Dedicated practitioners of either mindfulness or metta eventually develop a similar state of mind—“loving awareness” or “mindful compassion.” There’s a Zen saying: “Kindness is the fruition of awareness, and awareness is the foundation of kindness.” The film The Lives of Others illustrates how kindness can emerge when we pay careful attention to another person. (Spoiler alert!) In this remarkable movie, an East German secret policeman, holed up with listening devices in the attic of his prey for days on end, eventually finds himself feeling sympathetic to his enemy. That’s the cost of careful attention. Have you ever wondered how therapists can listen to people’s problems all day long without getting completely overwhelmed? The same principle applies: Pay rapt attention to another person over time and the quiet energy of love and compassion will rise up.
Loving-kindness meditation is a variation of single-focus meditation. As you’ll soon see, we’re using words instead of the breath as the anchor of attention. Whenever the mind wanders from the words, we note what took the mind away and return to the words. If you practice intensive metta meditation, you’ll also discover a lot about your shadow side: jealousy, hatred, fear, self-judgment. You can switch seamlessly back to using your breath as an anchor for attention if the feelings become too strong.
Some people “book-end” mindfulness meditation with loving-kindness meditation. They start and end their meditation with words of kindness and compassion. That helps mindfulness practitioners go easier on themselves—to strive less and enjoy themselves more. People (like me) for whom loving-kindness is their primary meditation may start meditating on the breath and the body because it stabilizes attention and calms the mind and then move on to metta practice. You’ll probably discover for yourself how nicely loving-kindness and mindfulness practices complement each other.
The following exercise is the only one in this chapter. Please set aside time to do it. Read through the instructions, then put down the book, close your eyes, and give it a try. That will make the rest of the chapter much more meaningful.
TRY THIS: Loving-Kindness Meditation
Please set aside 20 minutes for the purpose of giving yourself loving attention. Sit in a comfortable position, reasonably upright and relaxed. Close your eyes and bring your attention to the heart region of your body. Now take three slow, easy breaths from the heart.
Form an image of yourself sitting down. Note your posture on the chair as if you were seeing yourself from the outside. Feel the sensations in your body as you sit.
Recall that every living being wants to live peacefully and happily. Connect with that deep wish: “Just as all beings wish to be happy and free from suffering, may I be happy and free from suffering.” Let yourself feel the warmth of that loving intention.
Now, keeping an image of yourself sitting in the chair and feeling good will in your heart, repeat the following phrases silently and gently:
May I be safe.
May I be happy.
May I be healthy.
May I live with ease.
Let each phrase mean what it says. If necessary, repeat one phrase a few times for the sake of clarity. You can also repeat just one word of a phrase—“safe … safe … safe”—to experience the meaning.
Take your time. Keep an image of yourself in your mind’s eye, enjoy your loving heart, and savor the meaning of the words. When you notice that your mind has wandered, which it will do after a few seconds, repeat the phrases again. If the words become meaningless, revisualize yourself in the chair and offer yourself the phrases again. If both the image of yourself sitting and the words become vague or blurry, put your hand on your heart and recall your intention to fill yourself with loving-kindness: “Just as all beings wish to be happy and free from suffering, may I be happy and free from suffering.” Then return to the phrases. Whenever you feel lost, return to the phrases.
Let this exercise be easy. Don’t try too hard. Loving-kindness is the most natural thing in the world. Distractions will always arise, and when you notice them, let them go and return to the phrases. When your attention wanders, return to giving love to yourself. Sitting with yourself is like sitting with a dear friend who’s not feeling well; you may not cure your friend, but you’ll have offered the kindness he or she deserves.
Now gently open your eyes.
GOOD WILL VERSUS GOOD FEELINGS
Loving-kindness is an acquired skill. Some people seem to have a natural talent for it. The majority of us, however, are likely to find loving-kindness meditation awkward at first. Why?
The main reason for difficulty is that we have expectations about how we’re supposed to feel. Fortunately, as Sharon Salzberg reminds us, “loving-kindness meditation works even if you don’t feel a thing!” It works with our deepest motivation: good will. Sometimes good intentions stir up good feelings, sometimes they evoke obstacles to pleasant emotions, like self-doubt or self-judgment, and sometimes they conjure up nothing at all.
Loving-kindness practice doesn’t directly change how we feel, but it helps us hold ourselves in a gentle way that lets emotions change by themselves. Do you remember the story of Michelle at the beginning of this book? Michelle’s therapeutic challenge was to give up the wish to hide her shyness from onlookers. Loving-kindness meditation was instrumental in Michelle’s recovery. By offering herself compassion first, Michelle learned to relinquish the need to control her blushing. She felt good enough about herself to risk being seen as a shy person.
Try to abandon expectations about how you should feel while doing loving-kindness meditation. If you feel discouraged by the lack of good feelings in metta meditation, bring kindness to yourself because you’re feeling discouraged: “May I be safe, happy, healthy, and live with ease.” Shift your attention away from what you want and onto how you feel, that is, “not good.” With each kind word, you’re planting a seed that will grow, in its own due time, into a good feeling. Intentions come first, feelings later.
Positive changes will occur when you least expect them. For example, when I first stood up to give a speech after learning metta meditation, I found myself saying, “May I and everyone here be happy and free from suffering.” To my amazement, my anxiety subsided considerably. After using the metta phrases for a number of years, I’ve become significantly happier and less upset when things go wrong. As I said in the Introduction, self-compassion is like having a good friend around providing encouragement at just the right moments.
THE POWER OF WORDS
Words can be more powerful than actions. A broken bone can heal in a few months, but a harsh word can create a wound that doesn’t heal in an entire lifetime. Most of the words we hear are actually going on inside us. Even if you’re not generally a talkative person, your mind is constantly chattering away. If you say unkind things to yourself (“You’re a worthless piece of s—t”), you’ll suffer. If you say nice things (“That was good!”), you’ll be happy. Words shape our experience. That’s the rationale behind using words as the focus of attention in loving-kindness meditation.
Taken together, the four loving-kindness phrases comprise a kindly attitude toward a broad range of life experience. For example, if you’re in danger, you’ll wish for safety; if you’re emotionally upset, you’ll want contentment; if you’re physically sick, you’ll wish for health; and if you’re struggling to meet everyday needs, you’ll hope for fewer problems and greater ease. The metta phrases cover all this territory.
The phrases are neither exhaustive nor etched in stone. Buddhaghosa started us out almost 1,500 years ago with the following phrases: “May I be happy and free from suffering” and “May I keep myself free from enmity, affliction, and anxiety and live happily.” As you understand more about the practice, you’ll want to create your own phrases. Here are some examples:
May I love myself just as I am.
May I be truly happy.
May I find peace in this uncertain world.
May my happiness continue to grow.
May I h
ave happiness and the causes of happiness.
May I live in peace, without too much attachment and too much aversion.
May I be free from sorrow.
May I be free of physical suffering.
May I care for myself with ease.
May I love and be loved.
Dear one, may you be happy and content.
The idea is to find words that evoke tender, warm feelings inside you. They can be sublime, like poetry, or mundane. It’s best to keep the phrases simple and easy to repeat.
During the uprising against the repressive government of Myanmar, Buddhist monks gathered in front of the home of Aung San Suu Kyi on September 22, 2007, and chanted:
May we be completely free from all danger.
May we be completely free from all grief.
May we be completely free from poverty.
May we have peace in heart and mind.
Metta phrases incline the heart toward peace and well-being in spite of the terrible circumstances happening on the ground.
You can tailor the phrases for everyday challenges in your own life. For example, if you’re caught up in shame, you can repeat, “May I accept myself just as I am.” If you feel angry, try “May I be safe and free from anger.” Avoid being too specific about your wishes, such as “May I get into the college of my choice!” lest your wish become a demand for a particular outcome. Loving-kindness is an inclination of heart, not an attempt to manipulate the environment with our thoughts.
In your formal meditation practice—when you sit down specifically to cultivate loving-kindness—try to use the same metta phrases again and again. Metta meditation is a focused attention practice, and your mind will be calmed by repetition alone. If you slip into a state of loving absorption, you may find a stream of new metta phrases flowing through you. That’s a wonderful experience, but please use your regular phrases when you return to your ordinary frame of mind.
In addition to focusing our attention, loving-kindness meditation has a contemplative component. Contemplation meditation is a method for exploring the deeper meaning of an idea, such as reading a passage from sacred scripture and rolling it over in your mind until hidden layers are revealed. Carefully chosen metta phrases work like that; when we mull over the same words again and again, we get a direct, visceral sense of their meaning. This takes time, and we may see nothing for long periods—like waiting for tulips to emerge in the spring—but it’s worth the wait.
There’s a quiet joy that comes in meditation when the metta phrases and their meaning connect. You may discover that in an unexpected moment during the day, you’ll find yourself thinking “Oh, this is happy!” While doing psychotherapy, perhaps while a tear is trickling down my cheek, I’ll note, “Oh, this is compassion.” There’s neither pride nor embarrassment in it—just the simple experience. The loving-kindness phrases and the experience come together gradually.
Compassion Meditation and the Brain
In a study by Richard Davidson and colleagues, monks with 10,000 to 50,000 hours of practice in “non-referential compassion meditation”—“unrestricted readiness and availability to help living beings”—were compared to novices with only 1 week of training. Both groups were outfitted with a head net of 128 EEG electrodes and then began to meditate. The group of monks produced exceptionally powerful gamma waves (indicating intensely focused awareness) that were 30 times stronger than in the novice meditators, the wave patterns covered exceptionally broad areas of the monks’ brains, and the wave patterns were synchronized. This unusual brain state could be quickly turned on by the experienced meditators, and it tended to linger during the rest periods rather than go into “default mode.” Also, the monks with the most experience had the highest levels of gamma waves. Davidson’s research demonstrates that with intense practice we can develop astonishing control over brain activity and evoke loving feelings at will, independent of an object or circumstances.
Another study in Davidson’s lab was designed to detect whether brain circuits that detect emotions could be strengthened through meditation. Sixteen monks with over 10,000 hours of training in nonreferential compassion meditation were compared to 16 novices who had a 2-week training period. The meditators’ brains were imaged using fMRI as they reacted to sounds (distressed woman, baby laughing, background restaurant noise). Compared to novices, the monks showed increased activity in the insula (responsible for empathy and body awareness) and the temporal parietal juncture (where emotions of others are especially perceived) in response to the sound of the distressed woman. The monks more strongly detected all emotional sounds—positive, negative, and neutral—suggesting that compassion meditation attunes the brain to process all sorts of emotional stimuli, not just to process suffering.
What matters most is the attitude behind the phrases. Words may or may not reflect how we truly feel—we can fake words and try to distort reality with them. A friend of mine once remarked that loving-kindness meditation is like talking to her pet dog. You can call your dog a “miserable wretch” in a loving way and get away with it every time. You can also say “I love you” with a scowl and scare your dog under the table. Your dog isn’t evaluating your choice of words; it’s connecting with your intentions. I saw a bumper sticker that read “I want to be the person my dog thinks I am!” Somehow our dogs see our deepest intentions and forgive us our moods. In metta meditation, stick to your core motivation—to be happy and free from suffering—and don’t get bogged down in the words. The more we incline the heart toward loving-kindness, the more that will be the habit our brains are exercising.
FINDING A WAY TO YOURSELF
You probably had difficulty focusing on yourself when you did loving-kindness meditation. That may be due to a naturally wandering mind, but more likely it’s due to ambivalence about the process. The majority of us find it strange or difficult to give ourselves love.
Even after years of practice, I occasionally feel guilty (“This is too self-centered”) when I direct metta toward myself. That comes from my childhood as well as our culture. I know that self-directed loving-kindness makes me a better person, so I remind myself, “Give yourself the attention you need so you don’t need so much attention!” It was also written in the Visuddhimagga, “Just as I want to be happy and dread pain, as I want to live and not die, so do other beings, too.” There’s no need to exclude ourselves from loving-kindness. If you feel guilty directing loving-kindness toward yourself, ask yourself who told you that focusing on yourself was wrong or how growing up in your family taught you to care only for others.
As mentioned in the last chapter, loving ourselves is used as an example in religious traditions for how we should treat others. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Self-kindness is not where the process stops—it’s the beginning. The joy of caring for others is ultimately deeper and longer lasting than caring for ourselves because it liberates us from a narrowly defined sense of “self.” Also, as the Dalai Lama says, there are so many more opportunities to love others! But when we’re in pain, as we often are, we must know how to love ourselves.
Another reason for not giving ourselves kindness is that we feel we don’t deserve it. Feelings of worthlessness are lurking in almost everyone, even in teachers of loving-kindness.
A group of Western scientists and Buddhist teachers met with the Dalai Lama in 1990 during a conference in Dharamshala, India. Sharon Salzberg asked him, on behalf of the other meditation teachers, how they might help their students who suffered from feelings of worthlessness and shame.
The Dalai Lama didn’t seem to understand the question, so he and his translator spoke back and forth on this topic. When he realized what was being asked, the Dalai Lama showed genuine surprise, and he asked the gathering whether they were certain this was really the case. They responded that it was a problem not only for their students but also for themselves. The Dalai Lama then went from person to person, inquiring, “Do you experience this? Do you?” It was hard for him to grasp that
a person could actually dislike him-or herself.
I often wonder why the Dalai Lama was so surprised by this phenomenon. Research by Kristin Neff suggests that lack of self-compassion is not a unique quality of Western life. Ironically, it’s precisely when we need love the most that it is hardest to give it to ourselves.
How can we use loving-kindness meditation to care for ourselves? Here are a few suggestions.
Opening to Pain
Pain helps. When we’re open to pain, compassion flows like water down a mountainside. The metta phrases have an uncanny ability to soothe us when we’re feeling really bad. Many people have complaints (“Too touchy-feely”; “It’s just words”) about their loving-kindness practice when they feel good, yet when they feel bad the phrases are deeply comforting. Metta meditation can be like a spouse who’s taken for granted—until a crisis comes. Explore for yourself how differently metta meditation feels when you’re happy and when you’re not.
Pain is more available than you think. The body accumulates stress all day long, consciously or unconsciously. It’s a myth that we know when we’re under stress; usually we ignore stress as it wreaks havoc on the mind and body, shortening our lives and making our days more difficult. Here’s where mindfulness comes in: Before you do metta meditation, do a quick sweep of your body and identify any places of tension. Check in with yourself emotionally too: “How am I feeling?” Acknowledge any discomfort you may be holding in your body and mind and then begin the practice.
It’s a common mistake to use loving-kindness meditation to make pain go away. The first step toward relief is being aware of pain and opening to it. When you feel emotional pain in the present moment (“This really hurts!”), a deep, sympathetic response is likely to arise (“Oh God, may I be free from suffering!”). Alternatively, if you’re battling against pain right from the start, you’ll find yourself demanding, “Stop, stop, stop, please stop the pain!” That’s perfectly understandable, but it’s a lot of work and not likely to succeed.
The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion Page 15