May All
Beings Be Happy - A lovingkindness
meditation
Tricycle
Kevin Griffin March
20, 2015
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.