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Good morning. As MPs returned to their constituencies following a fevered period at Westminster, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association in a report last week on politicians’ mental health. It cites research published in the British Medical Journal which found that three quarters of British MPs reported sub-optimal mental health and a third had probable mental ill health. Along with common stressors like workload and lifestyle, it says politicians face high expectations and constant scrutiny but often have little ability to make the difference people want.

Online and in their constituencies, politicians face a toxic culture of abuse, polarisation and threats. The murder of David Amess focused this, but pleas for greater civility were quickly forgotten and perhaps they were unrealistic. In an adversarial system it’s natural that people oppose, challenge, reject and happily deplore their political opponents.

Keeping those responses in perspective, means managing our emotions. For many years I’ve practised a Buddhist meditation called The Development of Loving Kindness, which has five stages. In the first you develop kindness for yourself, and in the following stages you direct kindness to a friend, someone you neither like nor dislike, then an enemy, and finally you extend kindness to everyone.

The fourth stage, feeling kindness for an enemy, long puzzled me. How can I like someone I dislike? Should I try to convince myself that they’re really okay? Or maybe I should pretend to like them in the hope that I eventually will. Neither works, of course.

Eventually, I understood that, as Buddhist teachings say, we can’t really help what we feel about a person, but we can approach them with an attitude that grows from something deeper than liking and disliking. Understanding that our dislike contains a subjective element that colours our perceptions. Seeing the fear and insecurity that we share with our opponents. Or recognising a sense of our shared humanity.

This is true both in our personal lives and in our politics. A Buddhist outlook asks us to supplement the laudable desire to change the world ‘out there’, perhaps through politics, by also addressing the world ‘in here’. ‘Hatred’, as the Buddha said, ‘is never overcome by yet more hatred.’

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