We
On loving-kindness meditation, interdependence, and what it means to need help and receive it.
Hello, friend.
We’ve been practicing loving -kindness meditation in my Buddhism class— also called metta meditation. The basic structure goes like this:
You begin with yourself. You wish yourself happiness, health, safety, and ease. Then you bring to mind a benefactor—a parent, a mentor, someone who has supported you—and you wish them the same. Then someone you love deeply; for me, it’s often my daughter. Then someone neutral, someone you barely know; maybe the barista who makes your coffee, the neighbor you recognize by sight but have never spoken to. You wish them happiness, health, safety, and ease.
And then things get hard.
You bring to mind someone who irritates you. A difficult colleague. A public individual whose mannerisms rub you the wrong way. You wish them happiness, health, safety, and ease. You try to mean it. You may or may not succeed. You try anyway.
And if you’re ready for the advanced move, you bring to mind someone you actively dislike. For me, that’s nearly always a politician. You wish them happiness, health, safety, and ease.
In last week’s class, my teacher brought in a teaching from Pema Chödrön that shifted something in me.
After moving through all of those people — yourself, your benefactor, your beloved, the stranger, the irritating one, and the one you dislike if you are doing the advanced move—you imagine them all together. All of you, in the same space. And you make one small grammatical change: instead of wishing each of them well separately, you shift from you to we.
May we have happiness. May we have health. May we have safety. May we live with ease.
That’s it. One word. And it undoes something.
I’ve been thinking about interdependence a lot lately. Not as a philosophical concept but as a lived reality that my body keeps insisting on.
Since my brain surgery, I need help with things I used to do without thinking. I need someone to carry things when my hand is holding my cane. I need Lyft drivers who offer a steadying hand getting in and out of the car. I need neighbors who know what to do when there’s a freeze and I’ve already turned the outside water back on. I need people to get the door.
My first instinct, always, is to say I can do it. And often, technically, I can. But I’ve been learning, slowly, imperfectly, to say yes instead. To let people help me.
Sharon Lukert, in her memoir Until My Memory Fails Me, writes about this as a form of generosity. She’s a retired Buddhist chaplain navigating mild cognitive impairment, and she accepts her husband’s help with a grace I find genuinely inspiring. She frames it not as dependence or defeat but as a gift, to herself, and to him. Letting someone help you gives them something. It lets them feel useful, connected, present. Refusing help, she implies, is a kind of withholding.
I’ve been sitting with that. It’s changed how I think about the days when I have to ask.
The Pema Chödrön teaching takes it further.
The shift from you to we isn’t just grammatical. It dissolves the boundary between the self who is wishing and the others being wished for. Suddenly I am not separate from my benefactor, my beloved, the stranger at the coffee shop, the colleague who drives me up the wall, the politician who makes my skin crawl. We are all in this together, wishing for the same things: to be happy, to be well, to be safe, to move through our days with some measure of ease.
Wow.
I think about what it means to need help and to receive it—to be the one whose cane-holding hand can’t also carry the bag, to be the one who has to ask. In those moments I am not separate from everyone else who has ever needed something they couldn’t provide for themselves. Which is all of us, at some point, in some way. In other words, everyone.
May we have happiness. May we have health. May we have safety. May we live with ease.
The we includes me. It includes you. It includes the person who irritates me and the one I love most and the neighbor I’ve never spoken to and the barista who hands me my coffee without knowing anything about my life, and the politician who erases me with everything they say.
We are all just trying to get through. We all want the same things at the bottom of it.
I find that, on the days I can really feel it, extraordinarily comforting.
The pronoun we reminds me that we are all in this together. Life is hard for all of us. Just as I suffer, you suffer, others suffer. I can relate to it. I know that pain. The pain I feel from losing my husband Tom isn’t exactly the same as the pain his mother feels or his brother feels or his son feels, but it isn’t so different either.
I still struggle mightily wishing well for the politician. I remember that they started out as a child, vulnerable and helpless. Something happened to them at some point that I don’t understand that turned them into whoever they are now.
I remind myself, I’m going for progress, not perfection.
If something here resonates with you, I’d be honored if you shared it with someone who might need it today. Let’s help each other along on this journey. I’m grateful our paths have crossed.
Onward, in hope and solidarity.
Elizabeth
P.S. If this resonated with you and you're carrying something heavy, one of my upcoming journaling classes might be helpful for you. I offer sessions on grief, caregiving, chronic illness and disability, closure, and more, all via Zoom, all pay-what-you-can.You can read descriptions and register here.
Hello fellow Buddhist practitioner. I loved Pema Chodron's shift from you to we!
In our courses and learning circles (of fellow Dharma students) several other approaches to 'difficult people' have come up. One is the practice of exchanging self and other (as described by Shantideva in The Way of the Bodhisattva. Seeing oneself from the perspective of another is most illuminating!
The one that really helped me was the following prayer:
May he/she/they have happiness and the causes of happiness;
May they be free of suffering and the causes of suffering;
May they never be apart from the sublime bliss that is freedom from suffering;
May they remain in a state of equanimity,
Free from attachment and aversion to those near and far.
One can say that prayer for anyone! Just to take one line: if they are free of the causes of suffering (delusion, self-cherishing, anger and other poisons) they would be lovely people. It also helps me see that the causes and conditions of someone being 'difficult' , which frees ME from judgement! I can even say this prayer for POTUS when I catch myself hating.
Elizabeth, this really resonated with me.
The loving-kindness practice seems so simple, and yet when we come to the difficult person, it asks something real of us — to stay present with what’s uncomfortable rather than turn away.
That shift from you to we is powerful. It softens the edges and reminds me, in my work and in life, that beneath everything we share the same longing — to be safe, to be well, to move through life with some ease.
And yes… that part of the practice is hard. But also where it feels most alive.
Thank you for this reflection.