Thoughts on Friendship and Kindness, Inspired by Mary Grace Orr

Mary Grace Orr, of Spirit Rock in Wood Acre, California, has presented something that really captured my attention. She said that ‘you can take all Buddhist writing and distill it into three statements.’

1. This is the way it is.

2. Let go.

3. Nobody deserves your friendship and kindness more than you.

This is the way it is has to do with acknowledging the reality of the moment. It is raining outside, a relationship is strained, there are money issues that are upsetting, you have to have hip replacement surgery … the idea is that we acknowledge what is, so we don’t fight it, react to it or get frantic about the reality of what is going on in our lives.

Let go really means that we stop saying that things should be different than they are, or that what is happening is not fair, or that things need to change and I am not going to accept what is. The issue here is that if we fight against what is by saying it should be otherwise, what we are doing is setting up a resistance to ‘this is the way it is,’ and in so doing, we are giving the reality of the situation its energy.

In other words, what we resist persists. We become stuck in our need to change what is.

Don’t become stuck in a situation

In my own life, I have found that if I don’t accept what is and I don’t let it go, I become more deeply stuck in the situation. Instead, if I say that this is the way it is and I don’t fight against it, it stops being a source of focus in my life.

If someone calls me insensitive—by looking at what is being said and relating to what they are saying—if I don’t resist it, it doesn’t persist. I experience a sense of freedom from what I would otherwise become hooked into. I don’t spend my time fighting against a person’s point of view. I simply say that this is how someone views me and move on with my life.

To be sure, I will look into what is being said about me to see what they are responding to in my behaviour, but I don’t have to become stuck in fighting against someone else’s beliefs.

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