How do I meditate on kindness and gratitude?

by Venerable Thubten Chodron

We begin by focusing on our breath in order to let our mind settle down. Breathe normally and naturally, without forcing your breath. Let your breathing pattern be as it is. Focus your attention either at the nostrils, or at the abdomen. Simply experience the breath as it goes in and out. Be aware of being nourished by the environment, by the breath which connects you to the environment you live in. If distraction arises, don’t follow it. Acknowledge it, be it sound or an intruding thought, but don’t get involved in it, don’t make a story about it. Just recognise something else has come into your field of attention, and then turn your attention back to the breath. Do this for a minute or two to let your mind settle down and become more centred.

To do the meditation on kindness and gratitude, to help us see that we’ve received a lot of benefits from others, we contemplate the benefits or kindness we’ve received from others. When we reflect on the benefits we’ve received, let’s not get hung up on whether or not others had the intention to benefit us. That’s not the issue at this point; here, it is simply the fact that we have received benefits from others regardless of their intentions. The bottom line is that their actions have helped us in one way or another.

Begin by thinking of the benefits and kindness we’ve received from our friends and relatives. The help they’ve given us in moving house, or when we’ve been sick, in encouraging us in our projects, in listening to us when we have something we want to talk over with them. So think of all the various ways that we have been helped and supported by our friends.

As we contemplate this, we don’t want to let the attitude of attachment and clinging arise towards these friends. We don’t want to cling to them because they’ve helped us, but simply to acknowledge the kindness they’ve shown us so that we don’t take them for granted, so that we don’t just expect their kindness and fail to recognise it. Using examples from your own life, really reflect for a few minutes on the kindness that you’ve received from your friends and those who are dear to you.

Our friends encourage us when we’re feeling down. They’re kind in often pointing out our faults to us in caring ways so that we can correct them. They take care of us when we’re ill. They do many small favours for us in our lives. They just make life easier. We’re able to share a lot of things with them. So really appreciate our friends. Let’s not take them for granted. Feel ourselves as the recipients of their care and let our hearts open in a feeling of gratitude and affection towards them.

Then we consider the kindness of strangers. Think about all the people whom we don’t know, without whose efforts, we wouldn’t be able to function or survive. Think of all the people and the animals, all the living creatures that go into growing our food, transforming the food, packaging it and selling it. All the people who work in the mines, at the iron and the steel factories, the truck factories and the automobile factories, to produce the vehicles that we drive, or the vehicles that transport our food to the stores.

Let’s think of all the people who build the roads that we drive on. People who work at the public utilities board so that we have gas, electricity and water, things we take so much for granted. We wouldn’t be able to enjoy these without the work and the efforts of so many people.

Think of the people who work at the telecom companies, the people who work in government offices. Our lives are so intertwined with everybody else’s, not just in our own country and community, but also globally. We’ve received so much from these others. We don’t know the people who built our houses — electricians, carpenters, engineers, construction workers — so many people made our homes and the offices we work in, and constructed the other buildings we use, so let’s open our hearts to feel the connection and gratitude to them for all the work they’ve done. They may not have had us in mind particularly when they did their work, but that’s not important. The bottom line is that they had worked hard, and we’re receiving benefits from them. Yet we don’t even know who they are to be able to thank them.

Think of all the goods we use that have been made in other countries — who are those people who produce the goods? What are their conditions like? What pain and happiness do they have? Then think of how we use the things that they’ve made with so much labour. We don’t even know who they are to be able to say “Thank you.” Yet without their efforts, we wouldn’t have the things that we use in our daily life. There are many, many, many more examples. Just take one object in the room where you are, and trace back how many living beings were involved in its existence, how many living beings we’ve received kindness from. Again let your heart open in a feeling of gratitude and affection for those beings, even though we don’t know them, because they have been kind to us.

And let’s think specifically of the kindness of our family. When we were infants, we couldn’t take care of ourselves. We couldn’t feed and clothe ourselves, or protect ourselves from the elements. Others took care of us. Often our parents are our direct caregivers. Sometimes our parents couldn’t take care of us, so they arranged for other adults to take care of us. They wanted us to stay alive, so they made other arrangements even though they couldn’t look after us personally. And we’ve received benefits from those other adults.

Recall the time we spent as infants — people feeding us, changing our diapers, cuddling us when we cried, the times they’ve had to rescue us when we almost fell off the edge of the bed or choked on something that we’ve stuck into our mouths. Those of you who have children know how much care it takes to look after infants and toddlers, and we’ve been the recipients of that exact same care by the simple fact that we are still alive today. Others had protected us during those times when we couldn’t take care of ourselves.

Our family is also generally involved in our education. They taught us to speak. We often take our ability to speak and communicate for granted, but we don’t have this ability by ourselves. It’s because our family taught us.

Our education or our knowledge came from our family members who taught us, or they had sent us to school and made arrangements for other people to teach us. They had encouraged us to learn. It’s very important to reflect on the kindness of our family or the adults who took care of us when we were young, and also the kindness of our teachers. All our teachers who had thirty or more kids in their class tried to take care of us as best as they could. They didn’t give up on us even though sometimes we acted quite obnoxiously as kids.

It’s important to be able to look into our childhood, at our parents and teachers, and reflect on their kindness, on how difficult it must have been on them sometimes to raise us and to bring us up. As children, we may not have been the easiest people to be with, or the most cooperative living beings. They often had to discipline us, teach us some manners and guide us on how to get along with others. Even though we didn’t like their discipline, somehow we did learn that we have to be sensitive to others’ needs and concerns, we can’t just trample through life not caring how we affect others. So we learn this from our parents, our family and our teachers. And in spite of things that may not have gone well in our childhood, in spite of the various painful experiences we may have had as a child, the fact still remains that we do receive a tremendous amount of benefits from others. So acknowledge receipt of these benefits and kindness, and open our hearts in gratitude and affection in return.

Then let’s think of the benefits we’ve received even from people who have harmed us. In spite of the harm we’ve received from others, we have all grown. It’s because of the harm, those painful episodes in our life that we come out stronger. We were shaken up and challenged out of our complacency. Although it may have been painful and difficult, although we may have felt we weren’t ready for it, still, we grew, we developed our own internal resources. All of that came about due to the people who did us harm and challenged us, the people who put us in difficult situations. So if we can appreciate our own internal strength and resources, then we can also appreciate the people who cause those qualities to develop and feel some gratitude towards them. In other words, people don’t have to wish us well in order for us to benefit from them. We can still feel gratitude and affection no matter how they treated us, regardless of their attitude towards us. Simply by the fact that we did benefit from what they did.

The people who harmed us, who intimidated us, or who we disapprove of, also gave us the opportunity to practise patience. We can’t practise patience with people who’re kind to us. We can only practise patience with people who threatened us, harmed us or who we disapprove of. The development of patience is a very essential quality for spiritual practice. This arises on the basis of the people who have disturbed us. So again, we have received a lot of benefit from those people because without them, we couldn’t develop patience. Without patience, we couldn’t progress spiritually or internally to be of greater benefit. So we can also feel a sense of gratitude towards the people who we don’t get along with very well, or who we mistrust, because they’ve enabled us to practise patience. They’ve enabled us to find internal resources, talents, skills and qualities to cope with difficult situations that we didn’t know we had before.

Let your mind rest in this feeling of affection and gratitude. As that feeling arises, let your mind rest in it, and let your mind become stable in that feeling of gratitude and affection. Keep your mind focused on that feeling without letting it be distracted by other things.

To conclude, dedicate all the positive energy and potential that we’ve accumulated through our meditation to the welfare of each and every living being, including ourselves and all others by sending it out to them mentally.