So we're going to continue on this exploration of love that we started on Tuesday and I would like to begin actually with a poem by the poet Mark Napo that some of you may have heard before but it certainly is worth revisiting.
We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is a want to be loved and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.
When we hesitate in being direct we unknowingly slip on some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which if not put down diminishes our chances of joy.
It's like wearing gloves every time we touch something and then forgetting we chose to put them on.
We complain that nothing feels quite real.
Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves.
To unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips that the lips of another being.
Soft and unrepeatable.
So this is the practice that we do.
This practice of ungloving ourselves.
In our last meeting I asked you to reflect on what you personally learned about love growing up and that will be our topic of discussion at the end of this talk.
It's valuable to see how love was modeled in our family.
In many family systems there was affection and support and a general sense of security and acceptance and in some families that was the opposite.
There was the opposite of that.
There was emotional neglect or withholding or an enmeshment and dependency.
A love that was a form of control and in most experiences we often have a combination of all of these expressions in our family of origin.
If we've been exposed to a lot of dysfunction what tends to happen is we compensate by getting our needs met for love in unhealthy ways.
There is also a tendency in both healthy and unhealthy family systems particularly in this country to have a negative self-view.
You know a perception of inadequacy and that self-judgment can have an effect on our capacity to love and our ability to actually receive love.
I found that many people who I've spoken with in practice and practice discussions and also with teachers feel the greatest sense of struggle around the question of cultivating love for oneself.
And I loosely define love as connection.
So as we begin to meditate we're establishing a connection with ourselves.
You know we pause and we see what's going on inside and we meet these parts of ourselves with awareness and with compassion.
Kind of including even those parts of ourselves that show up in our practice that we have previously exiled is like oh this is not okay.
I don't really want this to show up but it shows up.
All parts of ourselves show up.
So we're learning about ourselves in this process of observing what arises in our meditation practice and what arises in the mind.
And the mind having a mind of its own perceives and interprets the thoughts that come up,
The feelings that come up,
The behaviors that we have engaged in or are engaging in.
And through this power of observation we see how we have defined ourselves.
You know we have been defining ourselves for decades and we're always kind of in the process of becoming someone.
You know it's a process of this is who I am.
This is who I am now.
You know I'm shy or I'm quiet or I'm friendly or I'm helpful or I'm an intellectual or you know we have these these labels that we've placed upon ourselves.
We told ourselves something based on our thoughts or feelings or behaviors or conditioning and we told ourselves something long ago and we also told ourselves something about love long ago.
So what did you tell yourself?
This is an important question because if we can get to the early perception then we can meet those barriers to love.
It was Rumi who said that your task is not to seek for love but merely to find all the barriers within yourself that you have built up against it.
So that's what we're doing.
Your task is not to seek for love but merely to find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
That is the practice of meditation.
As I mentioned last time my teacher Gil Fransdal describes the Brahmaviharas as the four faces of love.
So the first face is Metta.
Metta translates to loving-kindness and you could say that the Metta practice is kind of the way that we open our heart.
Metta is like a key when we start to do the practice.
Sometimes like when we unlock the the heart we find that what comes out are like all these secret beliefs and conditioning that the heart is kind of protected and closed.
So we we get to know our hearts and if what we see in the heart is not Metta,
Is not loving-kindness but ill-will or if we see some kind of attached love or resentment,
Great we're learning.
You know we're learning.
That's what this is about.
What I learned with this practice of Metta of loving-kindness is that I had to forgive myself for the harm that I've caused and also I had to forgive the harm that was caused to me.
So the forgiveness practice for me was the predecessor to the Metta practice.
You know to forgive ourselves it seems to be the hardest form of you know to forgive ourselves.
In Zen practice simply allowing yourself to be yourself just as you are is considered to be a mark of awakening,
A mark of enlightenment.
And I really appreciate that view because it's something that we can all do.
It's very accessible.
In a way it makes forgiveness a daily life practice.
You know allowing ourselves to be ourselves is a really beautiful act of intimacy.
You know we we can't really be close to others if we're turned against ourselves in some way.
Sometimes what I've experienced is my mind feels so compressed and so contracted and because I have a mind that is naturally kind of I guess turned in towards aversion I see aversion first.
Metta as an antidote really doesn't work right away because I'm seeing things with this kind of cloud of resistance.
But what my teacher has suggested in those times is instead of practicing Metta,
Which is the the Sutta I read earlier,
It's to switch to compassion practice,
Forgiveness practice.
And that's something I feel like I do a lot.
Like may I be okay with having this mind that is seeing the negative.
That's simple.
Recognition.
So loving-kindness practice,
The essence of the practice,
Is to be able to offer happiness or care.
That's it.
And we can't offer genuine happiness until we have experienced it for ourselves.
So it's also an intention.
You know what is your intention for yourself?
And can we have those same intentions for others?
It may be like just very simple like may I be grateful for this life.
May I be grateful for those who are in my life.
May I be grateful for the lessons given to me including my own errors and my own faults including those.
And may I be grateful that I have a heart to serve.
A heart to serve.
You know what are we serving to our communities,
Our families,
And our friends?
In a spiritual community like this,
We get to see our hearts that serve through our sharing.
And the sharing that happens after practice,
Sometimes we share about what prevents the heart from serving.
And sometimes the gratitude and love that pours out of you is your serving heart just speaking.
May I be grateful that I have a heart that serves.
So the Brahma vihara of metta,
Loving kindness.
The way it works is we're using words and phrases to evoke a quality of friendliness to incline the mind in the direction of loving kindness.
And words,
As you know,
Are very powerful.
Thoughts are very powerful.
So if a thought arises,
You may notice how quickly kind of an emotion is born out of that thought.
And what this practice is doing is using thoughts to evoke these wholesome qualities.
The traditional phrases that we repeat for the metta practice goes something like this.
May I be filled with loving kindness.
May I be well.
May I be peaceful and at ease.
May I be happy.
And those phrases that I just said,
You know,
I spoke those phrases to myself when I first learned metta for about 10 years.
You know,
May I be filled with loving kindness.
May I be well.
May I be peaceful and at ease.
May I be happy.
But then because the metta practice kind of felt like saccharine,
A little bit false for me,
I started tweaking the phrases so that they would work.
So one way is to ask the question,
Like when things are difficult in your life,
What do I need right now?
What would be helpful for me right now?
And then you or those phrases become organic.
Like if I ask myself,
Well,
What do I need right now?
What would be helpful right now?
May I rest in the way things are in this moment.
May I have patience with myself.
So it changes,
You know.
So I'd like to explore this in conversation.
And I offer you metta as we close.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy in body and mind.
May you be safe from inner and outer harm.
May you be at ease in this body.
And may you be at ease in this mind.
May you be free from worry and anxiety.
May you be happy.
Thank you.
