I am recently revisiting some of my MA thesis work on Loving Kindness meditation and its effects on teachers. One idea that came to my mind is that reciting loving-kindness to all people can be a source of inner conflict, particularly when a person is governed by fear during the day. What I am trying to articulate is: it's hard to extend genuine love to people when the general mood of one's life is fear. In fact, my research has suggested that the original intention of Loving Kindness practice was as an antidote to fear. It can be a vicious cycle if a person gives up reciting or wishing others loving kindness when she or he is dominated by an incessant anxiety about how to survive in the world.
For this reason, I feel that there needs to be a kind of supplementary practice in order for Loving Kindness Meditation to be consistently practiced. That supplementary practice would be some method of reducing anxiety, such as through a practice of bare awareness of a mantra, or contemplating the breath, or even contemplating the impermanence of thoughts. Of course, even the verses of Loving Kindness meditation themselves can be treated as mantra verses: that is, reciting them with a cool and bare awareness, rather than bringing up memories and associated meanings while reading the words. The important point, however, is maintaining an overall attitude that the reciter is going to be okay, that she or he is secure in her own existence, and that the mantra is not meant to validate her or his existence. If one recites loving kindness verses while tense, what is going to happen? It ends up being a kind of mental chore, where the mentality is, "I am going to do this in order to get good karma" or "merit points", etc. But this attitude is incorrect, because it only creates an anxiety about whether one is doing the practice correctly. This attitude also bolsters a strong sense of an ego that needs to control experience in order to confirm its existence.
So, how does this 'supplementary practice' play out or look? I think the best way to describe it is a kind of faithful and open-ended curiosity about the flow of life, in and around a persons' being. That sounds very vague and mystical, but I am hinting at a faith in the basic, inviolable interconnection of all being. If I lack that faith in that basic interconnection, my mentality becomes like an inward drawing door: I want to protect this energy inside me from potential 'thieves' outside, so I lose trust in other people. Paradoxically, I suspect that this move to protect myself only drains me of energy, since there is nearly no end to the kinds of 'dangers' outside that one can imagine when putting her or his mind to it. But this faith is not so much about 'trying to create connection'. It is more like a trust that a personal connection to the universe and all beings is already and inviolably present, no matter whether one is happy, sad, angry, open or closed. One can be grumpy and cold, for example, yet that grumpiness and coldness does not 'disconnect' the person from the universe. Of course, people tend not to believe that! They believe that only positive states lead to interconnection, and therefore one should suppress all other states of being, including even the desire to withdraw or be shy. But I maintain that if the emotion and the thought is honestly mine, it must be interconnected with other things, since it all arises in the same field of mind.
If one can simply let go of this preconception that one must earn one's salvation in life by doing good things, being good things, acting in certain ways, etc., then one has much more freedom to act as is desirable to the society as a whole. Why is that? It's because one is no longer pressuring oneself, and pressure is the biggest enemy of ethical life. If a person is always giving herself pressure to do more, be more, talk more, serve more, how will that person function ? Unless they are truly happy and feel their deepest and inviolable worth in the universe, they are probably going to feel tense, anxious, and needing the deepest validation to relieve their inner sense of pressure. And that is simply not good for one's life, because it burns out the soul. So it's important that a person recognize that he or she does not need to 'earn' their deep connection to all living things and the universe as a whole.
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