Goodwill a Good Beginning

When you start meditating, it’s always good to start with thoughts of goodwill. Goodwill is a wish for happiness. You want to spread that thought around so there are no exceptions. You want everybody to be happy.

That doesn’t mean you want them to be happy doing what they’re already doing. After all, some people are doing some very unskillful things. If they are, your wish is: “May they understand that they are making a mistake; may they come to their senses; and may they be willing and able to act on knowledge of what really will give rise to true happiness.” In that way, your goodwill can be non-hypocritical.

Think of anybody out there who’s behaving in very bad ways, and your wish is that they would find happiness through being skillful. That’s a reasonable wish. Now, you may have parts of the mind that say: “I’d like to see that person suffer some first.” But what does that accomplish? It’s provoking an unskillful thought in your own mind. And if they did have to suffer first, a lot of people suffer and yet they don’t see the fact that their suffering is related to their own actions. So it doesn’t necessarily “teach them a lesson,” as we sometimes say.

At the same time, goodwill is good for you. It helps prepare the mind to settle down in concentration with the breath—because of the five hindrances that prevent concentration, three of them are solved by goodwill.

Ill will, of course, is one of them. If you have ill will for someone and you want to see them suffer, you have to realize it doesn’t accomplish anything and that your wishing ill on them is certainly not good for your own mind. So you develop thoughts of goodwill in that case.

Thoughts of restlessness and anxiety—when you start thinking about some of the things you’ve done in the past that have caused trouble, that have caused harm, the Buddha says if you feel a lot of regret over that, the regret is not going to go back and undo the harm. You simply have to recognize that that was a mistake; you don’t want to repeat that mistake ever again. Then you extend thoughts of goodwill: goodwill to yourself so that you don’t beat yourself up; goodwill for the people you’ve wronged; and then goodwill for everyone, as a reminder that you don’t want to repeat that mistake. You want to maintain that goodwill as something solid on which you can base your actions.

Finally, there’s the hindrance of doubt. Here doubt means doubt in the Buddha’s teachings, doubt in your ability to follow them. If you have doubt about the Buddha’s teachings, you want to remind yourself that you know that goodwill is a good thing. So if you have doubts about whatever else the Buddha taught, try to focus on extending thoughts of goodwill to all beings. You realize that that way you’ve got your mind in a good place here in the present moment. If your actions really do depend on your state of mind, and if your future happiness or misery depends on your actions, you’re creating the basis for good actions. So despite your other doubts, you can hold on to something that you know is good. This is why the Buddha recommends goodwill for all beings as a background practice.

Then, when you’ve established goodwill and those hindrances have calmed down, you can focus on the breath. Focus on the breath in a way that feels good coming in, feels good going out. Notice the breath as not just the feeling of the air coming over the nose or the tip of the upper lip, but as the feeling of energy flowing through the body. As you pay attention to that energy, you find that you can get it to fill the whole body with an energy that feels good. This way, the mind has a good place to settle down, a place where it can rest—and a place where it can do its work, because the work of insight is going to be done right here. So you’ve got to get to know this place really, really well and use the quietness of the mind to make yourself more sensitive to what’s actually going on right now.

So goodwill is always a good beginning. It’s the framework for our practice. Think about the Buddha. It’s because he had goodwill for all beings that he taught. If we follow his example and have goodwill for all beings, it creates a good environment both outside and within.