Learning from Goodwill

It’s good to begin your meditation with thoughts of goodwill. Goodwill is a wish for happiness, your happiness and the happiness of everybody else. This is an attitude you can spread all over the world: that you’d like to see people be happy. Now, that doesn’t mean that you think that simply expressing that wish is going to make them happy. Instead, you want to make sure that this is your intention as you deal with other people. Of course, what’s going to make them happy is if they act in skillful ways: if they’re generous, if they’re virtuous, if they have goodwill. That’s going to be the source for their happiness.

So when you encounter people, your attitude should be, “If there’s any way I can help this person be skillful in his or her behavior, then I’m happy to do it.” That changes the dynamic. Instead of thinking about what you can get out of other people, you think about what you can provide.

Now, in some cases, there are people who will not want to engage in generosity, virtue, thoughts of goodwill. This is why we also have to have equanimity as a backup. There are things that are beyond our control in this world, but we wish them well.

When you have this attitude, then it’s a lot easier for the mind to settle down. When you have no ill will toward anybody inside, your mind doesn’t have any thorns or any scars. You sit down and, here in the present moment, there’s nothing to disturb you. If you know you’ve been acting on ill will toward others, it’s hard to sit down and be at peace. You either suffer from the thoughts that you’ve made a mistake or you deny it. We see a lot of this around, people in a lot of denial. When people are in denial, there’s no way they’re going to gain any insight, any insight into their own suffering.

So the easiest thing is to try to be as skillful as possible. And you learn from trying to be skillful in your actions with other people. If you know that your intentions are bad and you act on them, then when the results come out bad, you haven’t learned anything. But if you work with what you think are your best intentions and you find that they’re still not quite good enough, then the question is why? Where can you improve? You do your best and then try to figure out if it’s good enough. If it’s not good enough, then you do better. This is how the mind develops skill.

And it’s based on that attitude of goodwill. You don’t want to cause yourself any harm. You don’t want to cause anybody else any harm. You want people to be skillful in their actions and that includes you. You want yourself to be skillful in your actions. When you have goodwill in this way, then the rest of the practice goes a lot easier.