MEDITATION ON LOVING KINDNESS

by Brian Ruhe

The antidote to anger or aversion is to contemplate upon it’s opposite, friendliness or loving-kindness. The word ‘metta’ means a profound deep friendliness towards yourself and all beings. This is a very wholesome meditation practice and it’s also quite enjoyable to do. It works indirectly. If you are angry at someone you counteract that by sending loving-kindness to yourself first, then to a very dearly loved friend and then to neutral people. After you have genuinely built up some feeling of friendliness, benevolence and love towards yourself, the friend and a neutral person, then you try to think of the hostile person as a neutral person. Just visualize them as a stranger in a crowd of people and try to extend your feeling to them as though they were a neutral person, thinking “May they be peaceful. May they be at ease.” Neutralize any feeling of aversion. This is a skillful way of sending loving-kindness to difficult people.

Some people think that if they are angry at someone they should send them loving kindness, but that’s not always good advice. Someone may feel worse about themselves if they attempt that, feeling that they are incapable of generating kindness. If you use the indirect approach, what matters is that you are displacing the ill-will and aversion in your mind with friendliness by sending it to yourself and to a dearly loved friend or benefactor. That’s great, just to go that far. You can stop there if you want, with the anger quelled. It’s negative karma, which can rebound upon you, to nurse a grudge. And it’s good karma to break that up by sustaining those thoughts of loving-kindness, which will come back to you.

To practice metta, close your eyes and sit upright in meditation posture. Begin with thoughts of goodwill, friendliness, loving-kindness and direct them to yourself, thinking “May I be happy. May I find true happiness…” or use phrases of your own. Try to invoke this emotion with words, images, memories and imagination. Then extend it outwards to the subjects mentioned above plus you can include all kinds of people and other beings.

You can follow my guided meditation CD with tracks 5 and 6, which is a 10 minute guided contemplation on loving-kindness followed by a 20 minute guided contemplation on loving-kindness. You can do the short one or you can really bliss out and do a whole half hour in a row if you like. For more detailed instructions on metta meditation go to my website at theravada.ca and read “Meditation on Loving Kindness” by my teacher Venerable Sona, and the written guided meditation, as well as listen to audio track 5 and 6 from my guided meditation CD.

The benefits of loving-kindness are to be aspired towards but it takes regular practice which should be repeated, developed, made much of and made a habit of, in order that it does uplift your life. It leads to great strength and happiness in one’s mind.

May you be well, happy and peaceful,

Brian Ruhe