In my previous post ‘Eight verses for training the mind’ I briefly discussed the first verse which focused on cherishing others over cherishing ourselves as being a step toward our own happiness.
This has become a common topic of conversation with many of my clients in the last two months and is well worth revisiting.
The verse says:
With the heartfelt desire and determination to attain enlightenment for the welfare of all living beings, who are more precious than a wish-fulfilling jewel for accomplishing the supreme goal, may I always cherish them and hold them dear.
Cherishing and caring for others is understood from this verse to be the source of all happiness and the reverse of this believe is that cherishing ourselves over others is the source of all suffering and negative conditions in this world. If this is the case then, our quest to attain enlightenment (or happiness) should always be motivated by our heartfelt desire to serve others. If attaining enlightenment is our goal then we must acknowledge that we need others because they become the principle source for our spiritual development and for accomplishing our goal of enlightenment.
As a general rule, we each spend most of our time thinking about ourselves – there is no point in denying this! Even when we believe our thoughts are directed at others they are often transitory and quickly return to us. We may at times believe that we are thinking of the other but in reality we are thinking about how they relate to us, affect us and so on. So if each of us is spending most of our time thinking on ourselves there is very little time being spent thinking about others. ‘But if I am thinking about others and they are thinking about themselves then who is thinking about me?’ I hear you ask… and that is a valid question. My response ‘Do we really need to be thought about constantly?’ “Do we need to be in someone’s thoughts to be validated?” – I will let you decide that for yourselves.
What I have found with my clients is that the application of this principle can have some immediate benefits. When we practice this change in perspective the results are almost instant, so instant that I have coined the term ‘flick the switch’ as a trigger for my clients to redirect their attention to being of service to others in situations where they are focused on cherishing themselves to the point of suffering. For example, when one of my clients received a confronting email accusing him of making loud banging noises in his apartment at 3am in the morning keeping his neighbour awake night after night, he was suitably offended and upset. This cut to his very core of needing to be seen to be someone who ‘does the right thing’ and he felt unjustly accused of doing something that he wasn’t doing since he was well and truly in bed and asleep by this time.
Filled with self-righteousness and frustration that we would all naturally feel at being falsely accused, he vented all the reasons why this email was inappropriate and inaccurate to me one morning over our Skype call. I could have easily counted a few dozen ‘I’s’ and ‘me’s’ in the first few minutes and clearly he was ‘suffering’ as a result of this experience. After a few minutes I commented on how difficult it must be for the neighbour who was being woken up each night and how frustrating it must be not to know how to resolve it. I also wondered to him out aloud whether there was anything he could do to help them get to the bottom of it…. There was silence at the end of the line closely followed by an enthusiastic suggestion of how he could pop next door and see if they needed any help. The suffering seemed to have vanished in the instant that he stopped cherishing himself and started cherishing his neighbour and focusing on how he could be of service. I asked how he felt now, as I could detect a change in his tone and demeanour, there was a loud sound of a penny dropping as he realised what had happened and how the simplest change in his focus had eased him of almost all of his ‘suffering’.
It can be that easy to change things around for ourselves and ease the suffering that is almost always self-created. The change in focus is not designed to mask any emotions we are feeling (I would never suggest that we even begin to hide these or stifle them in any way) but the change in focus is a good test to see how deep or superficial those emotions are with regard to each particular situation. We can easily make each situation about ourselves if it serves us to gather more evidence to support our own stories or we can see them for what they are, in this instance a cry for help from a very tired and frustrated neighbour.
As with everything, there is a balance. There is no benefit in cherishing others to the point of our own neglect or harm…. It is of course essential that we ‘cherish ourselves’ to some degree to ensure that we maintain our wellbeing both from a physical, emotional and mental perspective. Ensuring that we are ‘well’ means that we can bring more of ourselves and our focus to the service of others.
Turning our focus to cherishing and being of service to others may benefit us by experiencing the happiness we seek. So have a go at ‘flicking the switch’ when you next experience some self-created ‘suffering’ and let me know how it works for you.
Until next time
Helen
