Metta
(lovingkindness) is that sense of openness when we feel connected to
everyone and everything in the world. In some ways, it's a natural
outgrowth of mindfulness practice and just the general cultivation of
happiness in our lives. When the Buddha talks about lovingkindness, he's
clearly pointing to something different from what we usually call
"love." In fact, his teachings point to the problems with selective
love, and how that leads to clinging and ultimately suffering as things
change. The Metta Sutta tells us to spread love over the entire
world to everyone, no matter what we think or feel about them. This is
unconditional love, love that doesn't expect or need a return, love that
sees past the petty differences and disputes in life to the universal
longings for happiness that we all share. In practicing lovingkindness,
we are faced with our clinging, our judgments, and our selective caring.
We see that what we usually call love may have a lot of conditions tied
up with it: "I'll love you as long as you love me" or " as long as you
give me what I want." And, further, we see that the love we have for our
dear ones makes us vulnerable to grief and loss.
Traditionally, metta practice focuses on three categories:
those we love, those we are neutral or have no strong feelings about,
and those we have difficulties with. Before we work with these
categories, the practice suggests we first focus on a benefactor or
beloved person (or even a pet). When we spend time sending
lovingkindness to this beloved, we accomplish a couple of things: first,
we soften ourselves up a bit, so that we are ready to send love to
others; and second, we get a clear sense of what love feels like so that
we establish that kind of baseline.
After connecting with the beloved, we then try to send
love to ourselves. Many people find this to be one of the most difficult
aspects of the metta practice. At least in our culture, many of us have
complicated, and often negative, feelings about ourselves. To see
ourselves as just another person deserving love is a valuable exercise.
Here we start to disidentify with ourselves, see ourselves in more
objective terms. When we can see ourselves as just another imperfect
human, equally deserving of love as anyone else, it becomes easier to
offer love to ourselves.
Moving from focus on ourselves to focus on all the rest of
the people we care about—family, friends, intimates, and partner—the
heart tends to open more easily. Now we might feel ourselves getting
into the flow of lovingkindness. Without obstruction, and using the
phrases, feelings, and visualizations of the practice, the mind can
become quite focused and concentrated, so that, not only do we enjoy the
pleasant feeling of love, but also the powerful feeling of
concentration, called samadhi, that comes with deeper meditation practices.
We then try to carry these two qualities, the
openheartedness and the focus, into giving metta to a neutral person or
persons. For many people, this seems to be an awkward practice at first,
but I think it has great potential in terms of growing a broad sense of
lovingkindness for all beings.
A neutral person is someone we don't have strong feelings
about, either positive or negative. I've used people like the clerk in
the video store and the security guard at the bank. These are people I
can visualize pretty easily because I've seen them many times, but I
certainly don't like or dislike them in any meaningful way.
At first, and naturally enough, it might be hard to feel
much about these people, but the practice gives us a form we can simply
follow without worrying about the results. You see the person in your
mind, you say the lovingkindness phrases to yourself, and you try to
connect in your heart. What helps me in doing this practice is
contemplating the universal desire for happiness and freedom from
suffering.
Even though I don't really know this neutral person, I know
that, just like me, they want happiness.
So, in a sense, I'm connecting
with my own wish for happiness and just projecting it onto them.
As we work with the neutral person, we have the
opportunity to see what the Buddha was getting at. It might be easy to
wish happiness for your loved ones, but as you wish that, it's still
very personal for you. You have some investment in their happiness, so
it's difficult to disidentify with their happiness.
However, with the
neutral person, you have no investment, so you have to connect with
something else, this universal longing that is impersonal. That moves
you away from your self-identification into a more authentic metta. As
long as there is identification or longing or investment in someone
else's happiness, we aren't experiencing unconditional love.
I think that many people can get caught up in the idea
that metta is about feeling good and praying for people you care about.
This is something of a distortion of the teachings. Yes, being immersed
in metta is a pleasant experience, but that experience isn't the goal of
the practice.
Working with the difficult person makes this fact clear.
If we were just trying to feel good, we certainly wouldn't spend time
thinking about someone we don't like. The difficult person can be
someone you've had conflict with or toward whom you have a resentment.
Sometimes when no one in my life comes up, I just use a political figure
that I disagree with. In any case, this is a place where we have to
apply a strong mindfulness to our practice so that we don't lapse into
aversion, anger, judgment, or resentment. As we follow through on the
practice, visualizing the person and saying the phrases, it's very
likely that we will not feel much that's positive, at least in our
initial efforts. We need to be careful that the mind doesn't wander into
negative thoughts and that we just keep with the simple task of the
practice, staying with the words and the breath in the heart. Here, you
may be able to get some insight into the limits of your own capacity for
love. That's a valuable thing to see. It can give us some goals as well
as show us where some of our own suffering comes from.
Clearly, the great spiritual masters believe that the
capacity to love our enemies is one of the vital tasks of human
evolution. Jesus spoke of this and exemplified it when he forgave those
who crucified him; the Buddha explains this in the "Simile of the Saw,"
in which he says that even if someone were sawing off our limbs one by
one, no thought of hatred should arise. If we want to be truly loving
people, unconditionally and for all beings, we have to work with some
form of this practice. It's certainly not something that I've come
anywhere close to mastering, but I have found that with compassion
practice, I can get some sense of this.
After working with the difficult person, we can move to
the expansive part of metta practice. This is actually a complete shift
because no longer are we thinking about any individuals, but working
instead with a sense of space. This space is what the Buddha is talking
about in the Metta Sutta when he says that we are "radiating
kindness over the entire world, spreading [it] upwards to the skies and
downwards to the depths, outwards and unbounded, free from hatred and
ill will."
This is a somewhat more difficult area of practice to
describe because it doesn't have the same cognitive elements of the
earlier pieces. Instead, we are working more with a feeling, a feeling
of expansiveness and connection. Hopefully when we arrive at this part
of the practice, we've developed something of an internal sense of
lovingkindness. While focusing on that feeling, that authentic wish for
all beings to be free from dukkha, or suffering, we being a
process of imaginative expansion. We can use a visualization if that
works, while we stay connected to the feeling in the heart and imagine
that the love is growing.
First we see/feel that love filling and enveloping the
room we are in. Then we let that feeling expand out through the whole
building, the neighborhood, outward in all directions until it touches
everything on earth. This can be done slowly or quickly, depending upon
how much time you have and how into it you are. You can think of
specific groups of people you want to send love to: the sick and dying,
the oppressed, or whatever comes up for you. You can also send love to
animals, plants, and the earth itself.
At this point, you may lose the sense of boundaries with
your body, and experience a sort of floating or fluid sensation. I'm not
trying to tell you how you should feel—just know that anything in this
realm is normal and helps to support this part of the practice. When
we've spread lovingkindness over the entire planet, we then expand into
space, vast and limitless. We try to permeate the universe with
lovingkindness.
Once we've sat in this place of boundless love for a
little while, we can bring ourselves gradually back into the body and
heart, and close the period of meditation.
Practice—Metta Phrases
I've more or less outlined the practice above. Always
start by connecting with the breath, so you have some attention in your
body, preferably at the heart. As I've said, we first send metta to a
beloved person or benefactor, then ourselves, our dear ones, a netural
person, a difficult person, then radiating to all beings. A big part of
this, then, is the felt sense of lovingkindness; however, this feeling
may be stronger, weaker, or even absent at times.
Nonetheless, we
continue the practice by visualizing the people we are sending metta to,
maybe naming them, and repeating phrases.
You should use phrases that
resonate for you and are simple and direct. Not more than four phrases.
Here are some typical ones:
May you be happy
May you be peaceful
May you live with ease.
Some people like to add something like, "May you be safe."
Stay in touch with your breath; notice feelings of
happiness or resistance that come up at various stages; let the phrases
flow with the breath and stay connected to the heart.
Kevin Griffin is the cofounder of the
Buddhist Recovery Network. He lives in Berkeley, California.
