Shining Light
"The person in front of us is a mirror, but we tend to ignore that. I realized this very clearly in one of our practices, a collective practice called 'Shining Light.' Shining Light is about carefully watching the practice, the daily behavior of one brother or one sister, as a group. We gather as a group and we make a list of positive points and less positive points about this person. When I teach this practice in retreats, people become very nervous because who wants to be in the position of being looked at by a group?
"Actually, this practice is very beneficial because there are three guidelines we have to respect when we do it. The first one is that when we shine light on someone, we should always start with their positive points. I know that in society we do not usually do this. When we speak about someone else, unfortunately, we are often carried away, and we have a lot of negative things to say about him or her. It just comes out, and it is quite a strong practice to put a break on that energy and to decide to start by saying positive things about this person. And for many of us, it may be very difficult to find positive things about the person because we may have had troubles with him or her and all we can find are the negative points. We have to make a point of looking for positive aspects of that person. It may be a little thing. Maybe this person dresses neatly, or this person speaks very kindly, or he or she walks beautifully. It can be a very little thing, but when we start to list the little things like this, eventually we'll be able to discover more and more important positive things about that person whom we did not like so much at first.
"The second guideline is that we have to be willing to change our point of view. We may have an opinion about the person whom we are shining light on, and then find out that thirty other brothers or sisters in the room have a very different opinion about that very point. So that alone allows us to reflect a little bit and to ask, 'Is my view correct or not?' So practicing Shining Light, we have to reconsider our point of view, our opinion, of someone. We have to analyze and look at it and say, 'Is that really true? If I really think that about this person, and thirty other people who also live with this person think differently, my opinion may be incorrect. So I have to look at this carefully.' We have to recognize that our perceptions are very limited sometimes.
"The third guideline is we must use compassion. We are not here to put down the person with negative or unskillful behavior. We are here to help the person, so we need to use very compassionate words. Eventually the whole group puts together all the positive and negative qualities and we take a long time to make a very kind, careful letter. Then we give the letter to the person. And it is always a great help to the person when they receive it.”
