Metta for the Familiar Stranger

Guided Meditation focusing on kindness (metta) for the familiar stranger or neutral person.

Transcript

All of these things,

The metta,

The mindfulness,

The forgiveness,

The compassion,

The joy,

The equanimity,

They all interweave together at some point.

We know this.

Really in some ways the art of the Brahma Vihara meditation is trusting our own inner wisdom of what is the flavor now.

And a lot of times we don't even need to be in charge of that process.

It's just wisdom expressing itself through the awakening heart and all of its flavors.

So this forgiveness about the possibility of dropping the burden,

Of putting it down.

And of course forgiveness is a verb in terms of practice,

Right?

So sometimes we put it down and then we pick it back up,

Whatever the load was,

And then we put it back down again.

And it's not condoning any unskillful actions.

It's just saying that the areas of our being when they're locked down tight influence everything else,

Influence everything else in our being,

In our interrelatedness.

But we really have to respect that it doesn't all open at once.

It's an unfolding.

So one of my favorite non-traditional metta phrases is this,

May I trust in the unfolding,

May I trust in the unfolding.

I say it all the time moving through the world as well as in formal practice.

In our progression of filling the reservoir of this friendliness and well-wishing so that it starts to overflow and overflow and overflow.

Just thinking about the reservoirs here in California,

How much they need to do that right now.

We continue to expand the circle of well-wishing to include more and more of these archetypal muses or categories.

And so we've been exploring the cultivation and fruition of this metta with ourselves,

With the benefactor,

With a good friend.

And now we can consider the possibility of making kind of a leap in the practice from these archetypal categories of those that we hold personally dear,

Whether we personally know them or not,

There's a personal sense of dearness there.

To those that we might not hold so personally dear,

But could we hold more universally dear.

So the next muse is traditionally called the neutral person.

And at the metta retreat that Donald and I teach here,

We've re-translated that into the familiar stranger,

Just a little bit more descriptive than neutral person.

Is there anybody that's truly neutral?

Those of you that have been here for a month,

You already know that your neutral person you chose last month isn't quite neutral in the same way,

Right?

So familiar stranger.

So it means somebody in our wider circle of acquaintance who we don't know so well.

We don't know their whole life story.

We may not even know their name.

So sometimes we'll choose somebody here on retreat that we haven't yet either fallen in love with or developed a huge aversion towards.

And we have labels for those on these retreats too.

We call them the vipassana romances and the vipassana vendettas.

It's nice to have mental notes for everything.

So why not that?

But there are many of those that are really just moving around in space with us.

There's a certain sense of familiarity,

You know,

Same set of shoes,

Same walk.

We don't really know them.

You could choose someone like that.

Sometimes if we work in a large organization or something like that,

We can't really know them.

Sometimes if we work in a large organization or something,

We can choose somebody that we don't know so well at work.

Sometimes we'll choose somebody in our wider community where,

You know,

It's a regular place that we go in our lives and there's somebody there that we're just aware of.

We see them,

But we don't really know them.

This is a place we can actually cultivate goodwill on an active level towards those that we see,

But maybe not all the way.

And just like with the first categories or muses,

We choose one to stand in for all.

So we were choosing one benefactor to stand in for everybody that has supported us in some small obvious or not so obvious way.

We chose one friend to stand in for all friends that we've ever had and will ever have.

And the reason that we do this is actually to support the collecting of the attention around the quality of the metta and to gain some traction and momentum with the concentration.

Because as much as we may have loved sending living kindness to our benefactor or our good friend or ourself as objects,

In the end,

I'm sorry to say it's not so much about the object.

That's why I call them muses.

They're actually like that which inspires something that's already here,

This kindness,

This friendliness,

Already here.

And here's the muse that's the inspiration for that in the moment.

So you may already have somebody in mind for this familiar stranger or you'll just trust that someone will come to mind when we get to that point in the practice.

I also really want to extend the invitation that if the forgiveness practice is extremely timely for you right now,

That you actually spend most of the time that we're practicing here just with that flavor in the ways that are unfolding for us.

And I'm going to give you a little bit of a little bit of a background on that.

So I'm going to give you a little bit of a background on that.

And for others of us who feel willing and available to explore these categories,

One at a time,

We might begin with ourselves.

And if even the idea of beginning with yourself raises the degree of difficulty too high,

Choose either a benefactor or a good friend to begin with.

So if you're feeling a little bit of a pain in the neck,

You might feel a little bit of a pain in the neck.

So again,

We might put a hand on the heart.

We might bring a small smile to the corners of the lips.

Just kind of uplifts the body,

Uplifts the mind.

And we're calling forward perhaps an image of who we're sending to.

Or if you're more somatic,

The feeling.

How do you feel somatically if this one entered the hall?

Or how do you feel in your own skin in a moment of well-being?

Just breathing in the image or the felt sense.

And allowing your own wishes of metta to come to you,

Creating space for them to arise,

Which is very different than becoming the metta manufacturing machine pumping out phrases.

So so so so so so so so so so so so so so and now keeping the phrases of metta or the radiation of metta continuous,

We might choose to switch muses to yet another muse that's in more of the near and dear circle,

Whether it's yourself,

A benefactor or a good friend.

And again,

Taking that moment to orient and ground in the image,

Or how you'd feel in your body if they were actually to walk in and sit down before you.

Radiating that metta or the phrases with them as your muse.

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Reviews

After the intro there was a good amount of quiet space to practice instructions.

My favorite! Exquisite.