How & Why to Practice Metta Towards Yourself

This is a short excerpt from a talk on metta dealing specifically with how and why to practice metta towards yourself.

In this modern world we are taught that it is selfish to think about yourself, to spend time on yourself, but we cannot hope to help others if we cannot help ourselves first.

Similarly, we cannot hope to develop metta, limitless goodwill, for all beings, unless we have goodwill for ourselves.

Transcript

How do you practice these things?

Okay,

So I want to move now directly into talking more about how we do these things,

How we practice this in our daily lives.

And of course,

Just like I started out on the first guide of meditation,

I'm going to talk about Metta to Self.

Because it's so important.

It's very important.

And you cannot give Metta to others unless you have it yourself.

Examine your mind.

You know,

One of the things that I have noticed in terms of my almost,

In my decade of practice is what I've let go of.

And what I've let go of a lot is self-judgment and extreme self-criticism.

Most of my life I was really harsh to myself,

Really judgmental to myself.

There were parts of my life I hated myself.

And it was these kind of practices,

And I started developing actually Metta for myself before I even knew what Metta was.

But it's these kind of practices that helped me to get over that and to allow myself to let go of this self-judgment and this criticism in my mind.

Now,

Of course,

I'm not an awakened being,

So I still have those in my mind.

I'm still self-judgmental and critical and all these kind of things sometimes.

But the level of which that I used to be compared to now,

It's an extreme drop.

And because of this,

There was a time where I was,

Humans suck,

These people are horrible,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

Why?

Because I was a human.

I hated myself.

I was critical to myself,

So I was critical to everybody else too.

And what happened in the practice is when I dropped the heavy criticism and negativity towards myself,

It dropped for others as well.

So this is important,

So this is not a selfish thing.

This is all of this practice you are doing for yourself,

But you're doing it for others as well,

Because everything you do in this practice affects those around you.

So,

And of course,

As I was just explaining,

Sometimes the hardest person to give Metta to is yourself.

On that first day when I was doing the guided meditation,

Did you think I was going to say the person we most hate?

And you're thinking,

Oh yeah,

My enemy.

And I said,

Yourself,

Right?

That surprised you,

I'm sure.

Because we don't think about these things.

In this society,

It's very like,

If you think about yourself,

That's selfish.

But in this society,

What I've seen is that we,

In not thinking about ourselves and not taking care of ourselves,

We lose ourselves in others.

We don't take care of ourselves,

We don't make ourselves better.

We'd rather just avoid that,

Ignore it,

And lose ourselves in somebody else.

Try to fix somebody else instead of ourselves.

So this practice is focusing in where we need to be,

With our own minds,

With our own practice.

And when we work on that,

Then it's much easier to work with other people.

And so there's a simile that came to my mind while I was meditating a couple years ago.

As a child,

I was on a plane a lot,

Visiting relatives.

And if you've been on a plane before,

You know that there's this little safety speech in the beginning.

How many people actually listen to that speech?

Oh,

That's good.

I'm glad some people listen to the speech.

Well,

What do they say in the speech?

As a young kid,

I was enthralled.

I loved flying.

I was listening to the safety speech.

And they say,

In the event of decompression,

The air will drop.

And what do they say?

They say,

Please put your own mask on before you put on a child or the person next to you.

And I was like,

Why is that?

As a kid,

I was like,

That kind of doesn't make sense.

Well,

Then it hit me,

Well,

Doug,

You're useless to other people if you're passed out.

How can you help somebody else if you're passed out?

So you put your own mask on first.

You're stable and secure in yourself.

And then you're able to help others.

This is why it's important to do that.

And it's not only just as something that you sit down and do,

But when you're going through tough times,

Positive self-talk.

There's some times where I'm going through hard times and my mind is very filled with these negative mind states.

And I can't meditate,

And I'm meditating,

And it sucks,

And all this kind of stuff.

And all I can do is I fall back to giving myself meta.

Sometimes that's all you can do.

You give yourself meta.

I have to say,

Jay,

You're doing a good thing.

I know it's tough.

You can do this.

You can keep going forward.

This positive self-talk,

I know it sounds corny and stupid,

But it works.

It's beneficial.

It's something that I highly suggest.

Because,

Well,

Actually,

I would say once you start to become your own best friend,

Then talking to yourself in that way is a lot less corny.

Because you're actually,

Don't be like,

Oh,

This is corny.

You know why?

Because when you're friends with yourself,

Then it's like,

Okay,

Well,

Yeah,

You can talk to yourself about these things.

Just like you can talk to your friends.

And then,

Of course,

In the Buddhist tradition,

When it comes to,

The Buddha talks about when a monastic or a disciple does something wrong.

There's three things that they do.

The first thing to do is you acknowledge that you did a transgression.

The second thing is that you,

That you,

Oh,

Man,

I just went,

I just blanked out.

So you acknowledge that this has been a transgression.

You make amends in according with the Dhamma.

That's usually like asking for forgiveness or apologizing.

Or,

You know,

If you did something wrong,

If you stole or whatever,

You make amends for it.

And the third thing is to have future restraint.

In modern times,

I've heard this,

I've heard,

It's very similar,

It's called AFL.

Acknowledge,

Forgive,

And learn.

So you acknowledge that you did something stupid.

You forgive yourself.

And if somebody did something to you,

You forgive others.

You make amends for that.

And then you learn from that.

Going back to what I said a couple minutes ago about seeing experiences in life,

Everything is the potential for you to learn from.

All your experiences.

So you can keep this in your mind,

This part of Metta.

All right,

Bonteji said that forgiveness is the precursor to Metta in his Q&A.

To forgive yourself is to begin to have that goodwill and that friendship for yourself.

And when you have that friendship for yourself,

It's very easy to have friendship for others.

Until then,

It's going to sound really corny and stupid.

But keep practicing,

It's important.

Reviews

Deep, but delivered in a light hearted way. Thank you.

A refreshing and relatable perspective, thank you for sharing. 🙏🏼🕊️

Thank you! That was wonderful

Thank you for this, brother! I love that you use the oxygen mask metaphor! Keep up the good work. ❤️

I assume this is the principle that one drowning man can’t save another? So obvious & so easy to miss! Thank you

Very recognisable, down to earth and inspiring. Thank you! 🙏

Incredible talk!

Excellent!!! - Thank you very much 🙏🏻

inspiring words indeed.

Very supportive, friendly and enlightening, thank you.

I love listening to Jay's talks..he is very engaging and warm, he makes the teachings accessible and relevant ..much appreciated!

Thank you 🌼 namaste

I like this guy and relate so much to what he had to say. Thank you!

Clear and heartfelt exposition

Basic and valuable wisdom. Thank you 🙏

We do tend to beat ourselves up, don't we? Learn to like yourself!

Excellent little talk, good advice to put into practice. Thank you

What a great talk! I hope I can find a more detailed discussion of this issue in your library!!! Thank you!!! 🌺🙏🌺

I really needed this today. Thank you, Bhante.

Very helpful. Thank you. 🙏🏻