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Why Metta? Metta is the Pali word for loving kindness. (Pali was the everyday language spoken in the Buddha’s time, as opposed to the more scholarly Sanskrit.) Metta sits at the heart of the Buddha’s teachings, and it is very much a practice rather than just an idea. It’s a practice of offering loving kindness to others and, just as importantly, to ourselves. In its truest sense, that second part may be one of the hardest things a human being can do. Jung saw this clearly when he wrote that we may discover “I myself am the enemy who must be loved.” Because offering metta to ourselves can feel so alien, we can begin by offering it to someone else, someone it is easy to love unconditionally. Then slowly, like a selfie, we turn the camera around and include ourselves in our circle of compassion. Without that turn, the offering is incomplete. This isn’t easy, especially when we’re going through a period of intense self-doubt or self-loathing. That’s why it’s a practice: you keep doing it no matter what, and then, almost like magic, it begins to work. When Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman were with us last month, Trudy led a guided loving kindness meditation. She asked us to picture ourselves as young children and offer that young self our love and kindness, which made it so much easier. A brilliant metta hack! For me, one of the most powerful moments of the morning came when a woman, a psychotherapist, asked Jack how to handle a very difficult situation with one of her patients. We could all feel how painful this was for her. The first thing Jack did was point out that the situation was so hard precisely because she cared so much about her patient. Then he asked all of us to turn toward her, to really see her, and to offer her our loving kindness. Perhaps it would have been easier to ignore her pain or push it away, or worse, to judge her for being emotional. But because of the depth of Jack’s understanding and practice, he created an atmosphere in which more than 130 people turned toward her without hesitation and did this wholeheartedly. What struck me, though, was that the harder part was hers: being on the receiving end of all that goodwill. If it had been me, I probably would have wanted to get up and run out of the room. We give first so that we can receive, so that we can keep giving and keep receiving, again and again, until we find the ease to accept loving kindness from the people who are so willing and able to offer it. And then life starts to get a lot easier. Hallelujah!
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