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Brahmavihāras: Loving-Kindness (3 of 5)

I want to mention again that on Monday, I said I am teaching a retreat this week, and the three talks I'm giving for the retreat are being made available on this YouTube channel. They are live when I'm giving them, and the idea is also to post them. Yesterday was Monday, so today at 4:00 PM California time, and Friday at 4:00 PM California time, if you'd like to attend this retreat I'm teaching, you can participate at least by listening to the Dharma talk. It is kind of unusual to have a retreat Dharma talk made so public, but with the pandemic, I thought it would be useful to offer this to whoever might feel it's supportive.

To continue the talks on loving-kindness, on mettā^[1], on goodwill—I delight in just saying those words. I think they are such wonderful qualities and touch something precious and valuable inside, just to evoke the qualities of mettā, kindness, friendliness, and goodwill.

That wasn't always the case for me. When I was first introduced to the teachings of mettā and loving-kindness, I had a background where the way I understood them was that they were artificial. It was like artificially creating feelings of goodwill or kindness. They felt kind of sticky, excessively sweet, or sentimental. I was much more practical and pragmatic; I just wanted to have a spirituality that was about waking up, about being present in a direct, unmediated way. This loving-kindness thing was just getting in the way.

When my early Theravada teachers would do guided loving-kindness meditation, I just tuned them out and continued doing my basic mindfulness practice. This went on until such a time that, through the mindfulness itself—it was kind of like mindfulness is a tenderizing force—something settled and relaxed. Something where I was holding myself closed began to open. At some point, I started having this very nice feeling inside that was new to me. It was a very pleasant, very useful, warm, nice feeling. It was very different than compassion, which I had already tapped into through practice, but this was something else.

Then, at some point, I thought, "Maybe this is what these teachers are talking about. Yes, it is! This is what they mean by this goodwill and this mettā." Rather than being something I had to construct or make happen, it was welling up inside. In recognizing it, the whole thing about practicing mettā and loving-kindness became quite valuable for me, and a very valuable part of my life.

When I say these words—mettā, goodwill, kindness—just saying the words touches something in my heart. My heart sings a little bit to those concepts and ideas.

The Self-Care of Mettā

This is the topic for this week. One of the things I want to say is that in emphasizing goodwill and loving-kindness, this Theravada tradition also does it for oneself. Because meditation practice involves closing your eyes and focusing inwardly on your own inner experience, it's easy to criticize it as being self-centered. In fact, back in the early years when I was meditating—I haven't heard this for many years now—people would complain that people doing 40 minutes of meditation each day were spending their time being selfish. They felt that someone who is religious should really be out there doing things in the world, sacrificing themselves.

The people who complained about the "selfish" meditators meditating for 40 or 45 minutes were probably spending two or three hours a day watching television. But television watching belonged to a different domain of life than the religious life, and the religious life should really be about being altruistic. Doing religious life inwardly was seen as being selfish.

I don't think it's that way at all, and it certainly wasn't for the Buddha. It's not a self-centered path, because self-centeredness—being preoccupied with oneself—is actually a way of harming oneself. If you really care about yourself and see yourself as important, you wouldn't be selfish, because of the harm it does to oneself.

The idea is that there is a mutuality in this world of ours. The more we care for ourselves, love ourselves, and free ourselves, the more we benefit others. And the more we benefit others without harming ourselves, we are also benefiting ourselves. You can see this in the practice of loving-kindness. As we offer our care to others—this mettā care, this kindness, and this friendliness—we benefit as well. If these feelings are really genuine—not artificial, not forced, not obligated, but arising from a wonderful place inside—then as we express them and live them, it vibrates, it flows, and it opens up. A warmth happens here. It is nourishing for the person who has the kindness. Compassion, also, is meant to nourish the one who is compassionate. If we're not somehow nourished, or if there's not some satisfying feeling in having loving-kindness, it probably isn't quite loving-kindness, or it's loving-kindness mixed up with other things.

In loving others, the loving person benefits. In the teachings of Buddhism, the loving person is allowed to benefit from the love. It's not selfish; it's a byproduct. It's not selfish because developing oneself and growing oneself is a way to become a person who is more beneficial to others. You become more able to meet others, really see them, and offer a presence as if that person is important—maybe the most important person at that moment in time.

If we diminish ourselves, feel somehow that we're less and not important, demean ourselves, are critical of ourselves, or don't have this care and valuing of ourselves, then we actually have less to offer others. When we meet someone else, we're not really meeting them fully. They don't feel the full goodness of who we are. They might feel a kind of goodness if we're trying to be nice, but it's not really full, and it might be a little bit of trying too hard sometimes. But to relax deeply, be at ease, be at home in oneself, and to feel that regardless of one's foibles and shortcomings, we completely deserve—and it is appropriate for us—to love and care for this being that is here, for ourselves.

It isn't like everyone in the world deserves love and care, except there's one exception, one person who just doesn't make the cut, and that's oneself. It doesn't work that way. Everyone does.

This practice of mindfulness and the practice of loving-kindness is a practice of including and caring for oneself. Mindfulness is a self-care process. The idea is to care for ourselves, love ourselves, see ourselves as important, and really learn how to soften and relax the ways in which we suffer, the ways in which we close down and diminish ourselves, so we have more to give others.

You can't teach a foreign language unless you learn their language yourself first. There are many situations where you can't teach a path of freedom unless you've been on that path yourself. And you can't know love—you can't offer love—unless you really know it here for yourself. So, it is okay to benefit from the practice of loving-kindness.

The Eleven Benefits of Loving-Kindness

It's not selfish to focus here and have this love for ourselves. One of the great delights of a spiritual life—and I've heard people in other religions say this outside of Buddhism—is that it's possible to have lots of love for others: warmth, kindness, friendship, goodwill, whatever words work for you, and not need to have it come back. Our well-being doesn't have to be dependent on being loved by others. As adults, we have a bigger need to love than we do to be loved. If we have a strong need to be loved—and I want to respect that need, for sure—that need is most benefited, found, or resolved if we are the one who loves ourselves, if we can learn to offer care, kindness, and goodwill to this person here.

If we practice loving-kindness, or just practice more goodwill in our life, and learn to explore it, feel it, appreciate it when it's there, and expand and enhance it whenever we can, there are many benefits. The Buddhist tradition lists eleven benefits that come from doing loving-kindness. The description specifies developing this to a high degree, but I think we get some of these benefits even if we just start doing it in small ways. It's a delightful list, and I wanted to read these eleven benefits of loving-kindness to you:

1. One sleeps happily.
2. One wakes happily.
3. One has no bad dreams.
4. One is loved by others. (One doesn't need to be loved by others, but one is loved by others—that's a nice balance.)
5. One is loved by non-humans. (Maybe that means animals, or maybe it means the devas. Buddhism believes in all these devas^[2] that are floating around.)
6. One is guarded by the devas. (I think that when one practices kindness, friendliness, and goodwill, there are seen and unseen ways in which the situations and people around us then treat us differently, and there is a kind of protection that comes with it.)
7. Fire, poison, or sword won't touch one. (I don't know about that, but it's quite a wonderful benefit if it's true that you're protected from fire, poison, and weapons.)
8. One's mind becomes concentrated quickly. (This is good for meditators. Your mind becomes concentrated quickly because you have less to be agitated or upset about if there's more love, so it's easier to get settled.)
9. One's complexion becomes clear. (That's nice! It's a lot cheaper than other ways of getting a clear complexion.)
10. One dies with the mind free from confusion. (I see this as a real benefit. To die well, to die at ease and at peace, to die with an open heart without confusion is one of the great potentials or possibilities. Mindfulness is said to support that, but so does this goodwill, this mettā.)
11. If no higher attainment is reached, one is reborn in the Brahma realms^[3].

Some of these benefits speak to us moderns and some of them don't, but I just delight in this grand list of wonderful benefits of it all.

Living Like Milk and Water

I'll read you one more wonderful quote. The Buddha once asked a group of three monks, "Are you living together on friendly and harmonious terms, as milk and water mix together? Do you regard each other with affection?"

The monks said they were. The Buddha said, "Well, how do you do this?"

One of them answered, "Since it has occurred to me that I am fortunate to be living with others in the holy life, the practice life, I have loving-kindness towards them in speech, conduct, and thought. I openly and privately extend my loving-kindness."

So, to live together like milk and water, harmoniously mixing together with others, is one of the benefits of loving-kindness.

Thank you, and I look forward to being here tomorrow. Sorry I went over time; it hasn't usually happened this way, but, you know, the topic is love. So thank you.