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Happy Hour: Goodwill & Gratitude for Everyday Human Connections

Introduction

Right over there, oh I love it! Oh yay, oh you're our neighbor then, I love it. Welcome neighbor, thank you, that is so great.

So we have folks who are new to IMC and folks who are joining from another continent and time zone, like now from Japan. Love it, love it! And of course East Coasters and West Coasters and all around, this is awesome. This is so great. Oh, and hi So Yoon from South Korea! We're definitely very international this morning—I should say, given your time zone, this is terrific. So let's begin.

Thank you, Neil, for posting information about Happy Hour Google Groups. If you are new to Happy Hour, we have a Google Group—a mailing list where information is shared, resources, references, and you can keep in touch with the community as well. At this time I changed the settings so all the chats will only come to the host, but I ask you to keep that channel quiet because it can be quite distracting to receive chats while I teach. I'll open it up afterwards. And last but not least, I turned on recording for the sake of Audio Dharma. Here we go.

Great, hello and welcome everyone. Welcome to this edition of Happy Hour. Lovely to be with you wherever in the world you are joining us from, those of you who are on Zoom or YouTube. I mentioned it earlier, but I'll say it again now: apologies for not having had a Happy Hour last night if you tried to log in on Zoom and were unable to. There was a confusion about the date for our invited guest speaker. So thank you for joining today.

For today's practice, I'd like to invite you to start practicing together, settling with the body, with the breath, and I'll invite us to reflect with some reflections in the meditation. I'll introduce the theme in the meditation itself. Okay, so let's begin.

Guided Meditation

Let's arrive. Let's begin. Arriving, arriving in this moment, in this body.

Letting go, letting go, releasing of whatever has come before. Whatever busyness, planned movement, it's all great, and yet we intentionally relinquish as we enter into the sacred space of our practice. It's like taking our shoes off before entering into the temple. Our proverbial shoes of walking in the world, engagement in the marketplace—take that off. Take our shoes off with humility, we enter into the space, to the temple of our practice with wholeheartedness.

Feeling your feet on the earth, bottom your sit bones on the chair and the cushion, hands on your lap. Connected, well rooted. And connecting with the breath, allowing the kind attention, awareness, to receive the breath in this moment. In-breath and out-breath. Let the breath be soothing, nourishing, comforting, steadying, knowing the breath, the entirety of the breath.

Those thoughts arise, parts for the past and future, it's okay. And we know that we are thinking with kindness, maybe with a smile, noticing that the puppy of the mind has gone off sniffing, playing. Lovingly notice where the puppy is.

After knowing where the puppy is, we release. We invite the puppy to release the bone. Might seem like a juicy bone, thinking about this, figuring it out. Or sometimes it's a dry bone: sadness, self-judgment. Letting go, letting be. Inviting the puppy back to our lap to be with the breath. Comforting, soothing, settling.

To bring the mind to your heart. Just as you are, feeling the breath connected to the body. Now having taken some time to stabilize so we're not leaving the body in the breath, while embodied, bringing to heart, to mind, someone who's a relatively neutral person in your life. You don't know them that well, they are standing for all of humanity. Could be someone at a store, a clerk at a store, a neighbor, a barista at the coffee shop. Someone you've seen but don't have a strong positive or negative experience with.

Of course, sometimes we develop a little bit of liking or slight dislike even with a simple transaction such as buying groceries, but that's okay, as long as you don't have a history with this person, bring them to mind, to your heart. This person, this being. Not like you, just like me, wants to be happy, wants not to suffer.

This person, this being, just like me, has hopes and dreams, aspirations. There are people this person loves or has loved, cares about, cares for—maybe children, maybe parents, friends, loved ones. They may be a caretaker, a caregiver. This being, just like me, is an object of affection of someone. Somebody really cares about this person. They look at this being affectionately, through affectionate eyes.

Just like me, this person has had loss, physical pain, disappointment, sadness. We may have both experienced a loss or pain or illness in a similar way in our lives.

Just like me, this person has hopes and dreams, experienced joy, happiness and laughter, delight. Just like me, they want to be happy.

This perspective of common humanity, wishing them well: May you be well, your fellow human being. May you be happy. These are the short form phrases for metta^[1]: May you be well, may you be happy. Or you can say the four phrases: May you be safe, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you have ease. I'll experiment with the short form tonight.

Hello dear fellow human being, just like me. I wish for myself happiness, may you be happy. May you be well.

Mentioning this being, this being who's alive, breathes just like you, experiences joy and pain just like you. They're not so different from you. Just as you wish yourself well-being, wishing them well-being. My dear sibling in humanity, I wish you well. My fellow sibling in being born, living, and dying as a human being, may you be well, may you be happy.

Knowing to engage with the phrases and engaging with the image, with the felt sense of this fellow human being. May you be happy, may you be well. See how your own heart can feel uplifted through wishing well, sharing your goodwill for someone else. It's uplifting, happy-making to us. Know this for yourself, not my telling you.

And I would invite yourself into a space of metta and see the two of you interacting. It's a neighbor, maybe you're both walking, the person at a grocery store. See yourself interacting, maybe even talking, exchanging kindness at the checkout counter. May we both be well, may we both be happy as we are linked in our interconnection. May we both be well and happy. May our lives flow with ease for both of us. We are not so different in wanting to be happy and not suffer in our basic humanity. May we both be well.

As our lives intersected with you, fellow human being, maybe making me a cup of coffee if you're a barista, or helping me ring up my groceries—thank you. Thank you for your service. May you be well. May we both be well.

Let's return to bring this meditation session to a close. Maybe in your heart connect with this being, with their humanity. Their lives are just as complex and compelling to them as yours is to you. The landscape of their mind, their heart, their lives is just as compelling, rich, filled with ups and downs, as yours is. If you could step into their lives for a moment in your imagination, see you in that interaction you had.

Now from this perspective, receive your kindness, receive your goodwill. If you were them looking out of their eyes into the world unto you, receive the goodwill, the kindness of this fellow human being, this customer whoever it might be, this neighbor. And returning the goodwill, wishing you well, wishing you well.

And now shifting perspectives again, coming back to your own perspective and appreciating this moment in time, this interaction you had with another human being. So many interactions like this throughout our day, we touch each other's lives. Perhaps seemingly mundane interactions, but not so mundane. Can we enrich them with goodwill, with kindness? Enrich them with kindness, with appreciation, with gratitude.

Gratitude for yourself for having showed up for this practice as best as you're able to today. Thank you, me, for showing up for this cultivation. And let us offer, let us share this co-created goodness in our practice with all things everywhere. May all beings everywhere, who just like me want to be happy and not suffer, may all beings everywhere be happy. May all beings everywhere be free, including myself.

Thank you all so much for your practice.

Reflections and Group Sharing

So today we started with the body and the breath to till the soil, to calm the mind, to settle first. Then we turned to practice with what is called a neutral person, someone who's a stand-in for all of humanity. And I invited you to then also shift perspectives at the end, from their perspective, from your perspective, both of you together. And also the appreciation of this person touching your life, perhaps in a moment as they did if there was an interaction, and the sense of gratitude, appreciation for so many such interactions we have with so many beings throughout the day, throughout our lives. And this is one of them, we're interacting with each other right now by showing up in this sangha^[2] in our practice.

So as an invitation for engaging in the breakout groups, the invitation is to explore that, to take that sense of common humanity to take that into the small groups together. We all just want to be happy and not suffer. We all have hopes and dreams and challenges and dukkha^[3] and sufferings and stress. It's the human condition. Can we bring, can we exchange, can we get into the space with that sense? And the invitation is, if you like, you could get into the group just hold presence, hold compassionate silent presence. You don't have to say anything, but it's a sandbox for the way of interacting.

So the invitation is to perhaps say something about how this practice was for you. Maybe there was an aha moment, or not. Maybe it's okay to say, "I was distracted the whole time," that's perfectly fine too, not a problem. No right or wrong, or you can just offer silence. Let's go in reverse alphabetical order and each person has the chance to share maybe just one nugget, not too long, so that other people will have a chance to share. And then you'll go around a few times, just what was this practice like for you.

I'll do a sharing before you go in. There was a lot of happiness and joy and actually a lot of gratitude came up for me. I imagined someone yesterday who was a barista at a coffee shop. I had not met her before so she was new, and then by really bringing her into my practice, there was a sense of gratitude. "Thank you for making that cup of coffee for me, it was really good. Thank you for the time that you spent crafting this decaf cappuccino, lovely, thank you." So that's one of my practice reports to inspire you with yours.

Here we go. I'm going to create the rooms. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other here.

(Breakout rooms session)

We will close in about 30 seconds. We'll wait until everybody is back. We will wait with kindness for all those who are back already from groups and those who are still in the breakout groups. Okay, the rooms are closed now. Everybody's back, welcome back everyone. We have some time for reflections. What aha moments perhaps you had, questions, complaints, realizations. Especially if you haven't shared in a while in the big group, I'd like to invite you to step forward. If you have shared, please step back, make space for those who perhaps haven't been present or raising their hands. Not necessarily calling them shy ones, but evening out the space with invitations.

We haven't heard from you in a while, would love to hear from you. Christine?

"Thank you, Nikki, that was good for me tonight. My group, I wanted to say we sat in silence and that's the first time I'd done that in a breakout room. But even though we didn't speak there was that sense of acceptance and gratitude for each other just sitting there tonight, so I just want to say to both of them thank you from here."

Thank you. Thank you, Christine. That moistens my heart, that makes me feel very tender or actually with tears in my eyes. How sweet to be in this space of sitting in silence with kindness for one another and gratitude. Oh, thank you for sharing that. It just makes me so happy. Thank you.

Amy. Aloha Amy, please.

"Thank you. Yeah, I really liked the practice today of the person we know—yeah, we don't know, it felt slightly less complicated than sometimes some of the other metta practices we can be doing. And that was actually something on theme I've already been playing with where I've been feeling a little bit of tension when I bring up someone that I really do love and care about, just because there's just little touches of unease or like a moment where they said something and I received it icky or things that have been coming up. And I think I realized today that I want to play with forgiveness practices around that. It was like a real nice moment of realization that I need to maybe pause when we're doing this, and if it's not happening, then maybe I can send out, yeah if it feels okay to do so, like make it become a forgiveness practice then. And then I did a little of that and then I was like oh wow, I did lighten. Like I just wanna, I feel a shift, so yeah."

Beautiful, I so appreciate the wisdom of what you just shared Amy. That, oh yeah, I noticed a little bit of, "oh, something didn't quite land right." I love this person and yet ouch, just a little bit of ouch. And what if I turn to forgiveness? Like there's an inner wisdom that says, "oh yeah, that's the medicine that's needed right now," instead of just pushing it away like, "oh, you know you're just being sensitive and it's nothing and oh ouch that went super north right." Oh yeah, and we do that a lot of times. We try to just bulldoze our way through difficulty and yet the inner wisdom, "oh what if I turn to forgiveness? Just forgiveness here, just moisten this tender area and oh yes, beautiful." Oh yeah, there's a clarity, there's a flow, there's like almost as you were describing it's like feel like there's just a little bit of obstruction, and then oh yeah, then there's a flow of metta. Oh yeah, I can now, it flows. Well, that's what was needed. Beautiful, I really appreciate how you describe that.

And one more thing I wanted to highlight is sometimes actually it is easier for the heart to just bring in someone we don't know really well, we don't have a history with, it's easier for the metta to flow. And sometimes actually that's easier for some people as a place to start than the easy person, because there are no easy persons in somebody's life. So I'm just saying this because you brought it up and it's a great opportunity to mention that starting from neutral is great if that works better for some people. So awesome, thank you so much, Amy.

Hugh, please.

"Oh, you're still muted. Okay yeah, thank you Nikki, it was wonderful. In our group we were discussing how as we go through our day we meet people who are nice to us and we send metta to them, and sometimes we meet people who maybe are not so nice or who maybe are jerks and they don't get so much metta. And how that sort of sets us up or in a position where we decide who gets the metta. 'Oh a lot of metta for you, not so much for you, and you, you jerk, no metta for you.' Neil mentioned that he has a right to live in a world where he feels metta for everyone..."

Sorry, I'm interrupting you, but just feel a little bit of tenderness, you know, it's best to let Neil share what he shared himself, if he wants to. But it's okay to say someone in the group said blah blah blah, but not identify who said it. So sorry I'm going to interrupt you and allow Neil if he wants to, to share what he shared in the group. Does that feel okay? Just at the center in terms of boundaries of what was shared in the group, for specifics to stay in the group. But I appreciate what you said Hugh, that was lovely.

That was so profound that, oh gosh, yeah we keep deciding. And in fact, people who are not being very kind probably they're hurting so much. Oh god, because hurt people hurt people. In fact, we're deciding, "oh you don't need metta." In fact, the person who's not being very kind is the person who needs the most metta because they're hurting the most. So yeah, I so appreciate the wisdom of what you brought in. Like yeah, it feels like we're deciding. I'm going to invite Neil if there's anything he wants to add, and anything you want to say about your own observations here, yeah?

"Yeah, that was my offering, and then someone else in the group said that they felt that they have a right, that they deserve to be, they have a right to be in love with everyone and to have a world full of lovers rather than to live in a world with people that are haters or be one themselves, you know."

Beautiful. Oh, thank you. That is so beautiful, yay. Oh, how inspiring! I am so inspired to hear what came up in your group. It sounds like a beautiful, beautiful exchange and reflection you had. And I'm touched equally with the beautiful conversation, equally with the silence, the group that sat together in an appreciative silence. Both are so beautiful. Thank you Hugh, thank you so much for bringing that up. Oh it was so lovely. And Neil I see your hand is up so please.

"You said plenty, all I want to say is Claire has a really cute dog. Right, I have nothing else to add about the group but just wanted to mention that Claire, oh my god."

[Laughter] Oh my goodness Claire. Oh my god yes, your dog is oh my goodness. Very sweet. Thank you for sharing your dog with us.

"She got a bath tonight so, oh that's her, that's her Happy Hour metta dog. Oh my god, she's the best. So cute, thank you. Her name is Dolly, she'll be back."

Neil says she looks extra fluffy. She does, Dolly looks lovely. Thank you all.

Thank you. And a couple of reflections I'll read and then we'll close. Thank you all, your reflections have been so touching and beautiful tonight. Thank you. This one is anonymous: "There was common humanity in my group in terms of the daily confusion that comes with interacting with people." Yeah, yeah. Thank you for sharing that. Of course, and that is a place of common humanity of course. And yeah, one of you feeling joyous and grateful with appreciation to the sangha and the teachings. Yeah, beautiful.

Well, this has been a very rich period of practice. All this has been so enlightening, I just so appreciate your practice, your engagement. Yeah. And I'm gonna sit with especially what came up at the end about, yeah the cute dog too, but also like you know, we make these decisions as we go through life like, you know, this person doesn't deserve nice metta, etc. And what if we choose to just live in a world of lovers, not haters? Because it's really our perspective that makes that possible. So especially if somebody's being unkind or hasty, can we give them an extra dose of metta? Extra, "oh gosh you poor dear, you're really suffering right now aren't you? May you be well, may you be well anyway."

Thank you all, thank you so much for your practice, your engagement. What a beautiful sangha, thank you all. May you all be well, may you be free, and may our practice serve all beings everywhere, including ourselves. Take care.