Living Kindness by Kevin Griffin

Author:Kevin Griffin [Griffin, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2022-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

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One of the ways that we fool ourselves into thinking we are acting skillfully in our intimate relationships is when we are caught by what Buddhism calls “near enemies.” Near enemies are things that look like or seem like other positive qualities, but are actually not useful.

The near enemy of loving-kindness is desire. As I was driven by lust in my twenties, I thought it was based in love. “I love you” often meant, “I’m sexually attracted to you.” That desire leads us to act in a kind and loving way, so it’s masquerading as metta, but what’s behind it, the intention, is to satisfy desire. This can then result in something very different from the expression of metta. When the demands and expectations of desire aren’t satisfied, our so-called love can turn into something ugly: obsession, jealousy, and even hatred. The irony of the lover who murders his beloved is the most tragic outcome of this near enemy, but a great deal of other suffering has come from confusing desire with love.

A near enemy of compassion is pity. Where compassion is “feeling with,” pity doesn’t have the “with,” but keeps us separated from the one who is struggling. Instead of truly caring about someone, we see them as different from us, the one with a problem. In an intimate relationship this undermines the whole sense of connection and can set up a relationship of dependency, as the “well” person takes care of the “suffering” one. This then easily moves into the near enemy of sympathetic joy, codependence.

Codependence is the need for others to be happy in order to feel happy ourselves. This kind of caring neglects the self in order to take care of others. It ignores the first step of metta meditation: cultivating love for oneself. Without this practice for yourself, you can’t actually love others in an authentic way; your love will always be tainted by self-hatred or self-judgment. The love you are expressing is essentially a desire for others to make you feel okay about yourself, a messy equation that says, if I love you enough and take care of you, then you will love me back and make me feel okay about myself. There are many ways that this doesn’t work: first of all, the object of your love will often feel smothered by your efforts to take care of them; second, even if they return your care, the nature of codependence, like addiction, is that it can never be satisfied. This is essentially a kind of love addiction, an insatiable grasping after affection.

So, we can see that codependence is “born from those who are dear.” Not that those who are dear are to blame, but rather that the way we relate to those we love can be codependent.

The near enemy to equanimity is apathy or numbness. We look as if we are peaceful, but we’re actually emotionally shut down. In trying to be detached we can become blinkered to the world. As

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