

Introduction

My topic for today is spiritual friendship. I have to say, I am brimming and overflowing with emotion as I contemplate joy. My heart is so moved. These offerings that have just been announced and are being offered by you—this is the Sangha^[1]. This is spiritual friendship. This is amazing.

I hope you all know how welcome you are here, and that you know each of you belongs here if you want to be here. You get to be fully who you are. I love Gil^[2] as a teacher, and one of his teachings is that you are a member of IMC^[3] if you want to be. If you don't like membership, no problem, you can still come. Whatever works for you; that's how spacious it is.

When you come in the door, you may have noticed a transparent logo on the front door that says, "All are welcome here." A group of us collaborated to create this sign. It was quite a project trying to figure out how to represent everyone being welcomed! The sign includes three hands of different races, colors, and ethnicities together holding a young Bodhi Tree, the tree under which the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment. It takes all of us coming together. It's our heartfulness, our kindfulness, and our mindfulness that create the soil and conditions for all of us to thrive. The sign also includes a rainbow to represent the LGBTQIA2S+ people in our world. We tried to list all the kinds of identities we could think of, and this imagery was the best we could do to show that everyone is welcome.

Kindfulness and the Sangha

As I was nurturing this talk and my reflections on spiritual friendship inside of me, I was thinking about a title for it. First I thought, "Mindfulness is spiritual friendship." Then I thought about "Heartfulness is spiritual friendship." Finally, I remembered that Ajahn Brahm wrote a book called Kindfulness. That was it.

There is a term in Pali, Citta^[4], which represents heart and mind together. Spiritual friendship requires the heart and mind to come together. To be kind, we have to engage our mental capacity to assess a situation and work from wise view, wise intention, and wise action. We need the mind to be engaged. But without the qualities of the heart—the Brahmavihāras^[5] of loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity—we cannot truly connect. So this term, "kindfulness," is where I settled. Kindfulness is spiritual practice, and spiritual friendship is what this Sangha is completely made from.

Everything here started in a small space that allowed a group of maybe ten or twelve people to practice. They brought Gil in to be a teacher, and they rented spaces until the Sangha grew. Eventually, they raised money through Dāna^[6] (generosity) to buy this building, which used to be a church. Everything here is the result of people coming together and working together.

The image I have for the Sangha in this place is a spiderweb. There are so many people doing little bits to create and hold this space. Everything here is hand-to-hand. Traditional organizational charts look fairly linear, but our organizational chart is an absolute spiderweb. Just like a spiderweb is imperfect, we are imperfect. There are places where things fall apart, and then people step in to connect one strand with another. What makes this web strong is loving-kindness. The compassion, joy, and equanimity that practitioners bring to the space light up the web like golden strands. The heart quality moves through the whole structure and makes it absolutely beautiful.

Even if you aren't volunteering, just being here supports my practice. If I didn't have someone I was inspired to share this with, all of this goodness would not be arising in the same way. Your practice and your attendance deeply support my practice.

The Qualities of a Spiritual Friend

I want to invite you to bring to mind a spiritual friend—someone you know, or just someone you know of who has inspired you. What kind of qualities do these spiritual friends have?

(Audience members shout out qualities: Presence. Brave. Non-judgmental. Loving. Kind. Available. Curious. Trust. Consistent. Insightful. Perceptive. Receptive. Honest. Accepting. Caring. Good listener.)

Those are beautiful. I was recently listening to a talk by James Baraz on spiritual friendship, and he mentioned a Nonviolent Communication teacher who said that when it comes to communication, it is the listening that matters the most.

I have a poem to share by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer called Aftermath:

Those seeds you planted in me with your words: all through the night they rooted, grew stems, sprouted leaves. By morning I am in full bloom. My thoughts are a rebellion of petals, a mutiny of beauty where once only shadows spread. All day your words unfold in layers of purple and unruly gold. I like it when people stare. Everywhere I go I share this: the aftermath of your kindness.

These are the seeds, the gifts, and the qualities that have been given to us by our spiritual friends. When they take hold, they bloom in us. What a beautiful aftermath.

Kalyāṇa-Mitta: The Whole of the Spiritual Path

What did the Buddha say about spiritual friendship? He made some very poignant statements. In one sutta, he says that with regard to external factors, he does not envision any other single factor that does so much for a monk in training as admirable friendship.

You may have heard of the famous conversation between Ānanda^[7], the Buddha's attendant, and the Buddha. Ānanda is sitting with the Buddha, likely feeling uplifted by spiritual friendship, and he says, "Lord, I think friendship is half of the spiritual path." The Buddha responds, "No, Ānanda, don't say that. It is all of the path." It is incredibly powerful.

The Pali word for spiritual friendship is Kalyāṇa-mitta^[8]. Kalyāṇa can be translated as spiritual, good, true, virtuous, upright, or beneficial. Mitta shares the same root as Mettā (loving-kindness). It translates to a good friend, a spiritual friend, a virtuous friend.

The Four Good-Hearted Friends

In the Dīgha Nikāya 31^[9], the Buddha gives a teaching about good-hearted friends as advice for lay people. He tells a young man to be aware of four types of good-hearted friends: a helper, one who endures, a mentor, and one who is compassionate.

1. The Helper The Buddha said the helpful friend can be seen as loyal in four ways: they look after you when you are inattentive, they look after your possessions when you are unattended, they are a refuge when you are afraid, and when some business is to be done, they let you have twice what you ask for.

That profoundly hit me—being a refuge when you are afraid. It is a really big thing to be stable enough to hold someone with presence and listen when they are afraid.

Thich Nhat Hanh's^[10] Sangha practices this idea of being a helpful friend through something called "Second Body Sangha." Each participant has two bodies: their own body, and the body of a Sangha member they care for. The care is determined by mutual consent and might entail a weekly phone call or a daily sitting practice. There is no gold star for being a second body; you just act with care for another as you would for yourself.

2. The Enduring Friend The second quality is an enduring friend who remains the same in happy and unhappy times. This friend tells you their secrets, guards your secrets, does not let you down in misfortune, and would even sacrifice their life for you. At IMC, this might look like welcoming someone back no matter what, even if they haven't been coming for a long time. It means being willing to listen to someone's fears, difficulties, or joys over and over again.

3. The Mentor The third quality is the friend who points out what is good for you. They keep you from wrongdoing, support you in doing good, inform you of what you did not know, and point out the path to freedom.

We have formal and informal mentors in our Sangha. A formal mentor might be a teacher. An informal mentor might be the way someone sits during meditation that inspires you, or the way someone demonstrates loving-kindness and compassion. Gil prefers to be thought of as a spiritual friend over a teacher. There is something really deeply connected about that. That's certainly how he became my teacher. I volunteered, showed up, and supported him, and he supported me. I remember the first time I managed an event and rang the closing bell. I hit it so hard that everybody jumped out of their seats! It was so loud. Gil was so kind to me. He brought me over, helped me learn how to hit the bell properly, and just said, "There are no mistakes here."

Thich Nhat Hanh says, "What is most important is to find peace and to share it with others." This is what a spiritual friend does.

Spiritual Friendship is a Training

Spiritual friendship is a training. It is the embodiment of our practice, bringing it out from the inner realm into everything that we do.

In the middle of the Noble Eightfold Path is Sīla, or ethical conduct. This includes wise action, wise speech, and wise livelihood. Wise action entails abstaining from killing living beings, taking what is not given, false speech, harmful sexuality, and intoxicants that cloud the mind and cause heedlessness. By engaging in these wise actions, we are abandoning greed, hatred, and delusion. These are things we do thoughtfully and mindfully.

We also train in the four Brahmavihāras, which are expressions of spiritual love. They are healthy emotional and mental states that arise without craving, aversion, or ego. The way we respond to each other is a reflection of what is active within ourselves. Gil once noted that contrary to the popular idea that "falling in love" is a mysterious process out of our control, the Buddha emphasized cultivating our capacity for love. It is different from sensual desire or affection entangled with the need for reciprocity.

Sometimes, when we hear teachings about letting go and not clinging, people worry it means they shouldn't be attached to their families or partners. No! What we need to abandon is the craving and the clinging, not the love. Letting go means letting go of the expectations, the desire to control, and the demand for something in return. Loving-kindness is the wish for everyone to be happy in their own way, showing respect to the dignity and uniqueness of each person. Christina Feldman wrote that in the cultivation of Mettā, friendship is turned into a verb: actively, intentionally, and consciously befriending all people, all events, and all experiences.

The Elephant and the Rider

Once loving-kindness is established, we can begin to grow our capacity for compassion (Karuṇā). I love Ayya Khema's^[11] teaching on this: "You suffer just like me. And just like you, I suffer." Compassion is the capacity to attune to suffering as a shared commonality, and the wish to support its end.

How we help is important to attend to, which brings us back to kindfulness and bringing the mind into the equation. In Jonathan Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis, he uses the metaphor of an elephant and a rider. Our unconscious, automatic mind is the elephant—it's the biggest part of us. It is brilliant and handles countless routine tasks so the rider (our conscious awareness) can stay present. But if the rider falls asleep, we are on automatic pilot.

All of the conditioning we receive from our family, culture, and society goes deeply into this elephant. Our present moment is constantly informed by our pasts, and most of that conditioning was not chosen by us. It's like the water we are swimming in. Shakil Choudhury, a mindfulness practitioner who wrote Deep Diversity, discusses how we internalize bias, racism, and oppression. How do we bring our practice to this conditioning to free ourselves and each other?

It is incredibly important to be humble, to listen, and to notice. When you look out at someone else and make an assumption, remember that it comes from your own story and your own conditioning. As a white person, there is conditioning that tells me my experience is the norm. I have a practice where, when I catch myself seeing others as "different," I stop and ask: Wait, how am I different? What is my reference point here? What's going on in me?

Thich Nhat Hanh captures this perfectly when talking about compassion. He advises asking if we truly understand the other person, rather than assuming we do: "Sweetheart, do I know you well enough?" Do I know you well enough to assume I can respond compassionately, rather than just projecting my own biases and doing more harm? Our "heart elephant" wants to rescue people, but unless the rider is awake and aware, that elephant can behave like a bull in a china shop.

Muditā: Sympathetic Joy

The third Brahmavihāra is Muditā^[12], which is sympathetic or shared joy. It is feeling happy for someone else's happiness.

Neuroscience teachers like Rick Hanson point out that we often have a tendency to not appreciate or settle into the joy that arises in our lives. If we are disconnected from the joy in our own lives, we are going to miss the joy in others, and we might instead feel envious, resentful, or left out.

We need to take sips of goodness. For example, a friend and I text each other photos if we get outside for early morning light. This morning, I took a picture of the sky, and the clouds looked like confetti. My friend said they looked like stars in the daytime sky. Just taking the picture and sending it helped me connect with joy. When we don't miss the little joys in our own lives, there is much more ease in connecting with the joy of others.

Take the joy in. Thank you for being here, and I deeply appreciate your attention and your practice.