Inclusive Mode

3: Inclusive Mode

Has one subdivisions:

1. Extending Love

1: Extending Love

Meditation six has four subdivisions:

1. Settling into the body and breath

2. Reconnecting with love

3. Including others

4. Releasing

With repeated practice of meditation two, deepening our receptivity to love and compassion, we notice two further things important for our lives with others: (1) When the mind is totally identified with one protective part of ourself, your perception of others is automatically reductive, and our capacities of love and compassion are much impeded. For example, in a moment when the mind is totally identified with a part of yourself that is focused on managing things, others in that moment are reduced just to objects of management. Or if your mind is completely identified with a part of you that is angry at another person, the other is perceived in that moment as only an object of anger—just bad. (2) When the mind unblends from that part of yourself, by holding that part in compassionate awareness (as in meditations two, three, and four above), your perception of others starts to open, so you can sense more of their humanity and potential—e.g. sensing them now not just as objects of management or anger, but as full human beings who have dignity, potential and who wish to be well and happy as you do. With this opening of perception, your capacities of care, love and compassion become less impeded, so you can be more compassionately present to them.

To engage the inclusive mode of meditation six, you begin in the receptive mode with your field of care, and let its healing environment of warmth, acceptance and compassion, which embraces all parts of yourself, extend naturally to others, as if they were all parts of your greater self. We let that help us commune with the others—to sense them as more than our reductive thoughts of them in their deep dignity and worth, and to wish them deeply well. “Communing” here means a preverbal sense of closeness to another, sensing the other as a subject, a full person and life beyond superficial impressions and judgments, possessed of great dignity and capacity in the depth of their being. It is to relate to others as what the philosopher Martin Buber called I-Thou, rather than I-it.

You can begin including others starting with one person or being that you’d like to include in this way. Then you gradually expand to others, as instructed. As the practice becomes familiar through repetition, it can naturally extend itself more and more inclusively, ultimately to all beings. If a part of you has trouble including others, or draws your attention away, just settle back into your field of care, reunite with its healing environment, and become compassionately aware of that part of you with acceptance and warmth. When it settles, you can return to the inclusive practice. If your mind becomes tired or tight at any point, you can take a short break, rest your heart and mind, and begin afresh.

1: Settling into body and breath

Sit in a relaxed way, with back comfortably straight, eyes gazing gently downward. Come down from thinking mind into the body, and settle into the grounded feeling of the body on your seat. (pause) Let the breath flow naturally while breathing from the abdomen, so you feel the belly expand and contract with each breath. Let that feeling draw you into it more and more, breath by breath.

2: Reconnecting with love

Now bring to mind your field of care: your caring moment, or benefactor or spiritual field, and experience it as present here now (not as just a memory). You are being seen and held in deep care, compassion, acceptance and warmth beyond judgements. Relax into this experience, steeping in its loving energies, feeling its tender qualities, and letting them spaciously infuse your whole being and your whole world. (Pause) Accept this loving energy and its qualities into your whole body and mind--every part of you loved in its very being. (Pause). Let any thoughts and feelings that arise be included in this healing environment of loving energies, warmth and acceptance. Let all such thoughts and feelings find their own place in this compassionate space, in their own time, by letting them all be.

3: Including others

Now think of someone dear to you that you’d naturally like to include in this same loving environment, and let them also be included in this field of loving energies, warmth, and acceptance. Let these energies and qualities permeate their whole being. Let this help you commune with them in the depth of their being, in their deep dignity and worth beyond labels, while wishing them deeply well. (Pause)

Now let a few more beings come to mind that you’d also like to include in this field of loving energies and deep acceptance, and let them also be included, along with the first person. Now let this practice expand to include larger circles of beings that come to mind, including them all in this field of loving energies and warmth, sensing them all in the depth of their being, while wishing them deeply well.

Finally, you can let the vast underlying capacity of warmth and compassion from your basic awareness expand much more fully to include all beings, human, animal, all creatures, or imagine this is happening. Let this help you commune with them all in the depth of their being, while wishing them all deeply well.

4: Releasing

After some time, let this loving environment of warmth and acceptance help your mind to relax deeply and release all its frameworks of meditation or concern. Let the mind settle back a bit inwardly and come to rest in the background of its awareness, which is naturally wide open and luminous like a sunlit sky. As thoughts and feelings arise, let them just metabolize themselves and release within this sky-like openness of awareness, by letting everything be.

After you have practiced this meditation repeatedly over many days, if you wish, you can add this further paragraph to the instruction above, just after the second paragraph of step three) above: When the practice expands to include larger circles of beings, you can consciously include in those circles some who feel like strangers to you, or who you are less fond of, and let the loving environment of the meditation help you to commune with them also in the depth of their being, in their basic dignity and capacity beyond labels, and to wish them deeply well. If a part of you has trouble with this, settle back into your field of care, reunite with its healing environment, and become compassionately aware of that part of you with acceptance and warmth. When it settles, you can return to the extending practice.

Processing Meditation Six: Extending love

This practice helps us experience ourselves as an extension of the field of care in which we are held. We hold as we are held, love as we are loved, know as we are known.

By practicing this inclusive meditation in our days, with whoever is around and whoever we become aware of (including the daily news), it becomes increasingly inclusive.

In step three above, if you have difficulty seeing another person as more than a reductive impression (“but she’s just a stranger,” or “just dislikable”), then your mind is identified with a part of you that is only seeing through that narrow lens. Notice that part of you, that sense of self, and settle back into your field of care from step two, letting that part of you and its feelings be included in that compassionate space. When that part begins to feel safer and more at ease, notice your lens on the other person begin to open, so you can sense them in their fuller life and dignity, with more ability to wish them well. This practice introduces a new degree of freedom to choose whether to continue to relate to our reductive impressions of others, or to the actual persons beyond those impressions. We experience what it is like to relate to the dignity and worth of others more than to our own limiting thoughts of them as just “strangers” or “dislikable ones” (or even as just “my friends”).

We familiarize with the practice by doing it each morning in a meditation session (however brief) and then repeatedly reconnecting with it many times throughout the day— noticing whoever is around us, or whoever we think of, communing and wishing well as instructed.

The process of unblending from limiting parts of ourself and reunifying with the openness and clarity of our larger awareness, which further unfolds with repeated practice, helps us sense more possibilities in each situation beyond any one lens upon it, with greater space in the mind for innovation, creative responsiveness, and humor (“skillful means”). We can find greater freedom to take up various roles or parts of ourselves as needed, but now without being so fully identified with them. There is greater space in the mind to be who or what is needed in the situation.

The three modes of SCT meditation bring out a power of love, compassion and awareness that can take us increasingly beyond in-group bias, by cutting through our habits of reductive labeling to extend care more inclusively to others in our days (see Meditation eight for more on this).

Many people in caring roles, service and activism seek a power of care and compassion that can help them avoid empathic distress and compassion fatigue. Empathic distress occurs when we empathize with others who are suffering and our attention turns inward upon ourselves, so we get caught up in the pain of our own empathy. Compassion fatigue occurs when the caring motivation that brought us into our work with others shuts down, often because of repeated experience of empathic distress, secondary trauma or inefficacy in our work. And these difficulties are exacerbated when administrators and co-workers, who are subject to the same difficulties, co-create work environments that feel uncaring, unsupportive or overly demanding. This inclusive mode meditation helps us avoid empathic distress because the outward directedness of its loving energy keeps our caring attention on others, while any part of us that struggles with love for others is embraced in the compassionate healing qualities that are evoked by our field of care. Meditations seven, eight, and nine below further empower our ability to avoid empathic distress. We are inoculated from “compassion fatigue” by learning how to access a replenishing secure base of love, compassion and wisdom in the meditation, and how to reconnect with its energies and qualities often in our days through repeated practice.

Authentic love confirms people in their deep dignity and worth, while also confronting harmful behaviors. Extending love inclusively does not involve accepting anyone’s harmful thoughts or actions. It puts us in touch with their fuller humanity, dignity, and potential. By learning to connect to that dignity and potential in them, we can challenge people’s harmful ways of thinking and acting on behalf of that potential, on their behalf, not just on behalf of others whom their actions may harm.

In daily life: After establishing a strong secure base through much practice of meditations two, four, and/or five, you could take up meditation six, extending love, as a main practice. Do meditation six first thing in the morning, however briefly, and reconnect with it many times throughout the day. To reconnect with it briefly many times daily strengthens the neural pathways that support the capacity to be present to others in this caring way, more sustainably and inclusively.

Pre-blessing your day: When you do the meditation in the morning, you can think of all the places you will go, and all the beings you will be near (even when commuting), and include them all in step three of the morning meditation. Then to arrive at any of those places, in itself, can evoke the practice of communing and wishing them well. It is as if your morning meditation pre- blesses your day, so when you arrive anywhere, you receive its blessing.