Greetings,

The month we will be exploring the Parami of Lovingkindness. Lovingkindness is the English translation of Metta. Many of you know in my early years I loathed metta. I thought it was such a weak and flimsy practice because I associated it with learning how to be nice. Over the years, I came to realize that metta has very little to do with "learning" anything. Metta is how we experience everything. The more we cultivate metta the more we are able to experience all of what it means to be human. But before we go into that, we should take note of a couple of things. First, metta is the second to the last Parami (equanimity, a derivative of metta, is the last Parami). This is significant. We've spent nearly a year on eight Paramis that are all pointing towards metta. We have covered every imaginable discussion around the difficulties that human beings face and the possibilities that the Paramis practice can open up for us. All of it has been pointing towards a citta (heartmind) of metta, which leads to the second noteworthiness. Metta is more than being nice; it is more than your metta phrases; and, it is more than our English translation of love. It has to be more than that because the eight previous Paramis point towards, strengthen, and illuminate this quality of heartmind. If it takes all of this to cultivate metta, we need to give metta a closer look.

I have come to see that we can cultivate metta in three different ways. Each way has its own unique qualities but they all point to the boundless, immeasurable quality of the heartmind. Remember, cultivation of the Paramis is necessary for the heartmind to awaken. We need an openheartedness that is not based on ordinary thinking, and we need a level of wisdom that can see past our opinions, our assumptions, our expectations, etc. We need this because I believe we are looking for an understanding that is different than anything we can capture in our ordinary mind. An awakened mind sees the world from a completely different paradigm. It has to. An awakened mind does not grasp. I does not cling to its preferences. And it does not judge or compare. It basically discerns the appropriate response in any given moment and it discerns the appropriate response in the moment without pre-judging the situation. I know several people who seem to move in the world this way. I can recognize my own pre-judgment just by listening to their response vs. my own response to a situation. I am often stunned at how quickly my aversive mind pre-judges a situation, identifies a problem and decides an answer before the situation itself arises. This is a very natural human trait. Cultivating metta helps us see this trait and not follow it. The more metta we cultivate, the more secure we feel, and the less worrying and need for pre-judgment exists. Before moving onto describing the three ways, I need to add one caveat. One of the main reasons I had difficulty cultivating metta was because I couldn't connect with people. As soon as I would bring up the image of a person, I would lose my stability and get trapped in stories about the person. I gave myself permission to offer metta to nature, insects, and small non-threatening animals. This was a game changer for me. It allowed me to access the quality of metta without all the stories. I didn't have any stories around nature, insects and small animals. And without the stories, I could focus on the offering itself.

The traditional way of cultivating metta is with phrases. We start by collecting three or four simple phrases that capture a wish for goodwill, ease, health and safety. We then gather our attention and offer these phrases to various categories of beings. We start with an easy being or benefactor because of the ease in which we can offer goodwill to these people. Then we move to ourselves, which can be a little bit more challenging, but still there's an ease in wanting goodwill. Next we offer the phrases to a close friend or family member. Here we still want to offer goodwill, but often our good friends and family can be a mixed bag. They can bring up feelings of both care and frustration. Then we move to a neutral being where we don't have a strong emotional connection and this ups the ante because we are offering goodwill to a stranger. Many people find it harder to offer metta to people they don't know than to people they care about even if it's a frustrating relationship. Learning to offer metta to strangers is an important step in opening up the heart. As you begin to open your heart to strangers you can move into opening your heart to the difficult person. The difficult person is not someone who is difficult. It is a person who you have difficulty with no matter how insignificant that difficulty is. It can be as simple as someone who irritates you, or a situation with someone that frustrates you. I can remember once using the customer service audio tapes as my difficult being because I used to get to angry at the lack of connection with something that was inanimate. I remembered one day that somebody recorded that audio and I made that person my difficult person. Lastly, we offer metta to all beings. This last category recognizes that all beings are similarly situated. We all experience pleasant and unpleasant, ups and downs, gains and losses.

The first way of cultivating metta is when metta is your primary object. This is considered a concentration practice. This type of cultivation of metta develops samadhi, jhana or absorption states, and unification of mind and body. A concentration practice means that you select one object and continuously return your attention to that object. Metta as concentration is generally cultivated on a metta retreat. The phrases become the object of meditation by continuously returning to the phrases, the felt sense of sitting and/or the image of the person. If you want to cultivate metta as your primary object, it's important to go on a metta retreat. Staying with metta as an object is very difficult because of the complications and difficulties we have in relationship. Trying to stabilize your mind on metta brings up all the difficulties you have with relationship. Learning to practice metta as a concentration practice on retreat provides a support mechanism through sangha that allows us to move past our resistance in a meaningful way.

The second way of cultivating metta is based on metta as capacity. It doesn't take long for a practitioner to realize how difficult meditation is, generally. It's difficult because meditation brings up the hindrances. The hindrances are five naturally arising mind states that challenge our resolve to focus on the object. They are desire, aversion, sleepiness, restlessness and doubt. These five mind states push against our dhamma canda (wholesome desire to awaken). This pushing is difficult to experience in real time but is necessary to strengthen our resolve towards a steady, unified mind. The more we cultivate the capacity of metta, the more we have the ability to see the drawbacks of the hindrances. The more we see the drawbacks of the hindrances, the less influence they have on our practice and the more likely we can abandon them entirely. This capacity building metta is usually cultivated on Insight retreats where there is only one metta sit a day. We use the same practice as with concentration but we are only using the phrases to soften and/or open the heart. Throughout the day the main object of meditation is generally the breath, sound or the body. The afternoon metta sit is primarily used to help soften our temperament.

The brings me to the third way of cultivating metta. It doesn't involve the phrases at all. It's about cultivating our natural tender heartedness. Experiencing a tender heart in this day and age takes courage. We are mostly scare of our hearts. We trust the mind and protect the heart. But this is actually backwards. We should trust the heart and protect the mind. Cultivating metta in this way requires that we first contemplate what metta means to us. As I said in the beginning, metta is translated as lovingkindness. I began to realize that I had a problem with this word "loving." When I let go of the word "loving" and considered metta as kindness or friendliness, I had no problem wanting to cultivate this way of being. The important part was that I connected with my own understanding of what it meant to experience metta. I found words like "softening into," "allowing," and "giving permission" were closest to what I felt metta to be. The more I cultivated the felt sense of my own understanding, the less difficulty I had with metta. I cultivated what it meant to me to soften, allow and give permission in all kinds of situations. This helped me open up the heartmind naturally, not out of some kind of force of will trying to be a certain way or feel a certain. Cultivating metta in this way is what enabled me to move through the world with kindness and friendliness, while remaining in alignment with my practice no matter how different my actions appeared to others.

This month is about finding your authentic relationship with metta. It's not about simply rehashing what you already know about metta. This is about taking a month to actually consider, what does metta mean to you and how would you like to cultivate it in your life.

With a deep bow,
Tuere