The Spaciousness of Loving Kindness

Albert Einstein said, “The splitting of the atom has changed everything except for how we think.” How we think, how we look at our lives, is all-important, and the degree of love we manifest determines the degree of spaciousness and freedom we can bring to life’s events.

Imagine taking a very small glass of water and putting into it a teaspoon of salt. Because of the small size of the container, the teaspoon of salt is going to have a big impact upon the water.
However, if you approach a much larger body of water, such as a lake, and put into it that same teaspoonful of salt, it will not have the same intensity of impact because of the vastness and openness of the vessel receiving it. Even when the salt remains the same, the spaciousness of the vessel receiving it changes everything. 

We spend a lot of our lives looking for a feeling of safety or protection; we try to alter the amount of salt that comes our way. Ironically, the salt is the very thing that we cannot do anything about, as life changes and offers us repeated ups and downs. Our true work is to create a container so immense that any amount of salt, even a truckload, can come into it without affecting our capacity to receive it. No situation, even an extreme one, then can mandate a particular reaction.

Once I had a meditation student who had been a child in Nazi-occupied Europe. She recounted an instance when she was around ten years old when a German soldier held a gun to her chest — a situation that would readily arouse terror. Yet she related feeling no fear at all, thinking, “You may be able to kill my body, but you can’t kill me.” What a spacious reaction! It is in this way that loving kindness opens the vastness of mind in us, which is ultimately our greatest protection.

Sharon Salzberg
from Loving-Kindness; The Revolutionary Art of Happiness