Speaker 1 · 0:03Do you truly, deeply feel that you have empathy and compassion for all living beings? What about those people you can't seem to get along with? And does your compassion extend to yourself? Mindfulness is the act of applying attention to our present moment experience, just as it is, without judgment. But a non-judgmental attitude is not to be confused with avoidance or non-caring. Rather, mindfulness encourages the cultivation of empathy, loving-kindness, and compassion. One way to cultivate this caring attitude intentionally is with loving-kindness meditations, referred to in the Pali language as meta meditation. In this episode, Sean Fargo shares his personal experiences with loving kindness practice and offers practical advice to those who are practicing or teaching these heart-opening meditations.
Speaker 2 · 1:17Start of my second year as a monk, I went to one of my teachers and I said, I really think I could use more care in my practice. Because up until that point, I was kind of focused on like concentration, mindfulness of breathing. I was kind of like using that as a crutch a little bit, you know, using my breath as an anchor so that I wouldn't necessarily have to be with raw emotion. It's like, oh, okay, I'll do mindful walking or mindfulness of breathing. Like that's easy. You know, being mindful of my emotions is hard. And I think most guys are like that. I think many women feel that too, but I was using it as a crutch. And then my teacher said, Oh, well, try reading Loving Kindness by Sharon Salzberg and see what happens as like a starting point. I said, Okay. And so I had a two-week solo silent retreat in my little hut in the forest. Didn't see anyone. People brought me a plate of food each day at my doorstep, and I would eat it. And I was just kind of stuck with the book for two weeks. And it hurt like hell. It really hurt. Like my heart just broke open. And I had three boxes of Kleenex. And it hurt like physically, emotionally. And it wasn't like I was hanging out on a cloud of bliss, of like care for everything. I had to work through the pain in my heart. And it's like scrubbing your heart with an SOS, like Brillo pad. And it hurts. It's like, oh no, I want like a little cotton swab or like a hug around my heart. But like the loving kindness practice is like a brillo pad. It's the brought up stuff. And I had to just be with it. I had no alternative. A lot of it is just kind of not allowing yourself to distract yourself, but to stay with it. You know, no screens, no like Wikipedia, like how-tos just being with the raw emotion and experience. But it usually gets more intense. And so in these meditations, what I often say is, you know, allowing the emotion, allowing the feelings to stay, allowing them to intensify, allowing them to change, allowing them to go. Like full allowance. Like full allowance. Because a lot of us only kind of allow things to happen if we want them to be happening. Like, I'll allow you to go right now. Meanwhile, I'm kind of pushing it. Like that's not full allowance. Full allowance is do what you want. I'm just gonna be with it. That's my job. I'm just gonna be with you. It's surrendering your illusion of control.
Speaker 1 · 4:50We may struggle with surrender, with allowance, and with applying feelings of love and kindness to all beings everywhere, equally, including to ourselves. But imagine for a moment what it would feel like to live in a world where everyone did just that. How much harm would be minimized, and how much beauty we might create if each of us lived more mindfully with greater empathy and compassion for everyone and everything.
Speaker 2 · 5:28Loving kindness, practice is around this sense of care and benevolence for ourselves and others. Can we share the sense of kindness and care for more and more people, more and more beings, including the ones who get on our nerves or we flat out disagree with or are afraid of? You know, loving kindness practice can be very helpful for addressing xenophobia. Because a lot of people around the world are xenophobic. You know, it's not just a US thing, it's a human thing. So loving kindness can soften xenophobia, increase the sense of care for more and more kinds of people. You know, when we're talking around the suffering of certain populations, then I would personally talk about loving kindness more in terms of compassion. Loving kindness in the face of suffering is compassion. You put these two ingredients together of loving kindness and suffering, and it kind of blends into compassion. So I would frame it in those terms usually when describing the suffering of certain kinds of people.
Speaker 1 · 6:58As our mindfulness deepens and our hearts open, we become more aware of the suffering in the world. If we take this on as our own pain, it's easy to become overwhelmed. Integrating compassion with the wisdom of equanimity protects us from this type of burnout. Cultivating mindfulness and compassion together expands our capacity to be present without needing to step away to recover.
Speaker 2 · 7:33Equanimity practice can be really helpful in dealing with the vicissitudes of the world. Equanimity is sort of that combo of loving kindness and wisdom. And sometimes the wisdom aspect can be looked at around this is the way things are, things are always changing. Am I taking this personally? How can I look at this from a much bigger lens? You know, I am myself prone to these vicissitudes myself, just as everyone else is. So sometimes looking at the elements of wisdom can be helpful as well if the heart is feeling heavy, if the compassion is feeling deep, and you're still feeling a little lopsided. The wing of compassion and the wing of wisdom, how can we up our wisdom so that both wings are strong? You know, are they both flying pretty strong so that I'm flying straight? Because if the wing of the heart is really strong, but the wing of wisdom is a little off-center, then we might crash. Easier said than done.
Speaker 1 · 8:51In addition to preventing crashes, equanimity serves another valuable role, that of equalizing our feelings toward those we are close to, to those who present us with challenges, and even to those who commit harmful acts. For offering compassion is not the same as condoning.
Speaker 2 · 9:29You know, you can create really strong boundaries in sort of conventional terms, physical terms, social terms, but like, can you include more and more people in your heart? Can you include everyone in your heart? Easier said than done, but that's the encouragement. So it's not about condoning everything or everyone, but remembering that a lot of people do really stupid things because of their own suffering and delusion. And if we knew their whole story, we may risk falling in love with them. And there's also gray areas in this, but the point is we're not condoning you know violence, we're not condoning the act, but can we still have care for the person who did something regrettable? You know, Rick Hansen actually is kind of famous for using this old adage of we all have this wolf of love in our heart, and we all have a wolf of hate. And we're all capable of just about anything if we're poked enough. Most of us aren't above despicable acts if we were put in extreme situations. Mindfulness training can help us to stay present for who we really are, or to keep cultivating and feeding the wolf of love so that there's less and less likelihood for us to do or say or think something despicable. But it takes constant feeding of that wolf of love, you know, and the more we feed the wolf of love, the less food that the wolf of hate gets. And so loving-kindness practice can help us to you know have a healthy love wolf.
Speaker 1 · 12:02As we make space in our hearts to love everyone, we also want to include ourselves. When practicing loving-kindness meditation, some say to begin with the self, for we have to learn to love ourselves first. Others say it's best to leave the self for last. So which is correct? A different way to pose the question might be, how am I feeling today?
Speaker 2 · 12:34The suggestion would be to kind of start with whatever's easiest. To feel that sense of care. So for most people, I think it would be to start with someone else who you just really love or kind of feel excited about, or who you feel like connected with or drawn to in some way, like at the heart level. Could even be like cute squirrel in your backyard, or a dog, or spiritual figure, someone who makes your heart sing when you think about them. You know, could be a grandparent, or but the intention really is to kind of connect with the heart and that sense of care and kind of go in baby steps. So for most people, that's someone else. For some people, meta for self might be the hardest. So maybe that's last rather than second. Everyone is gonna be different, you know. The self can be problematic, you know, and it can even change day to day or hour to hour. You know, maybe I'm filled with self-hatred one minute, and then you know, later in the day feeling very different, and it's so much easier to connect with myself in a loving way. So it's not static for any given person either. I tend to reserve it for last. I tend to start with a benefactor, like someone who's really easy to feel that care for, and then keep going in baby steps towards someone who I really like. Maybe they don't make my heart sing, you know, at full blast, but I care about them. You know, it's kind of easy for me to wish them well. Maybe it's a friend, a good friend, or a neighbor or something who I really connect with or something, you know, and then move to someone else who I don't know quite as well, but you know, they're fine. You know, I can wish them well. And then maybe like a very neutral person who I really don't know at all. But I think the most common example of a neutral person is the grocery checkout clerk, but you know, it's kind of become cliche at this point that that's your neutral person. So there's lots of neutral people we can choose from, and then people who we kind of have more problematic relationship with, who it's like, well, I don't really care for them, but I can wish them well anyway, and then move on to a difficult person who we don't like, and we can keep pushing the envelope in the sense that like keep working with people who are more and more difficult over time in baby steps. You know, we don't want to start with our nemesis as the difficult person, or we don't want to go into figures in history who we just can't ever imagine ourselves wishing well, but you know, we can build up to that over time gradually. I usually end with the self. I mean, if I'm working with someone one-on-one and I get a sense for how they think of themselves, or you know, if I get a sense for how they relate to themselves from the heart, then I might intuitively either start with them because maybe they really love themselves fully with acceptance, or maybe put them second or third. But if I'm doing a big group and there's a lot of wild cards at play, then I'll usually end with the self. That said, I don't know that there's a right or wrong. You know, a lot of people start with the self and just give it a go. But regardless, you know, metto for yourself, I think it's helpful to emphasize that can we open to a sense of care to whatever extent we can? Like it's not like we have to love ourselves fully, unconditionally right now, but like, can we even open to the possibility of care for ourselves? Or can we just wish ourselves a simple sense of care, or wish ourselves warmth or a little more care than normal, or a little more benevolence or something? Opening to that gradually rather than getting a sense that we have to completely love ourselves like right now. So whether we're at the start of a meta meditation in the middle or at the end, I just want to be sensitive to people's difficulty with themselves and just kind of encourage that sense of opening to a sense of care for ourselves or feeling a sense of care just gradually and not conveying any judgment that there's a right or a wrong, good or a bad, or a black or a white, or all or nothing. You know, just kind of a gradual opening of the sense of care to whatever extent we can.
Speaker 1 · 17:58Gradually opening the heart, softening our judgments, and practicing self-compassion in conjunction with loving kindness can be made easier by dropping from the brain to the body, from cognition into the experience of felt sensation. Emotions, after all, reside in the body. So why not start there?
Speaker 2 · 18:27One of the things that I'm personally practicing with is sort of like a meta loving kindness practice, but really in a focused, somatic sense. So feeling care, feeling love, feeling it around different parts of the body. That's personally what I'm trying to sense into more and more right now is can I feel into every cell of my body or any cell of my body the sense of friendliness or care or benevolence or whatever you want to call it? But can I feel into a sense of warmth and inclusion or connection? And I know this might sound a little woo-woo, but can I feel like this care and different parts of the body? Especially the more problematic areas. Everyone has different parts of the body we may like or have fear around or pain or whatever it is, but can we gradually gently sense into those areas with a sense of warmth, tenderness?
Speaker 1 · 19:48As with everything, the words we use affect the way we feel. Certain words during meditation can help facilitate a connection to specific felt sensations. Meta meditation makes special use of words. It is typically practiced by extending care in the form of a wish. So, are some loving-kindness phrases better than others?
Speaker 2 · 20:21Sometimes these minor shifts in wording choices or phrases can make a big difference. We may resonate with one word one day or one moment, and then the other word at the other moment, and kind of intuitively sensing into what feels skillful or wholesome or opening or deepening. And you know, sometimes people play with the phrases like these loving kindness phrases. Like, may I be safe, may I be healthy, may I be happy, may I live with ease, may I feel safe, may I feel healthy, may I feel happy, may I feel more ease or safe, or feeling safe, opening to safe, healthy, healthy, opening to health, you know, and just kind of wiggling around a little bit.
Speaker 1 · 21:23As always, sensing into the body is a helpful practice. Becoming familiar with the felt sensation of care can help us become more trusting of our intuition and more confident around our word choices.
Speaker 2 · 21:42In general, it's fine to find phrases that you feel. So to play around with the language a little bit or the wording to find something that really suits you that you can resonate with and that you can actually feel around the heart, like around the chest. So it's fine to find the languaging or the wording that suits you in this moment. Ultimately, it's about the feeling. So we can use the words as kind of like a tool. I mean, there's so much we could say about this, but in general, it's usually just about the feeling. So whatever wording allows you to access your heart and that care is the main thing. You know, there's nothing special about specific words, there's nothing magical about certain phrases. And I think it's helpful to just notice whether wording that you're choosing might be building a sense of ego or specialness that I might be better than others. Or some people find words like I am amazing, and like affirmations can be very helpful for building a sense of worthiness and stuff, but you just want to be careful that we're not building ego or we're not comparing ourselves as being better than or worse than other people, so it's really more of about a sense of care, connection, humility, compassion, you know, that we can feel and that feels like natural, common, gentle, or just you know, it can feel powerful, but it's not coming from a place of ego. It's more just like accessing that natural care or the authentic heart. That tends to be my rule of thumb for phrases, you know, may we be safe, may we be healthy, may we be happy. And then I, you know, we as in my family, or we as in the whole world, or whatever you want. And some people will repeat a set of phrases, or even just one phrase over and over for a while, or sometimes we'll repeat phrases and then over time drop most of the words until we just repeat safe, healthy, happy, ease, or like single words, and we'll repeat those, or we'll just like even just kind of sense into safety without even like having a word, but it's like feeling into safety, feeling into happiness, feeling into ease. But ultimately, again, I think it's more about the feeling and seeing if we can kind of form that intention of cultivating that feeling outside of the meditation as much as we can. But like these phrases or like loving kindness in general is very helpful for our mindfulness practice in the sense that it helps us to diffuse judgments, you know. So that mindfulness is this non-judgmental moment-to-moment awareness. And so loving-kindness practices help us to diffuse judgments and meet experience with less and less judgment and more openness, inclusion, curiosity, humility, etc.
Speaker 1 · 25:45This open-heartedness is not only reserved for matter or loving kindness practice, we can apply it to all of our mindfulness meditations. We might invite in a sense of support at the start of our practice. Bring in caring, kind curiosity throughout, or end each meditation with a moment of intentional connection to the heart.
Speaker 2 · 26:18I kind of like ending meditations with some sort of heart practice of some kind, and so kind of like a loving-kindness practice, but breath-related, where it's like, may we breathe with ease, may we breathe with kindness for our surroundings, may we breathe with care for our connection with the world, may we breathe with gratitude for each breath.
Speaker 1 · 26:55Thank you, Sean Fargo, for reminding us that while opening the heart is not easy, there is great benefit from the practices of loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity. If you'd like to learn more about loving-kindness, equanimity, and compassion, listen to our previous episode, Sharon Salzberg on Healing Ourselves and the World for Real Change with Sean Fargo. May we all go forth, breathing with a little more care, grace, and kindness in our personal practice, in each moment of our daily lives.
