I’ve noticed that when people try to cultivate kindness or compassion towards someone they find difficult, they often do it quite vaguely. Typically, during meditation, they visualize their “enemy” and repeat phrases like, “May you be well,” or “May you be free from suffering.” This is the method I was taught and it’s what most others were taught as well.
The problem with this approach is that our difficulties with people often stem from their behaviors—the things they say and do that provoke us. When we only visualize the person passively, we don’t trigger the emotions that usually cause us to get annoyed. Essentially, we’re not challenging ourselves enough. We need to make ourselves uncomfortable to learn how to manage discomfort without reacting. We must put ourselves in situations where reactivity is possible to recognize the signs of anger and choose not to fuel it.
I prefer teaching lovingkindness and compassion meditation as a way to practice facing real difficulties. When thinking of a difficult person during meditation, it helps to focus on specific behaviors that trigger us. By vividly remembering or imagining these behaviors, we generate uncomfortable feelings which can lead to reactivity. Meditation offers a mindful space to sit with these feelings, observe our anger as it arises, and choose to let it go. It also allows us to remember the humanity of the person and cultivate kindness towards them.
This approach brought to mind the civil rights marches of the 1960s. When I first learned about how Martin Luther King’s marchers endured insults, beatings, and other forms of violence without retaliation, I was amazed. I wondered how they managed when I get upset over minor online insults.
I later discovered that these activists trained themselves to be non-reactive in the face of violence. They rehearsed by role-playing insults and physical assaults to learn non-violent responses. They even reframed encounters with the police, seeing arrest and imprisonment as badges of honor rather than violations of freedom.
Their training emphasized that nonviolent resistance aims to win the trust and understanding of opponents, not to insult or humiliate them. They understood that their true enemy was the ideology of oppression, not the people enforcing it. These courageous individuals didn’t achieve this overnight; they learned it step-by-step. This made me realize that we can also learn to perform seemingly superhuman acts of nonviolence through practice.
If these activists could practice love while being brutally attacked, surely we can handle minor irritations in our lives. I suggest using your meditation practice as a rehearsal. Do you get annoyed when someone loads the dishwasher improperly or doesn’t clean up? When someone ignores or belittles you? Visualize these situations clearly, feel the irritation, and let it be present without reacting. If you feel anger, let it go. Connect with kindness while visualizing these annoying behaviors. Rehearse responding with humor, kindness, and sensitivity towards the other person’s feelings.
This also applies to compassion meditation, where we aim to be loving and supportive in the face of another’s suffering. Simply recalling someone’s suffering isn’t very challenging. Buddhist monk Mathieu Ricard once explained how he visualized suffering while meditating. For instance, he imagined a friend severely injured in a car accident, lying in blood by the roadside. This vivid image evokes strong feelings.
Ricard suggests imagining different forms of distress as realistically as possible until they become unbearable. The goal isn’t to make ourselves suffer but to develop a compassionate response that supports the suffering person. True compassion is heart-warming and insulating against personal suffering.
However, we should stretch our capacity to bear suffering gradually. If we can’t respond to suffering with kindness and compassion, we risk becoming overwhelmed, which helps no one.
In short, our meditation practices will lead to slow change unless we challenge ourselves. By vividly imagining emotionally provocative situations, we give ourselves the chance to grow our kindness and compassion significantly. As shown by the civil rights activists, we can even develop superhuman levels of love and compassion.