If you were lucky enough to be amongst the 120 or so meditators that got to enjoy Guru Purnima with my teacher Thom Knoles last Saturday night in Los Angeles, then you can skip this post but for those that weren't, I thought I would share a little from the night.
Asked by a student, "how do we make friends?", in typical Thom fashion, this turned into a beautiful, multi-faceted 15 minute answer that covered so much more than I think the questioner anticipated.
But some of what i took away from it was as follows:
1. Be friendly.
This seems obvious but think about it - how often do we interact with people in front of us and yet, our minds are a million miles away? How frequently are we actually interested in the person in front of us? How many uber rides do we take where we don't even acknowledge the driver?
All interactions are opportunities for us to exhibit our friendliness - not to gather a million friends - but simply because human nature craves company - so we may as well make that company enjoyable.
2. Look for the similarities not the differences in people.
Ok fine, maybe we don't like someone's political views - but maybe we like the same beaches, or burgers or rom coms.
We need to avoid creating "them" and "us." A person with a different political view - that's just another human being with some thoughts that don't align with our thinking.
If we don't agree with their way of thinking, maybe we agree with how they like to make their bed. There are always ways to find common ground and what we pay attention to grows. When we find something we can agree on, we put our attention there and our commonalities can't help but expand.
Needless to say, the reverse is also true. If we put our attention on what is different about each other, this is what grows and all of a sudden, this human being is one of "them." We want to avoid this at all costs.
What is going on right now is very dangerous. Thom called this the “it-ification” of society - where we put people in categories of them and us. Wars don't start when it's man on man - they start when it's them and us.
3. Empathy is key.
Empathy is the ability to feel from within another - to understand what it must be like to be them, have their thoughts, their feelings. When we have empathy, we can't help but love someone because we understand how and why they behave as they do.
Which brings me to the last point.
4. Love everyone.
Everyone is loveable. Maybe they have a lot of stress that makes that loveability hard to find, but it's there.
You may have heard the story about the pearly white teeth but for those that haven't...
Guru Deva was famous for never being able to say a bad word about anyone or anything so one full moon night, when two of his disciples stumbled across a dead dog on the side of the road, full of maggots, smelling horribly, they decided they would put this to the test and have him walk past this dog and see how he would respond.
Sure enough, when he encountered the dog, he couldn't hide the fact that it smelt, but then he looked at them and remarked 'Wow. Look at the way it's pearly white teeth shine in the moonlight."
What we want to do is always look for the pearly white teeth.
There will always be something that we can find that's loveable. And we put our attention there and the recipient of that attention feels us focusing on their "pearly white teeth" and naturally, they feel a surge of positivity. This positivity circulates back to us.
There’s a lot of complaints about the leaders of the world right now but the truth is - our leaders are merely a reflection of the consciousness state of their constituents.
If we want to change our leaders, we need to change the society that they represent.
This change begins with us.
And for us to change, all we need to do is close our eyes for 20 minutes twice a day and practice Vedic Meditation, let the stress unwind and naturally, we become more friendly.
And friendliness leads to happiness.
As Thom said, there's no such thing as a happy terrorist.
Jai Guru Deva
Pictured above - myself with 2 of my best friends and also my partners in the Baseline Happiness Project
https://www.baselinehappiness.com
Which speaking of - we have 2 retreats coming up in October focussed on people in the music industry - and creatives - more info here:
https://www.here-in.world/retreats/industry