The power of appreciation

Speaking the truth on a deeper level

Our speech is one of the most important ways we can take into the world the lovingkindness, or metta, that we develop in meditation .

I’ve said already that mindful speech should not only be honest, but should be meant kindly. One of the most effective means of being kind in our speech and of helping others is to express appreciation of them. This is an excellent practice.

We all tend to delete certain perceptions from our consciousness. When we have an enemy, then we’ll tend not to notice anything positive about that person; we just concentrate on what we don’t like.

A tale of blindness

When I was on the four-month retreat on which I was ordained, we had a month-long process of ordinations. One person would be ordained each night, and before the ordination, Suvajra, the retreat leader, would do what we call “rejoicing in merits,” or punya-anumodana.

This is a traditional Buddhist practice of celebrating someone’s good qualities. So every night Suvajra had the task of finding positive things to say about the man who was about to have his ordination ceremony.

There were one or two people on that retreat that I found it hard to like. In fact, to be quite honest, there were things about them that I really disliked. And in those cases I found myself wondering what on earth Suvajra would find to say about those people. He never had the slightest difficulty. Every night, without fail, he would spend up to half an hour celebrating the good qualities of the person to be ordained, even those people in whom I hadn’t noticed such qualities.

And the funny thing was that when he rejoiced in the merits of the one or two people I didn’t get on with and in whom I hadn’t found anything to rejoice in, I recognized that what he was saying was true.

Suvajra would say something complimentary about them and I’d think, yes, that’s true, I had kind of noticed that in an almost subliminal way. Right, he is playful. That’s true, he is always first in the meditation room. Although I hadn’t been prepared to consciously notice that person’s good qualities, I had still perceived those qualities on a dim, not-quite-conscious way.

Suvajra’s rejoicing in merits allowed me to bring those qualities into a more conscious part of my mind so that I could really see that person without the distorting filters and deletions that had kept them in my mind as a shadow of themselves.