A blessing that keeps on blessing
My very first yoga teacher closed each of her classes with a blessing:
May you be filled with loving-kindness.
May you be well.
May you be peaceful and at ease.
May you be happy.
As we said these words together, and then bowed in reverence for their intention, I would find myself feeling blessed and, perhaps more meaningfully, tangibly connected to the people in the studio around me.
Some of these people were complete strangers – brand new to the class as I had once been. Some were familiar faces – “yoga friends” who I smiled at each week as we unrolled our mats and who I missed when they weren’t there. Some had – in the mysterious way of friendship – slipped from “yoga friendships” to real-life friendships that I still treasure two decades later.
Practicing together builds community
What is interesting is that during those moments of blessing at the end of class, I felt just as connected to the strangers in that room as I did to the people I knew. Somehow, an hour spent sharing space, movement, and breath had created connection. Somehow, sharing the intention to turn within and connect with our deepest selves allowed us to sense and to honor the deepest selves of those around us.
Over the years, I have watched with wonder as deep and meaningful connections developed in classes I was teaching. It did not matter whether the room was in the basement of a church or in an exercise room at a corporation or my own yoga studio. When a group of people come together with the intention to take care of themselves, they wind up caring deeply for the people around them.
Like I did myself, many students have marveled to me that such a silent and seemingly individual practice done together could yield true community. For years and years, I have watched and wondered. These days, I find myself content with the mystery that – somehow – our intentions deeply affect the world around us.
Loving-kindness meditation
The blessing my teacher taught me, I’ve since learned, is steeped in tradition. It is a practice that was offered by the Buddha to his students. But it’s even older than that. It is found in the Upanishads, ancient Indian spiritual texts, older even than my beloved practice of yoga. This antiquity is comforting to me. The power of this blessing – its ability to touch us and the world around us – is tried and true.
I imagine the practice as concentric circles of blessing. We start with ourselves – sending ourselves loving-kindness, wellness, peace, ease and happiness. We then expand this circle of blessing to those we feel close to. When we’re ready, we quietly expand the circle to include someone we have a disagreement with or with whom we are struggling. Again, when we feel ready, we expand our circle of blessing to include our community – this could be a school, town, or even a country. Finally, we expand the circle to include all the beings with whom we share this world of ours.
Practice creates the foundation for something to change your real life
As yoga has taught me so well, it is important that we begin working with this blessing in the safety of practice. After all, when we’re practicing something, there is no need to be perfect or even good at it. We’re just practicing!
It doesn’t much matter whether you’re sitting on a meditation cushion or reclining on your sofa or walking through your neighborhood while you practice. It just matters that you practice. Saying the words and thinking the thoughts allows their intention to root into us the way that sharing the blessing in class after class allowed it to root into my classmates and me.
The foundation created by your practice is what allows you to put a loving-kindness intention into action in everyday life. It’s no harder than it was for me to smile at the person I didn’t know as we unrolled our mats together in the yoga studio. It’s no harder than chatting with a fellow booklover at the library. It’s no harder than making those effortless acquaintances that develop when you’re walking your dog.
When your intention is to create connection, it turns out that loving-kindness is easy to enact in the “real world.” And – no – you won’t feel creepy or weird when you do it. You’ll simply feel the warm expansiveness of being part of something much larger than little-old- you.
“There are no strangers here, only friends you haven’t met yet.” – Irish poet, William Butler Yeats
I wrote this essay the day after a bitterly contentious and excruciatingly long election in my country. I awoke with this blessing spinning in my mind and allowed these words – words prayed and chanted by countless people for countless years – to wash through me again and again on a long, quiet walk. They feel rich with meaning and promise as I navigate my longing to feel connected to the world around me as I did to my fellow yogis all those years ago. No matter whether the candidate you cast your ballot for won or lost, maybe these words will help you, too.
Photo by Bill Ecklund