Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. This guided meditation by Thubten Chodron walks practitioners through a systematic reflection on kindness received from multiple sources. Beginning with friends and loved ones, she guides you to recall specific acts of support and encouragement without attachment, then extends the reflection to parents, teachers, and relatives — recognizing the years of care, education, and effort invested in your development. The meditation then expands to include kindness from strangers whose labor and work sustain daily life: builders, farmers, manufacturers, and countless others we’ll never meet. Finally, Chodron reframes difficult relationships and people who have harmed us as unexpected teachers, showing how conflict and pain have strengthened character and revealed inner resources. The practice culminates in resting the mind and heart in a felt sense of gratitude toward all beings whose kindness, whether intentional or not, has shaped and sustained your life.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 32 GM.mp3
UUID: 409e1749-1370-4376-a8e3-d3f9a2373db1
Teacher: Thubten Chodron Guided Med
Collection: Guided Meditation (Thubten Chodron Guided Med)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~744
So now we’re gonna think about the kindness that we’ve received from others. Because when we recognize that we’ve been the recipient of incredible kindness, then very easily the wish to repay the kindness arises. Effortlessly, it comes. And that makes generating love and compassion much easier. So begin by thinking of the kindness that you’ve received from friends, maybe support or encouragement and so on.
So don’t think of this in a way that creates attachment towards the people that you’re close to, but rather really recognize the value of certain friends and relatives in your life so that you stop taking them for granted and have a sense of appreciation for their kindness. So think of specific people and specific acts of kindness that they’ve shown you. And then think of the kindness and benefit that you’ve received from your parents and relatives and teachers. So reflect on the care that they gave us when we were young and couldn’t protect ourselves from danger, couldn’t feed ourselves. Reflect that they looked over our education, taught us so many skills.
See all the time and energy that our parents and teachers put into helping us so that we can learn even the most basic things, like tying our shoes and how to talk and how they continue to help us so that we could really develop our good qualities and develop our talent. So all of our talents and abilities and skills are due to the people who taught us and trained us. So spend some time reflecting on this and really have a sense of gratitude for the kindness that you’ve received from the people who have brought you up and taken care of you and educated you for so many years. And then consider the help that you’ve received from strangers. For example, the people who built the building that we’re sitting in right now, we don’t know them.
But without their kindness, we wouldn’t be able to sit here and be protected from the elements. Or the people that made the clothes we’re wearing, again, we don’t know them. But because they put in so many hours laboring, we have the benefit of having clothes to wear. If we think of the food that we ate for dinner, how many living beings went into producing it, transporting it, and so on. Again, we don’t know these people, but we’ve received a lot of benefit from them.
So regardless of what their motivation was, the fact is that without their energy and effort, we wouldn’t be able to stay alive. We wouldn’t have all the enjoyments that we do. So think of how interconnected we are in our society and develop a sense of the kindness of other people for doing the jobs that they do. And let your heart open to these strangers in a feeling of gratitude. And then think also of the benefit that we’ve received from the people that we don’t get along with are the people who have harmed us.
So, initially, we may not think of our interactions with them as beneficial. But if we look deeply, we did derive some benefit. So often the people who we don’t get along with or who criticize us point out our weaknesses, and that gives us the ability to change, to develop ourselves. In addition, whatever difficult times, even incredibly painful times we’ve had with other people, we’ve survived them, and we’ve come out stronger as a result. So by having to deal with those difficulties, we found resources within ourselves and developed talents and abilities within ourselves that we wouldn’t have developed otherwise.
So no matter whether that other person’s motivation was to benefit us or not, still the interaction with them helped us to grow. So try and look at the difficult relationships you’ve had in your life from that perspective. And, again, have a sense of gratitude for having known those people and for the kind of help that they provided us in making us grow, making us develop. And so as you recognize the kindness of friends, parents, and teachers, strangers, and even people you’ve had difficulties with in the past, as you get a sense of having benefited from all those people, your heart kind of naturally opens. There’s a real deep sense of appreciation and gratitude towards those sentient beings.
So just let your heart, your mind rest in that feeling.