Looking After Both of Us

Reflections on Mindful Self-Compassion · No. 2

Encountering my life and encountering you: not losing ourselves in the life we are building, but being present in the very moment that is in front of us. Compassion begins there. And as our heart opens, we may encounter ourselves and others differently.

The Story of Meda

While recently reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness with a Chinese-English practice group, I came across a passage that puzzled me.

He recounts a story from the Buddha about two acrobats: a teacher and his young student, a girl named Meda.

The teacher balances a tall bamboo pole on his head while Meda climbs to the top. Their safety depends entirely on each other. One day the teacher suggests that they should therefore watch each other carefully.

Meda disagrees. Each of them, she says, should look after themselves:

“To look after oneself means to look after both of us.”

And the Buddha says: “The child spoke correctly.”

The Miracle of Mindfulness

Originally, The Miracle of Mindfulness was a long letter to Brother Quang and young social workers in South Vietnam. They were rebuilding villages destroyed by the war, teaching children and providing medical care. Some had been kidnapped or killed.

By 1974, when Thich Nhat Hanh wrote to them from exile, exhaustion and bitterness had become a real danger. And in the midst of this, he reminds them of the importance of looking after themselves.

Following Meda’s story, he continues:

“Only by practicing mindfulness will we not lose ourselves
but acquire a bright joy and peace. Only by practicing mindfulness will we be able to look at everyone else with the open mind and eyes of love.”

Mindfulness

Reading the book with a group of professionals leading busy lives brought Thich Nhat Hanh’s words immediately into the present.

How can we understand them today?

I remember my mother towards the end of her life. My father had already passed away, and she was living in a nursing home. What she missed most was something very simple: to be home again, sitting with my father in their garden, drinking a cup of coffee together.

And I think of this sometimes when I am standing in our own kitchen, preparing food for our children. Cutting some fruit. Smelling its freshness. Talking to one of the children as they pass through. And when I remember my mother, I am also reminded of my own life’s finitude. At times, everything else falls away.

I am simply here, living my life.

And I am happy, in an ordinary moment like this.

But of course, our kitchen is not always like this. There are mornings when someone is late for school, breakfast still needs to be made, and I have my own worries about the day ahead.

Last week, our son was ill. I could hear him shouting upstairs while my wife was helping him. Downstairs in the kitchen, I noticed my irritation. Then I paused. I heard my son crying and remembered what it felt like to be ill myself as a boy.

When he came downstairs, something had changed in me. I asked him how he was feeling and what he would like for breakfast. And when he said he had no appetite, I became worried.

Compassion

When I think back to that moment with my son — how I remembered what it felt like to be ill myself — I saw him differently. Perhaps this is what Thich Nhat Hanh is pointing towards when he speaks of “not losing ourselves” and of looking at another person with “the open mind and eyes of love.”

Contemplating these words today, from the relative peace of my home, I can relate to them. But Thich Nhat Hanh was writing from exile to his brothers and sisters facing war, violence and loss. I wonder what it was like for them to read about looking at another person with “eyes of love.”

I thought of Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman facing the German occupation and terror in the Netherlands.

After a confrontation with a Gestapo officer, she wrote that she was not afraid. Even in this man, she remained aware that she was encountering a human being. And despite all the suffering around her, she could not hate him. A few days earlier, she had noted her reply to a friend who was speaking bitterly about what human beings were doing to one another: “Yes, human beings — but remember that you yourself are one of them.”

She did not reduce the person in front of her to what he represented or what he had done.

He remained a human being, as did she herself.

How was this possible?

In her diaries, Hillesum repeatedly turns towards herself. Each of us, she writes, must “turn inward” and root out the hatred within ourselves. Even the smallest “atom of hatred” we add makes the world more inhospitable.

Perhaps there is a similar movement here to the one Thich Nhat Hanh describes: beginning with ourselves can change how we meet the other.

“…to look after both of us.”

Meda’s words still leave me wondering.

Mindfulness brings us back to the life that is here. We become more present to our own experience. And as our heart opens, we may encounter ourselves and others differently.