Seeing the other: daily life benefits of changing perspectives

I have been slacking on the #lojongchallenge in the last weeks, but it is never too late to get back on the bandwagon. I guess one excuse is that I submitted a few papers: one paper described the effects of Tibetan monastic debate on the participants' brain waves. Another article reviews the very small literature on computational modeling in the context of meditation research, where of course I argue that more people should take this approach. A final paper in which we compare analytical meditation and debate to other contemplative practices will be submitted tomorrow before I head into retreat. I hope to write another couple of blogposts during the retreat, since I think blogging is a wonderful way to reflect.

Picture by Floris van Vugt. Seeing a very small other! (little frog)

Now onto the topic of this blog: the next Lojong slogan, which is: "Sending and taking should be practised alternately. These two should ride the breath." This slogan refers to a Buddhist practice called Tonglen--the exchanging of self and other. The idea in this meditation is that you do exactly the opposite of what you normally do: normally you try to acquire good things for yourself and avoid bad things. In this practice, you instead take other people's suffering, and give away all the good things you have. Now of course that is a bit challenging since it goes so directly against our natural tendencies--even though sometimes it can be quite liberating as well. Nevertheless, you can also start by putting yourself in the other's shoes: realizing that they are another human being that also wants to be happy. This seems to be logical, but if you think about it, you realize that in fact we rarely act that way. More often, we consider others as just some kind of animated things. I have this problem sometimes with my students and other employees: I tend to think about their work from the perspective of my knowledge and skills, instead of thinking about their skill level. As a consequence I then get frustrated because they may not be able to perform the work I ask them to do efficiently. When instead I look for the talents of that individual and try to help them from their perspective, the work proceeds more smoothly and more efficiently--for all of us.

This trick of exchanging yourself with others also works when another person is acting quite annoyingly from your perspective. Usually we then focus on our own annoyance, which gets worse and worse. If instead we focus on the needs of the other person, and think about why they may be acting that way, maybe even feeling some compassion for them, the annoyance decreases quite quickly. So next time this person cuts right in front of you, you can try to imagine how they may be very stressed about an upcoming deadline, instead of focusing on your own anger and frustration. Worth an experiment! (probably more than one...)