Protect Your Goodwill

Close your eyes and start your meditation with thoughts of goodwill. Goodwill is a wish for happiness: your happiness and the happiness of others. Think about true happiness—it comes from within. This is one of the reasons why we meditate. We have to develop good qualities in the mind. We start with goodwill because it not only informs our meditation, but it should inform our lives as a whole.

What do we have to depend on in this life if not our own goodness? And if our goodness is not reliable, then where are we? We’re stuck. If you have ill will for anybody, then it’s very easy to do unskillful things with them. That then eats away at your goodness. We want to be the sort of people who are not just good to the people who are good to us. After all, any common animal can be good to someone who’s good to them. We want to be good to people even when they’re not good to us because we want to make sure that we can have some goodness we can depend on, in terms of our thoughts, our words, our deeds.

If you’re coming from goodwill, then even if someone has been behaving really poorly, they may sense your goodwill for them, your desire that they truly are happy. It makes it a lot easier to deal with them. It also forms a kind of restraint for yourself. There are things that you might want to say, or do, or think, but you realize if you do that, it would be harmful—harmful to them, harmful to yourself. So why do them? Just because you want to do something doesn’t mean that it’s the best thing to do.

So you have to keep reminding yourself that no matter how other people behave, you want to have goodwill for them. Wish for their genuine happiness. Think about it: If people could find true happiness within, the world would be a much better place. People would be behaving much better than they are. So that’s what your wish is. If people have been behaving in cruel or thoughtless ways, you hope that they stop, that they realize the harm they’ve done and be willing to change their ways. That’s a thought you can have for anybody.

And it’s a thought that helps protect your goodness. As the Buddha said, you should protect your goodwill in the same way that a mother would protect her only child. Think about what it was like back in those days if a mother had one child. They didn’t have Social Security. They didn’t have a social safety net. You were going to have to depend on your children. So you would protect them as best you can. In the same way, you have to protect your goodwill in all situations. Even if someone is cutting you up into little pieces, the Buddha said, you should still have goodwill for that person, because you don’t want to die with ill will. If you die with ill will, who knows where you’re going to go—not a good place.

Make sure you have goodwill for everybody. That informs your practice; that informs your life. That’s your protection. That’s your refuge: goodwill for all.