I loved this explanation of unconditional love by Ayya Khema, the world’s first fully ordained Buddhist nun in a thousand years. I pulled this from a book about her called “Path to Peace.”
Both “unconditional love” and “loving-kindness” are wonderful phrases, evoking a lot. But they also sound like tall orders for the more cantankerous among us. In a way, we’re really just talking about being friendly and decent, right?
Yes, exactly. That’s how it starts: be friendly and decent. And as you get better at being friendly and decent, you can also be helpful and friendly and decent. And when someone has something positive happen, you can be happy that something positive happened to that person. In other words, you start out just being friendly and decent, but it’s possible to take it even further to the point where yeah, you’re wishing and sending good will towards everybody. Including the difficult people in your life.
This idea of wishing and “sending” metta for someone — if somebody’s never really encountered this before, they may be vexed by the meaning of “sending” here. What do we really mean by sending?
My favorite way of doing metta is basically to ask somebody, do you like to be happy? Most people like to be happy. Can you get in touch with the fact that you like to be happy? Most people can actually get in touch with the fact that they like to be happy. Do you like it if your friends are happy? Yeah, I like it if my friends are happy. Can you get in touch with the fact that you like it, that your friends are happy?
Can you appreciate the happiness of other people? If you can do that, then it sets you up so you can help them to be more happy.
What about your coworkers? Your neighbors? Can you get in touch with that? You like it that they’re happy? This is more what the “sending” is. Just get in touch with that sense of, yeah, I like it when the people I run into in the grocery store are all happy, when the clerk is happy, when my coworkers are happy, when the difficult people in my life are happy because they have wholesome sources of happiness. So it’s more about realizing that happiness is something that we all appreciate. And can you appreciate the happiness of other people? If you can do that, then it sets you up so you can perhaps at times help them to be more happy, help them when they’re feeling down or rejoice with them when they’re having good fortune. And this actually opens your heart. The whole purpose of this metta practice is to realize that we are vastly interconnected.
We’re not separate creatures. We’re social creatures. And we all rely on each other for everything, including our food, the electricity, everything that goes on in our lives. We’re relying on many other people. It’s a vastly interconnected network. Act in harmony with this interconnectedness, and that’s by making the interconnectedness work better for everyone.