Lesson 4: Metta (loving-kindness)

Why?

The first time I heard of metta (e.g. loving-kindness), was when a friend sent me a guided meditation. The meditation had some melancholic music in the background and a woman was telling me that I should wish happiness to others and myself. My immediate reaction was: ‘What is this hippy bullshit?’. Little did I know that it had deep fundamental wisdom. Metta is not about forcing yourself to be happy and always be happy with people, but it is about seeing our common humanity in ourselves and others. Therefore, this practice will have a deep impact on how you relate to others and yourself. What is often said, is that others see the impact of this practice quicker than yourself: they tend to find you more pleasant.

The core of the practice is to plant seeds of kindness using intention in your mind. You do this by trying to wish people happiness and other good qualities. This will cause your mind to be kinder in general as well. Practices like concentration and mindfulness try to accept negative thought patterns and see them as something separate from you. Metta also changes the mind to a more loving mind.

The practice consists of three parts: mantra, visualization, and the feeling of metta. We will discuss all three and also how to best practice this meditation using the body.

The phrases

A mantra is a couple of sentences that you repeat to yourself in a repetitive, meditational way. This repetition is very similar to the breath. Instead of focusing on the breath, you can focus on the mantra while you say it in your head.

For metta meditation, you can be quite creative: pick 3-4 phrases about qualities that you would like other people to have. A couple of examples:

‘May you be well’
‘May you be happy’
‘May you be peaceful’
‘May you be loved’
Etc…

Notice here that the phrases are wishes that you would like to come true. Pick 3-4 of these phrases and repeat those.

Visualization of people

The next thing we want to do is to pick a bunch of people to send those nice phrases to. There are different categories of people you can pick. However, during this course, we are going to focus on four categories: somebody close to you (can also be your pet!), yourself, somebody you do not know (like the cashier in the supermarket), and somebody you do not like. Yourself is actually the most important one, but I will come back to that later. Picking somebody that we do not like, can be really hard. Remember that metta is not about trying to force yourself to be happy with that person, but seeing the humanity in them as well. In the beginning, I would advise against picking someone you really despise.

There are usually two ways of visualizing. The most common way is to visualize a person and send the phrases and metta towards this person. The other method (this is the one that I like) is to visualize a bubble of metta around you and include people in this bubble one by one. See which method you prefer.

An important aspect is playfulness and experimentation. See what works best for you.

Feel the Metta!

In the beginning, you might think: ‘Why am I doing this?’. That is a fair question, I definitely had that. What we would like to cultivate is a feeling of metta. This is a warm, loving feeling towards yourself or someone else. It is very pleasant and calm. There are two reasons to want to cultivate this:

1. It is nice. Yes, this might sound a bit stupid, but meditation is also about enjoying yourself.

2. It will produce more metta in daily life. This will cause us to be nicer and feel nicer in daily life. We will understand our shared humanity more and more with this meditation.

Connect to the energy body!

The feeling of metta is felt and cultivated in the energy body from last lesson. This is why the main focus of this meditation is still in the body, but now our focus is the whole body with the heart as the center. A good way to start is by connecting/feeling the body as a whole. Then one wants to start adding the phrases and the visualization. Both of these will be more on the background and the whole body is on the foreground. We are trying to feel what this does to our energy body and if we can cultivate the lovely feeling of metta in our body.

When we do not feel the feeling of metta, we do not try to force ourselves to feel something. Doing the steps of the practice when you are not able to generate the feeling of metta can still be very valuable. And sometimes just by continuing, we start to feel it.

When you do feel it, it might be interesting to focus mostly on the feeling instead of the phrases and visualization. This feeling can be very pleasant and boost your practice even more.

Practice: Metta meditation (15 min)

Summary of the practice

Pick the people for this metta session: A person close to you, yourself, someone you do not know and someone you do not like. Do not pick someone you hate intensely in the beginning.
Pick the phrases that you are going to use this session.
Start with the person close to you and start visualizing this person, while also saying the phrases. Our main focus will be on the body while we visualize and say the phrases.
If a feeling of metta arises in the body (usually a nice, warm and pleasant feeling in the heart area), start tuning into that feeling by focusing on it. You can even drop the phrases and visualization.