THE EFFECTS OF CARING • Sharon Salzberg
Recently, a friend told me about a study that had been conducted on the effect of the qualities of intimacy and caring, the effect of those qualities on the quality of people’s lives — On the richness, the feeling of connectedness of people’s lives.
The study was conducted in a nursing home.
Every resident of the nursing home was given a plant.
Half of the people were told that the plant would be put in their rooms and that the nursing staff would take care of the plant. The person themselves, the recipient, could look at it, admire it, and enjoy it, but they would have no role in directly caring for it.
The other half of the population was also given a plant and they were told that they were going to be responsible for taking care of it : they, themselves, would have to water it and see what it needed and be directly involved in the care of that plant.
This went on for 6 months or a year.
What was discovered at the end of that time was that there was a tremendous difference between those two halves of the population.
The half of the people who were involved in caring and responsible for their plant were becoming much more alive, much more energetic. They were getting sick a lot less, they were living longer, as compared to the other half of the people in the nursing home.
This was considered in the light of the importance of intimacy, and connectedness, and caring in the quality of our lives.
When I heard about the study, one of the things that struck me was that we most often consider intimacy in terms of our relationship to someone else. Or something else, even a plant.
We very rarely consider intimacy within the context of how we are relating to ourselves. Whether we are intimate, personally connected to the depth of our own being – If we are relating to ourselves in that kind of caring, responsible way.
Meditation is very much the transformation, the redirecting of that kind of energy towards oneself. Oneself as a basis for understanding. Developing our own vision of the nature of our lives.
Meditation is like turning on a light in a dark room – It doesn’t matter if the room has been dark for 2 days or 10,000 years. You just turn on the light.
And with that act, so much becomes revealed.
Listen to this full episode of METTA HOUR with Sharon Salzberg here: