We’ve been looking at joy in general and last week was about the joy of not having to carry the world on our own shoulders, which we do as lawyers. And also the joy of letting go – letting go of feeling we have to be in control all the time, even though when we’re in certain roles, like when we’re a lawyer in a courtroom, or a professor in a classroom, of course we have to have a command of the situation. But we talked about the joy – which maybe takes the form of relief – in knowing we’re not actually in control, and in taking a breath and being with whatever is happening.
Today I want to start talking about sympathetic joy. If you look closely at the photo for today, you can see the skydivers’ joy. I picked this photo rather than, say, a four-year-old eating an ice cream, because I would never, ever, jump out of a perfectly good plane. So the photo is a reminder for me of what sympathetic joy is, when it’s not as easy as seeing my favorite four-year-old eating an ice cream: taking joy in the joy of others, even when it seems like what they’re doing is just not right.
Sympathetic joy is even more than that, though: it’s rejoicing in another’s wellbeing, or happiness, or success, or prosperity. Or their win. When sympathetic joy is present, there’s no jealousy or judgment, no comparison, no negativity. And there’s also no giddiness because it’s not a heady state, but rather, a peaceful, happy feeling – a state that’s occurring just because someone else is happy.
Maybe think about whether this runs true to, or counter to, the way you were raised, or your culture, or the legal culture. For me it runs counter. I was raised to be competitive: my dad held a spelling bee at the dinner table and my brother - who now has a PhD - usually lost because he was a STEM kid. The girls I grew up with were very competitive. And then I went into the law.
The law was perfect for me. The adversary system, spending law school sharpening my sparring skills on my friends (and them on me), being in an environment where, at every level, everyone is competing with, and judging, everyone else. When I first offered a lunch meeting at Berkeley to introduce my mindfulness class, in the Q&A a single hand went up. The student asked, “Where’d you go to law school?”
We all know plenty of colleagues with notches on their belts, whether they represent wins, articles, salary, or whatever.
So in my experience, the law inclines the mind in the opposite direction from sympathetic joy. Which is unfortunate because sympathetic joy, of all the four Brahmaviharas, or heavenly abodes of the heart, which also include love (or lovingkindness) and compassion and equanimity, is the one that, classically, provides the most ease, the greatest sense of freedom. This has been true for me.
When I first heard about the four Brahmaviharas, being a good student and having fallen in love with the teachings of mindfulness, I set about remembering the Brahmaviharas so I could practice them. But no matter what I did, for years I could only remember three. I could remember lovingkindness, and I could practice it. I could remember compassion, and practice that. And I could remember equanimity and even sometimes practice that.
But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember sympathetic joy. I would look it up, go, “Oh YEAH!,” read about it, and then promptly forget it again. In mindfulness this is a classic thing: the mind just not being able to remember something it’s not ready for. This has happened to me with other practices, too. Clearly, I just wasn't ready to study or practice sympathetic joy.
What that probably says is that my mind was still stuck in the opposites of sympathetic joy. According to Sharon Salzburg, who has written and taught extensively about the Brahmaviharas, those opposites are judgment, comparing, discriminating, demeaning, being envious, being avaricious, and being bored. I’m going to work through those over the next few weeks, and we can explore what they look like and maybe see if they’re present and how they feel, and what it might feel like to let each of them go, and incline more in the direction of sympathetic joy.
Starting with judgment, judgment is many things and of course we need it to practice law. We need to judge or at least discern. We’re using that faculty of mind all the time.
In this context, though, judgment is that feeling that can arise about others, that they should be doing something, or not doing something, or living their lives, more the way WE think they should. They should drive this kind of car not that one; or quit that job and grab this one; or jump into, or get out of, that relationship. We’ve told them, they’re not listening to us, and then they’re happy with their choices and we have that little catch, that glitch, because in our best judgment, they’re not doing what we think they should do.
Or maybe it's more of an overall concept: someone else is in corporate law and you've devoted your work to something in the public interest, or vice versa. In one group I felt judged because I was the only lawyer doing corporate work and everyone else was involved in social justice work or teaching. I see this at Berkeley: the students going into corporate law or prosecution feel judged and when one of them lands a plum job, they don’t share the news because they’re afraid they’ll be scorned.
Even on the most mundane level, sometimes my partner orders a big bacon cheeseburger and I forget about sympathetic joy and the thought arises, “Eew. How can you eat that?”
So the question is, is it possible to look across the table and see the juice dripping down someone’s chin, and be completely joyful because they’re so happy, eating their sloppy burger? Or be happy for a friend who decides to jump IN and is happy at least right now, when the relationship sure doesn’t look right to us? Or be happy for the colleague who gets the win, or gets published, when we don’t? And worse yet, when we think WE should have gotten the win, or published. Is it possible to not hold back our happiness for them, or, taking it a step farther, is it possible to cultivate sympathetic joy so that our more usual response is to not judge, but to be happy for others?
There’s a big caveat here, especially since our work is about justice in all its various forms: I’m not talking about someone living a life or taking some action that’s harmful to others or to themselves. But I am suggesting that it’s very freeing, for me, anyway, when I can be nonjudgmental about the way people live their lives, or jump out of planes, even when I can never imagine living that way. And it’s even more freeing when I can remember that third Brahmavihara, sympathetic joy, and be really happy for other people when they’re happy. Because it’s true what His Holiness the Dalai Lama says: sympathetic joy increases our chances of joy by 7.6 billion.
So in a kind of dog-eat-dog world, and in an adversary system, what would it take? What would it cost? And what might we gain?
