The Dark Side of Love — The Buddha’s Relationship Advice

The Dark Side of Love, The Buddha's Relationship Advice The Buddha was very mistrustful of love as a source for happiness. He noted that there are many noble things that people can do from love, but also many horrible things they can do. There was a case where a man had lost his son. He goes to the funeral, comes back, and sees the Buddha. The Buddha asks him, Where are you coming from? He says, From my son's funeral, my only son. And the Buddha says, Yes, there's a lot of suffering that comes from those who are dear. And the man said, Well, no, I don't agree with that. There's a lot of happiness that comes from those who are dear. Here was someone who just suffered a loss of that magnitude, and yet he was blind to what had happened. So he goes off and happens to meet up with some gamblers, and he tells them the conversation. The gamblers agree with the man that only happiness comes from love. Word of this gets to the king. This was apparently back in the early days before King Pasenadi had become a follower of the Buddha. But one of his queens, Mallika, had already become a follower. So he said to her, This Buddha of yours has said that those who are dear bring suffering. And she said, Well, if that's what he says, then it must be true. He said, Here you are, just believing everything the teacher says. Get out of my sight. So she has a Brahmin go to see the Buddha and ask him, What did you mean when you said suffering comes from those who are dear? So the Brahmin goes. The Buddha tells him a whole series of stories about people who go crazy because they've lost a husband, lost a wife, lost a child. In one case, a young couple had just gotten married and the parents of the bride were not too happy with the son in law. So they brought the bride back home and were going to give her to somebody else. So the young bride sneaks out of the house, goes to see her husband, tells him what they're planning to do. He can't face the idea of living without her. So he kills her and kills himself with the idea that after they died, they'd be together. A lot of suffering and a lot of very unskillful actions. So the Brahmin goes back and tells the queen what the Buddha said. And instead of repeating exactly what the Buddha said, she goes to the king and starts talking about some of the king's children and his major queen. Are they dear to you? Yes. If anything happened to them, would you be affected by it? He says, It would alter my life. She says, that's what the Buddha meant. The Buddha's relationship advice. We live in the world where there's so much impermanence and we find somebody that we really like, that we love, that we get attached to. And there's a lot of clinging there. The affection is not what the Buddha criticizes. He criticizes the clinging because the clinging is where the suffering is. Clinging basically means that we're feeding off of them. A large part of our happiness depends on them. In that way, they become part of us. So when there's a loss, we feel that a good part of us has been lost as well. Think of all the unskillful things we do out of the concern to maintain a relationship. Fear that we're going to lose someone who's dear to us. There are cases where people will kill and steal and lie and do all kinds of unskillful things in order to maintain a relationship. Yet then the relationship just gets pulled out of their hands. Either one side dies or else the affection dies. But then they're still left with the kama. Kama lasts a lot longer than affection. It can go from one life to many. Many lifetimes down the line. This is one of the reasons why we meditate. To find an alternative source of food so that we don't have to feed off of our relationships. A sense of well-being inside. A sense of being able to control our own happiness. Control our own mind. Because that's what the problem is. The mind is out of control. We go grabbing for whatever we think will make us happy and we end up doing a lot of unskillful things because we hold on to something and we find it slipping from our fingers so we get desperate and we try to hold on even tighter or maybe grasp for something else. Because there's so much dissolution going on, we don't take the time to stop and figure out, well, what should I hold on to? What's skillful to hold on to? We just grab whatever. So we need concentration to give ourselves a more solid basis. Even though the concentration itself is not permanent, still it's a lot steadier than most of our other clingings as the Buddha would call them. That puts us in a better position to regard our relationships with more objectivity. When a young monk ordains, the Buddha says that he should have the same affection for his teacher that he would for his father and the teacher should have the same affection for him that he would for a son. So there's some affection there and it's in the atmosphere of affection and mutual respect that the student grows, but it's important not to turn it into clinging. Back when I was in Thailand, there was a famous monk whose monastery I visited once and he seemed to pay an awful lot of attention to me. I began to get the sense that he wanted me to leave Ajaan Phuong and come and stay at his monastery. I really didn't trust him even though he was highly regarded in general. I got back to the monastery, Ajaan Phuong yelled at me, the woman in the kitchen yelled at me, and I said to myself, ah at least I'm at home where I feel safe. So you want to have relationships where there is affection, there is respect, and there's also the sense that when a relationship ends it doesn't have a lot of ragged ends. In other words, you look back on how you treated the other person and you realize you weren't just feeding off him or her. You offered something. You offered the relationship as a gift. That's when relationships end well. Buddha lists four qualities that he said make a good relationship, and they make the relationship good while you're having it, and also when you look back on it after it's over. There's not a lot of regret. You left the other person with something good basically to pay for whatever amount of feeding you did off the person. The first quality is generosity, giving of things, giving of your time, giving your knowledge, giving of your forgiveness, so that you're not totally on the receiving end. The second quality is kind words. This doesn't mean speaking sweetly all the time. There will be times when you have to make criticisms, but you try to do it in a way that's timely and beneficial. In other words, it's something that's actually helpful to the other person. You're criticizing them for something that they can change. At the same time, you try to find the right time and place to make the criticism. The Buddha says there are actually times when it's advisable to say something that's not pleasing to the other person, but if you're showing respect for the other person by, say, taking the other person aside, showing that you don't have contempt for the other person, then when you look back on your words that you've shared with the other person, there's no reason for self-recrimination. The third quality is genuine helpfulness. In other words, when you give a gift, it's not simply for the sake of showing off or making points. You actually try to figure out what would be good for this person, what would be helpful. You help that person in his or her genuine aims and offer encouragement in ways that will be for that person's long-term welfare and happiness. And finally, consistency. The way you were at the beginning of the relationship, if you treated the person fairly, you want to stay at least that fair-minded all the way through. If you're not quite yet fair, try to become fair-minded and say that way, especially be very careful about how you talk about that person behind his or her back. The things you say behind the person's back should be at least as good as the things you say to that person's face. When I was with a John Fong, he very rarely praised me for anything. It wasn't until after he died that I found out that he'd been praising me to other people, which, of course, meant a lot more. I realized that he wasn't doing it to gain favor. When he did die, I remember seeing some of his students crying, and I realized I didn't have any sense of regret. There was a sense of lacking something valuable, but the sorrow that comes from having said or done something unskillful was not there. I always felt that everything he'd done was in my best interests, and I'd always tried to respond in kind. When the inevitable end came, it came with a minimum of regret. So as you think about your relationships, you remember, if you try to make all your happiness dependent on the other person, that's placing too big a weight on the other person. You want to be responsible for your happiness inside. This is why we meditate. When you're feeding well inside, the relationship's not so much one of feeding. You want to make it a relationship where you're giving a gift. Because as we go through this lifetime, the Buddha said, it's very hard to meet somebody who hasn't already been our mother or father or brother or sister or daughter or son at some time in this long, long time. So you reflect on that. The main feature of relationships is that they end. So keeping in mind the fact that the relationship will end, what do you want to be able to look back on? Not so much the good times you had together, but the good things you did for the other person. Those feel really good. As the Buddha said, if you have a really good relationship that you want to continue in the next lifetime, make sure that you both observe the precepts together. Of course, there are times when the relationship is okay, but you don't particularly want it to last beyond death. Even then, you observe the precepts so that when the relationship ends, it ends well. Kama outlasts affection. It outlasts relationships. So train the mind so that your relationships don't get in the way of good kama, but can actually foster it. That way, the relationships are good while they last and also good in retrospect when they end. Caring without clinging. Several years back, about a year after I returned to America, I was teaching meditation to a group up in Orange County and I gave my first interviews. One of the people in the retreat started her interview out by saying, Buddhism, it's all about love, isn't it? I was taken aback. I said, well, no, it's all about freedom. She was taken aback. We come from a culture in which love is very highly valued, not only as a social virtue, but also as a religious one. So it's a little shocking when we come to another tradition where it's not valued so highly. The Buddha talks about dispassion, disenchantment, equanimity, and to us, it sounds cold. But everything in the Buddha's teachings is put in the service of freedom. As the Buddha once said, all of his teachings have a single taste, the taste of release. This means that all of his teachings on goodwill on the one hand, and equanimity, dispassion, disenchantment on the other, are all put in the service of freedom, realizing on the one hand that we have a certain freedom of choice in our actions right now, and that if we learn how to exercise that freedom skillfully, we can come to an ultimate freedom, total freedom, with no limits on the mind whatsoever. It's good to keep that in mind as we think about the Buddha's teachings on equanimity and dispassion. He's not teaching people simply to be uncaring. He's asking us to look in what ways are we slaves to the idea of love, or the enjoyment of the emotion of love, or the enjoyment of happiness, or the enjoyment of sorrow. We do enjoy these things, the ups and downs, although when we take the downs, we often console ourselves by saying, well if we didn't have the downs, we wouldn't have the ups, which is true. But the Buddha calls our values into question. Might there be something better than those ups? After all, what are we getting out of them? When he calls for equanimity as a skill in the practice, is he saying that we should have no emotions at all? Or is he talking about our relationship to happiness and sadness as they come? The answer is the second alternative. There are things that we like, things that we don't like. Even the Buddha, there were things he liked and things he didn't like. But he learned how to keep his mind from being overwhelmed by them. When people would come to study with him, some of them would listen to him, but they wouldn't follow through with his teaching, and they didn't get the results. Of course he didn't like that. But he said he established mindfulness so that his mind was not overtaken by his sense of dissatisfaction. When the students did follow his teachings and did gain awakening, it's not that he didn't like that. He did like it, but he didn't allow the sense of satisfaction to overcome his mind. What this means is that the mind has to learn how to look at these things and not get sucked into them. This is another one of those issues around becoming. In fact, the Pali word for emotion, bhava, is like bhava. Bhava means becoming. You make it bhava with a long a, and it becomes emotion. We like to get into the emotion. We like to taste it. But then we become slaves to it. We get addicted to the taste. We want to taste it again and again. We like getting wrapped up in it without realizing that we've just allowed ourselves to become enslaved to these things and have placed limitations on ourselves. So it's not that the Buddha asks us not to have feelings, but he tells us to learn how to be free in the midst of these emotions. Learn how to observe them, step back from them, and don't get deluded by them. It's easy to get swayed by something when we're happy. We pick up all sorts of deluded ideas from it. What you want to be able to do is learn how to observe. This is where his analysis of equanimity is important. He says there's equanimity that's based on multiplicity and equanimity based on singleness. The equanimity based on multiplicity is simply learning how to keep yourself from getting pleased or displeased by things that you see or smell or taste or touch, listen to, whatever. But it requires an act of the will and it doesn't have a foundation, which is why it's hard to maintain. Equanimity based on singleness, however, comes from getting the mind into a good solid state of concentration. As we chanted just now, getting to the point where the breath gets more and more refined, the mind settles in. Your sense of awareness fills the body. The sense of breath energy throughout the body feels connected and open, so there's a less and less need for the in and out breath until you finally get to the point where the in and out breath goes still. That's purity of equanimity and mindfulness. That's your foundation for equanimity based on singleness. It gives you a foundation from which you can look on things. There's another interesting wordplay in Pali. There's upeka, which is equanimity, and there's apeka, which means looking on. The two are very similar. You look at things from your state of equanimity. When they arise, you see them arise. When they pass, you see them pass away, and you realize you don't have to get caught up in them. They can happen. It's not like you're trying to prevent them from happening, but you want to make sure you don't get caught up in the delusion that comes along with these things. The idea that when you're happy, everything in the world is going to go fine. Actually, you know there are problems in the world, or the delusion that when you're sad, everything in the world is miserable. Well, you know that things can often work out. You can't let your emotions cloud your vision and get you to make thoughtless generalities. You realize that each emotion is a state, and from within the state, it's going to have a particular point of view, but you can't trust that point of view. Things are a lot more trustworthy when the mind is really solid. After all, it was when the Buddha was in the fourth jhana that he was able to gain all the knowledges of his awakening. Not that the fact that he was in the fourth jhana guaranteed the truth of everything he saw. He saw his previous lifetimes. He saw beings arising and passing away. That wasn't yet his awakening because, after all, those visions could have been wrong. But then he saw the truths of suffering or stress arising, passing away, and seeing why it arose and why it passed away, and what he could do to bring it to total cessation. Seeing that from a really still and equanimous mind. That's when he really knew, and that was the knowledge. Seeing things in terms of the four noble truths that allowed him to find something that was beyond equanimity and beyond the four noble truths. His knowledge of the total ending of suffering was the guarantee. But if he hadn't been able to bring his mind to that equanimity to begin with, he wouldn't have been able to open up to that other dimension. So when the Buddha teaches equanimity, dispassion, disenchantment, he's not simply teaching us to have a stiff upper lip or to try not to feel anything at all. That's not what the purpose is. The purpose is to free the mind. Disenchantment, Nibbida, can also be translated as distaste, disgust, revulsion. It relates to the fact that we're constantly feeding on things. We have to get to a point where we realize we don't want to feed on them anymore. The dispassion means that you don't allow the mind to be colored by these things, so that your vision isn't obscured. All this is for the purpose of freedom, a true well-being that doesn't have to depend on feeding, that doesn't have to depend on the ups and downs of emotions. Being in that state doesn't mean that you're uncaring. It simply means that you don't need to feed anymore. The compassion and the goodwill that can come from that state are very different from the compassion and goodwill that come from someone who needs to feed. When you need to feed, compassion has a clinging aspect. Goodwill has a clinging aspect. When there's clinging, there's a fear of allowing the object of the clinging to have its freedom. This is what's revolutionary about the Buddha's ideas on goodwill and compassion. If they come from a heart that's totally free, then they're genuine goodwill and genuine compassion. This is very different from the goodwill and compassion that we're used to, where there's the element of clinging and holding on, enslavement. So it's important that we not mistake the warmth for what it's not. The warmth we often feel sometimes has this element of feeding, which is not what we want. As for the compassion that comes from someone who's not feeding on us, don't think of that as cold. It's liberating. When we can look at things from this perspective, then it's a lot easier to understand what the Buddha is getting at. We can sort out the various emotions in the mind, but it does require the skill of learning to get the mind to be centered and still really centered, really stilled, feeding first on its concentration, on that equanimity based on singleness, then finally getting the mind to the place where it doesn't need to feed at all. That really is liberating. As a John Lee says, you're not only liberating your own mind, but you're also giving freedom to everything else around you. That's why equanimity, dispassion, disenchantment are things that we really want to work for. They're not to be feared. Goodwill. This morning we'll discuss metta, which we translate as goodwill. This is the second perfection coming under the section on discernment. It provides the heart side to what is usually seen as a head perfection. Notice, we translate metta as goodwill and not as love or loving kindness. Pali has another word for love, which is pema, as in pema chodron. The Buddha warns because love involves partiality. As he says, there are cases where love can give rise to love, but it can also give rise to hatred. Hatred can give rise to love and hatred can give rise to hatred. For example, suppose you love Bernard. If someone does something nice to Bernard, you're going to like or love that person. If someone mistreats Bernard, you're going to hate that person. Now, suppose you hate Bernard. If someone does something nice for him, you're going to hate that person. If someone does something nasty to Bernard, you're going to love that person. So, as the Buddha said, you can't really trust love as a basis for social engagement because love is a way of feeding on the other person and it can lead to factionalism and divisiveness. One of the reasons why metta is often translated as love or loving kindness is because there's a passage in the canon. It's in passage sin 1.8 in the readings, describing the love of a mother for her child. As a mother would risk her life to protect her child, her only child, even so, one should cultivate the heart limitlessly with regard to all beings. Sometimes that passage is translated to say that you should love everyone the same way a mother would love her child, which is a nice sentiment but totally impossible. What the passage is actually saying is that you should protect your goodwill for all beings in the same way that a mother would protect her only child. In other words, even if other people are mistreating you, you should protect your goodwill for those people. Even if they're going to kill you, you still protect your goodwill. Remember the passage in the readings about how you're being pinned down by bandits and they're sawing off your limbs. The Buddha says that you should still have goodwill for them. Otherwise, if you allow yourself to feel ill will for them, it'll lead to a miserable rebirth fixated on thoughts of revenge. This is what the image of the mother means. You protect your goodwill for everyone, even risking your life to do so despite whatever they may be doing as a way of protecting yourself. Now, goodwill is an expression of discernment. As I said, it's the heart side of what's usually regarded as a head quality. In terms of the factors of the noble eightfold path, it's a part of right resolve, one of the discernment factors. Right resolve is based on the understanding that it's perfectly fine to want true happiness. But if you want your happiness to be true, it cannot depend on the suffering of others. This understanding is what underlies the desire for goodwill. Because you want a happiness that lasts, you have to be determined to extend goodwill to others and to yourself so that you won't do anything in your pursuit of happiness that will cause harm. You want to be skillful in all your interactions with other beings, regardless of whether those beings are good in your eyes or bad. At the same time, you also realize that true happiness is something that will have to come from within, which means that your true happiness doesn't conflict with anyone else's. This is why a wish for true happiness can be an unlimited attitude, one you can extend to all beings. Love creates divisions, but goodwill can erase divisions. You understand that true happiness is a good goal for you and for all beings, and so you learn how to focus your desire on the causes of that happiness, the perfections. In that way, every perfection is an expression of goodwill. To understand goodwill, to have right view about goodwill, it's important to understand its relationship to kama. The first lesson from the teaching of kama is its explanation of what it means to wish others well. For people to be happy, they have to act skillfully. So, when you extend goodwill to others, you hope that they will understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them. In other words, you're not simply wishing them to be happy, whatever they're doing right now. After all, they may be doing some very unskillful things. I once had a student from San Francisco who was having problems with her landlord. The landlord was going to sell the property and wanted all of the renters to lie about the rent that they were paying, and my student didn't know what to do. She told me, well, I've been spreading goodwill to him and imagining him with a beautiful house and a swimming pool and many girlfriends. I said, no, no, no, no, you don't understand goodwill. First, get together with the other renters and then go as a group to talk to the landlord. Spread thoughts of goodwill to him by figuring out what you can do so that he won't make you lie. After all, not getting you to lie would be for his long-term welfare and happiness. In other words, goodwill is not a magic wand to make people happy and prosperous. You're thinking, what can I do to help these people act more skillfully? If they're really set on doing unskillful things, you think, what can I do to help these people have a change of heart? That's the first lesson that Kama gives to goodwill. The second lesson concerns what's involved in creating a mind state of goodwill in yourself. Unlimited goodwill is not an innate feature of the mind. It's simply one of the possibilities that exist in the mind, together with many unskillful possibilities. As the Buddha once said, the mind is more variegated than the animal kingdom. Just think of all the different kinds of animals there are on land, in the ocean, in the air. Your mind is capable of more variety than even that. It's also capable of changing its direction faster than anything else. This is why the Buddha speaks of goodwill as a determination, something you make up your mind to pursue continuously. He also talks about goodwill as a kind of mindfulness, something you have to consciously keep in mind. Otherwise, because it's not innate, it's very easy to forget. You can be sitting and doing metta for a week, may all beings be happy, may all beings be happy. Then you get out in your car, and somebody cuts right in front of you, and may this being go to hell. You've got to keep reminding yourself that goodwill is an attitude you have to bring to every encounter with others. Here it's good to remember the three kinds of fabrication we talked about last night, bodily, verbal, and mental. Bodily fabrication is the breath, verbal fabrication is how you talk to yourself, and mental fabrication covers the perceptions you hold in mind, together with the feelings you create with the other fabrications. Now, to create an attitude of goodwill, you have to use all three kinds of fabrication. Breathe in a way that feels good in the body, and then talk to yourself about why you need to have goodwill for this other person. Then hold in mind a perception that this will actually be good for you and the other person too. This will help to develop a feeling of pleasure associated with goodwill. For example, if your boss is doing something stupid, breathe calmly, and then think about the good things the boss has done in the past to erase any perception you may have that the boss is a monster or a fool. Hold that perception in mind. Something in your mind may rebel, asking, why think about this person's good aspects when he's doing something so horrible right now? The antidote for that attitude is a perception, a mental fabrication that the Buddha recommends calling to mind. It's as if you're walking through a desert. You're hot, tired, trembling with thirst, and you come across a small footprint of a cow that has a little bit of water in it. You realize if you tried to use your hand to scoop it up, you'd make the water muddy, so the only way to drink the water is to get down on all fours and slurp it up. Now, this is not a very dignified posture. You would not want someone to come along with an iPhone and take a picture of you and post it on Instagram. However, you need the water, so you don't worry about the dignity. In the same way, you need to think about the goodness of other people, even if it seems beneath you, because you need their goodness in order to nourish your goodness. That's a good perception to hold in mind, making it easier to think about the goodness of other people for the sake of your Otherwise, you become like the two dogs in a cartoon I saw once in the New Yorker. They're female dogs, they're wearing makeup and lipstick, and they're sitting at a bar drinking cocktails. Both have very mean and cynical expressions on their faces, and one of them is saying, they're all sons of bitches. The point there is that if everybody is a son of a bitch, then you're going to be a son of a bitch or a bitch yourself. So, for the sake of your own goodness, you try to think of the goodness of other people. These are some ways in which you use the three kinds of fabrication to create and maintain an attitude of goodwill. The third lesson that Kama teaches about goodwill concerns the reasons for why you need it. Its function is to guarantee the skillfulness of your actions. You want to make sure that your goodness is not dependent on the goodness of others. Only when it is independent can you trust it. It should also not be dependent on thoughts about whether other beings deserve your goodwill or not. It depends more on the fact that you need your goodwill to protect yourself from doing unskillful things. This is why the Buddha talks about goodwill as a kind of restraint. We usually think of goodwill as something open and wide without limits, but it does place certain restraints on what we do say and think so that we don't do unskillful things that will harm ourselves or others. Another reason why you need goodwill is that it helps to mitigate the effects of your past Kama. The Buddha has an image, another good perception to hold in mind, that your past bad Kama is like a large lump of salt. If you put that lump of salt into a small cup of water, you wouldn't be able to drink the water. However, if you put it into a large river of water, you could still drink the water. The cup of water stands for a mind that has very limited goodwill for others, whereas the river stands for a mind of unlimited goodwill. As the Buddha said, if your mind is unlimited, then even though past bad Kama will give its results, you hardly experience them at all. The teaching on Kama also teaches you about the karmic consequences of developing goodwill, as in one of the passages given in the readings. You sleep easily. You wake easily. You dream no evil dreams. You are dear to human beings, dear to non-human beings. The divas protect you. Neither fire, poison, nor weapons can touch you. You gain concentration quickly. Your complexion is bright. You die unconfused. And if you penetrate to no higher attainment, then you are headed for the Brahma worlds. Doesn't sound bad. Another lesson coming from the teaching on Kama is how goodwill is best expressed in your actions. It's not necessarily best expressed through tenderness. In Thai, they have the concept of what they call high-level metta, which is often attributed to the Ajahn's when they do or say something that you don't like, but is good for you. Sometimes they can be quite sharp, but it's for your own good. I'll give you an example. As my concentration was getting better when I was practicing with Ajahn Phuong, he would say things to try to get me worked up. He knew where my buttons were. At first, I was upset. I'm trying to keep my concentration going, and here he is destroying it. But then I finally realized what was happening. So I told myself, no matter what he says, I'm not going to let it get me upset. One evening, I was talking with him. He had asked me to translate one of Ajahn Lee's books, and I happened to tell him that I had finished it that afternoon. Instead of saying that was good, he said, that's your business and none of mine. Fortunately, my mind was in good shape and the words just went right past me. I said to myself as they went by, that was pretty nasty, but my vacuum cleaner was turned off, so I didn't suck them in. Then the next thing he said was, good, in that case, we'll find someone to print the book. I passed the test. So sometimes metta can be very harsh, but it still is conducive to well-being. Finally, the teaching on kama requires that the way you live be in keeping with thoughts of unlimited goodwill. The Karaniya Metta Sutta talks about the prerequisites for metta, that you be content with few things, that you are easy to instruct and easy to support, and that you have duties. Now for monks, what this means is you don't have a lot of building projects. Otherwise, everyone who comes into the monastery becomes a target for your desire to contribute to the building project. It's like the Shackleton expedition. When they were coming back from the Antarctic, they stopped at an island and they had no food, which meant that every penguin that walked onto the island was going to become a meal. I think about that image every time I go to a monastery where they have a building project that they're promoting aggressively. So you have to live your life in a way that really is harmless and unburdensome to other beings if you want your metta to be sincere. This is how the perfection of metta connects with the perfections of truth, virtue, and persistence. Goodwill is also nourishment for all the other perfections. If you develop a mind state where you realize you have no ill will for anyone, it gives you a sense of strength and nourishment. And as the Buddha says, it provides protection for you in all directions, into the past and into the future. What this requires though is that when you're developing goodwill, you don't simply think over and over again, may so-and-so be happy, may they be happy, may they be happy. You also have to think, is there anyone out there for whom I cannot have genuine goodwill? Why can I not feel goodwill for this person? If they're misbehaving, genuine goodwill means that you're wishing that they will have a change of heart, that they'll change their ways and behave more skillfully. Now is there anyone out there who you would like to see suffer before they change their ways? If there is, ask yourself, okay, why? What are you feeding on? It's usually a sense of revenge. And even though they say revenge is sweet, it's miserable food. It would actually be better for the world if the other person did not suffer because when people suffer, they rarely tell themselves, ah, this is the result of my misbehavior. I should change my ways. They usually take it out on other people like the hummingbirds I talked about last night. So for the sake of your happiness and for the sake of everyone's happiness, you want to be able to express thoughts of goodwill even to very difficult people. By working through your ill will in this way, you can get to a place where you can genuinely feel goodwill for everyone in all directions, and you'll be protected in all directions as well.