Sustainability with ‘metta’ in mind
A workshop for the PCSR Conference, ‘Contributing to a sustainable society’.
Kamalamani, May 2010

"The subject tonight is Love
And for tomorrow night as well
As a matter of fact
I know of no better topic
For us to discuss
Until we all
Die!"

Hafiz in Ladinsky (1996).

Introduction
In this workshop I will introduce ‘metta’ and its relevance to the themes of this conference. I will introduce and lead a session of the ‘metta bhavana’ meditation, with the chance to explore how this practice can support emotional sustainability in our work as therapists and our lives as human beings.

What is metta?
Metta approximately translates as ‘universal loving kindness’. There’s no exact translation into English. Metta has a warm, boundless, expansive, limitless quality that isn’t adequately captured by words. The ‘spirit’ of metta is communicated in this excerpt from the ‘metta sutta’, a traditional Buddhist verse:

“May everything that lives be well,
weak or strong, large or small,
seen or unseen, here or elsewhere,
present or to come, in heights and depths,
may all be well;
have that mind for all the world,
get rid of lies and pride
a mother’s mind for her baby,
her love, but now unbounded,
secure this mind of love…”

In traditional Buddhist terms, metta and mindfulness are two of the building blocks of life and practice. In my own tradition, beginners are taught three practices: the mindfulness of breathing, the metta bhavana and just sitting. Metta is a foundation practice across many different schools of Buddhism. There has recently been a growing emphasis upon mindfulness-based approaches to therapy. As yet, metta hasn’t received the same attention as mindfulness in a therapeutic setting. This is starting to be addressed, and one purpose of this workshop is to introduce another practice from Buddhism which can make a vital contribution to sustainability.

Metta is the foundation of the four ‘sublime abodes’ (or ‘brahma viharas’) in Buddhism, which are: Metta (universal loving kindness), karuna (compassion), mudita (sympathetic joy), upeksha (equanimity). Metta is the foundation of these states. When we experience metta in response to suffering, compassion (karuna) arises. When we experience metta in response to joy, sympathetic joy (mudita) arises. When we experience metta in response to joy and suffering, equanimity (upeksha) arises. So there are a number of different ways in which metta can be expressed, from our one to one interactions through to our response to what we see going on in the world. 

Introducing the metta bhavana
The metta bhavana is a meditation practice divided into five stages. The invitation of the metta bhavana is to become increasingly receptive to, and aware of, metta in your experience, towards yourself and others - both human and other than human life. In each of the stages of the practice you bring to mind different people and living beings: yourself, a friend, a neutral person, an enemy, and all sentient life. In terms of the theme of sustainability, I really appreciate that we are here reflecting upon a practice which has been around for more than two thousand years, focusing on compassion for self, other and world!

What’s the purpose of the metta bhavana?
In one sense, metta itself just is; a positive state of being which is familiar to all of us. It’s erroneous to think that metta is somehow removed from our everyday experiences of loving kindness. Having said that, practising the metta bhavana is a very effective way of making more conscious the deepening of this quality and its expression in our everyday lives. As an actual meditation practice, different people might do this practice for a variety of reasons, from wanting to feel okay, through to longing to be enlightened. A common reason for practising the metta bhavana is to get really curious about who you are, how you are, and the effect you have on yourself and all beings, human and other than human.

What is the contribution of the metta bhavana to sustainability?
In thinking about sustainability for this conference workshop, I was drawn to recalling the time when I used to do overseas sustainable development work. The work was challenging, and I remembered what would help sustain me in this work. I came up with the following, pretty spontaneously:  feeling well resourced - knowing my purpose - having my eyes wide open - being whole-hearted.

The most important part of my work was the quality of my engagement with myself and others (rather than the more technical content), in particular: my receptivity, how well I listened, how closely I noticed signals and signs in the field and how robust I was in myself, working long hours, and facing the unknown. Thinking of the list above, I am struck at how similar a list I would draw up in thinking about what’s important in my work as a therapist. So I’ve reflected upon how the metta bhavana meditation might support sustainability in a variety of different ways, explored in the rest of this paper.

Interconnection: self, other, and world
The very nature of the metta bhavana is such that it is designed to encourage us to go beyond our narrow self-views and self-interest. This practice is about having a perspective which encompasses self, other and world, reflected in the five stages. In seeing your interconnections more tangibly through the metta practice, one consequence is to become more aware of your actions and take greater responsibility, seeing which of your habits cause suffering for yourself and others and which conduce to contentment. It’s a really really tall order to be consistently aware of the consequences of your actions. Yet it’s precisely what we each need to move towards, in a real and immediate sense, if we are to move towards local or global sustainability.

A continual flow of phenomena
The most obvious point to say about metta, and about any meditation practice, is that the more you practice, the more you notice how your experience is a constant flow of thoughts, feelings, and emotions, rather than the fixed views and stories we often tell ourselves. This in itself is really important in thinking about sustainability. In my mind, the more I can recognise - really recognise - my own body-mind as a process, a flow of phenomena, intersecting with the processes of other living beings, the more I can see each of us living on the body of the planet in that way. For me, this is essential in working with clients, and in understanding the nature of the world, each of our places in it and the nature of mutual interdependence.

The ground of the intentional heart
In thinking about the starting point for the metta practice, I am reminded of a lovely quote from Pema Chodron:

“Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we already are. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That’s the ground” Pema Chodron (2001: 2).

The starting point of the metta bhavana - the first stage - is about valuing who you are. Not who you would like to be, or who you might be one day, but who you are this minute. That’s the first stage: cultivating metta for yourself. Beyond that, as Chodron says, metta is about being alive to our real, breathing, moment to moment experience, rather than trying to think nice thoughts or to do anything in particular.

At the heart of the metta bhavana is understanding your intentions in the moment. The metta bhavana is often misunderstood, quite understandably, as focusing upon generating nice warm thoughts. That isn’t the point - although the warm thoughts can be pleasant! The point of the practice is to become increasingly clear about your intention with regard to each of the people and beings in the practice, in turn. Valuing yourself, knowing your starting point, knowing what’s you and yours, and being as aware as you are able of your intentions seem pretty central to good enough therapeutic work and living life sustainably. 

Intimacy and imagination
Practising the metta bhavana, and in particular, having a strong sense of your intentions, is to have a pretty live and intimate relationship with yourself. This meditation can bring about a strongly-experienced, heart-felt intimacy. As this sense of intimacy deepens, we are likely to experience a range of emotions in the context of this meditation practice: sadness, bliss, hatred, etc. This intimacy with your whole palette of emotions whilst sitting in the quiet (or seemingly quiet) context of meditation is invaluable in terms of sustainability. In becoming more emotionally intimate and able to be with this whole range of emotions, we are more likely to be equipped to face the big questions we currently face as humans, without falling so easily into overwhelm or horrified anxiety.

Getting to this intimacy can be helped by engaging active imagination in your metta practice. As we bring to mind the beings in each stage, and then extend metta to all life, human and other than human, we are bringing in a spacious, cosmic, transpersonal sense. To face the world as it is, at present, calls, I think, for a high degree of intimacy, imagination, and faith (that we can each make a difference), yet these are often not talked about or included, perhaps being seen as something of a luxury, or perhaps as a ‘spiritual’ irrelevance in the face of more pressing technical matters. I personally think that we need to engage on this cosmic, universal, global level of all sentient life, starting with ourselves, if we are to find more sustainable ways of living and engaging.

Embodiment - getting the head, heart, and guts talking
It’s difficult to do the metta bhavana practice in a purely ‘heady’ way. Not impossible, but difficult. Very often, practising the metta bhavana over time can be a very effective way of noticing all your responses, from your raw, gut feelings, to your more refined heart feelings, through to hearing your strongly-held views. This practice seems to bring a greater emotional robustness, alongside a heightened sensitivity, perhaps because it has the effect of getting the different parts of you ‘talking’, as it were.

Bringing to mind the presence of others also has this embodying effect. It’s hard to bring someone to mind as a sort of nice idea. In my experience, I picture a person’s smile, or hear their voice, or more often than not, imagine I am sitting with them, feeling their energetic presence, from their physical through to their ethereal body.

This richer sense of embodiment can be challenging and liberating. It can be useful to notice how often we tend to work from one part of our body or another, perhaps forgetting that there can be a constant flow of dialogue between the energy and expression of the head, heart, guts. I am reminded of the worlds of Suzuki, and the importance for me of staying with a live sense of the mysterious koan of the body/mind split:

“Our body and mind are not two and not one. If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong; if you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one” Suzuki (1970: 25).


Being with conflict and difference
The metta bhavana meditation practice is, in some senses, a study in our preferences, peccadilloes and how we can love someone one week and feel immensely irritated by them the next - the person I feel friendly towards this week in the second stage of the practice can suddenly pop up in the enemy stage next week. This practice can be an effective way of becoming aware of and acknowledging difficult feelings and transforming them over time.

The metta bhavana is quite a radical practice in this way. It’s not suggested that we should pretend that we don’t have feelings of annoyance, frustration, anger or whatever. The point is to notice as fully as possible what happens when we bring those feelings into the context of meditation, face to face, as it were, with the person we see as causing that annoyance, frustration and anger. In my experience, this can have an alchemical effect, and can be a very effective form of meditative conflict resolution. It can mirror back to you what you are bringing to a particular scenario, and what another is bringing, in a clean, clear, mirror-like way, held in compassion.

Relaxing…
In thinking about the metta bhavana, I am reminded of my first meditation teacher. “If all else fails - just relax!” he would say. So if you find it hard to follow the meditation follow his advice and just relax. I am reminded of some lines from my favourite Pablo Neruda poem, which seems particularly fitting to the themes of this conference:

“…If we were not so single minded
About keeping our lives moving,
And for once could do nothing,
Perhaps a huge silence
Might interrupt this sadness
Of never understanding ourselves
And of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
As when everything seems dead
And later proves to be alive…”

Perhaps this is something we need to spend more time on - including during sitting meditation - the art of relaxing for its own sake. I undertook a little informal Facebook research in preparing this workshop, and asked all my Buddhist friends to say the most important thing they had learned in doing the metta bhavana. I appreciated the comment from a very seasoned meditator and teacher:

“Metta is 'here' and (sometimes) 'doing' metta bhavana can tend to obscure it ... but that doesn't mean that doing metta bhavana is optional!”

That’s a really important point - not trying too hard in an over-willful way, or looking for metta outside of our experience, but just keeping on practising.

Conclusion
Metta can open up what’s known in Buddhism as the ‘point of freedom’. This is the point on the traditional Buddhist wheel of life between feeling and craving. As we start to notice the arising of a feeling, we often habitually respond by craving, reaching for the next thing/person/feeling/habit to distract ourselves, rather than staying with our live experience. Metta and mindfulness can support us to open up this gap, so we have greater choice and freedom in how we choose to respond in each of life’s situations, with greater clarity and compassion. In facing the current global questions, it seems to me that we might usefully work towards finding some sort of collective ‘point of freedom’.

Metta can be a far-reaching way of understanding our intentions, preferences, prejudices, and how we are with difference and conflict. Metta can fuel our connection with ourselves, others and all sentient life, giving us a richer sense of empathy. In practising the ‘metta bhavana’ we give ourselves the opportunity to become more emotionally awake, balancing mindfulness and metta, reason and emotion. Practising metta can also bring a greater emotional robustness, alongside a more attuned emotional sensitivity, sustaining our work as therapists and humans. The most important thing, in the nature of an invitation - something which is central to the practice of Buddhism - is to try it for yourself and see how it contributes to your understanding and practice of sustainability.


References
Pema Chodron (2001) The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. Shambhala Publishing.
Chapter 7.
Jack Kornfield (1994) A Path With Heart. Rider Publishing.
Daniel Ladinsky (1996) The Subject Tonight is Love. Penguin Compass. 
Nagabodhi (2003) Metta: The Practice of Loving Kindness. Windhorse Publications.
Paramananda (1996) Change Your Mind. Windhorse Publications. Chapter 3.
Sharon Salzberg (1995) Loving Kindness: the Revolutionary Art of Happiness. Shambhala Publications.
Suzuki, S. (1970) Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Weatherhill.
Vessantara (2006) The Heart (Art of Meditation Series). Windhorse Publications.

Online metta bhavana resources
Wildmind


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