This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: What can you stop doing; The Divine Abodes: (2 of 5) Metta. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: What can you stop doing?; Dharmette: The Divine Abodes (2 of 5) Metta - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 10, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: What can you stop doing?

Welcome, good morning to most of you. It is lovely to see the names over there. Just beginning with the sweetness of community and spiritual friendship, which is not its own kind of silo, but actually a sense of belonging and shared sensitivity. This allows us to meet the intensity, and sometimes brutality, of the world. We genuinely cannot do this alone.

Just settling into your posture. Thich Nhat Hanh says it is like a nectar settling to the bottom of a glass of juice. But it’s not like we push the nectar down; we just let time and stillness become our allies. There is entropy, but there is order too. Let me just let the Dharma order and organize our body and mind.

How many things might you stop doing? How many of our routines do we associate with practice that are actually just a kind of reiteration of our self-doubt and agitation?

How simple might awareness become? How simple might you become? So relaxing all of the push and pull, all the self-improvement and all the acceptance. All the moving to and from, all the ways in which we continually hum the story of me, mine, my life. All the willfulness and control. How simple can we be?

The sense of self is an avatar we use to organize our greed and aversion. Maybe it's safe enough in this moment to put that down.

Dharmette: The Divine Abodes (2 of 5) Metta

Non-hate, love, is the theme this week. Sometimes we have the sense that disliking, liking, and loving are three points along the same spectrum. We think, "I might hate you, I might like you, I might like like you, or I might love you." But that is not right to my mind. Love steps outside of the realm of ordinary hedonic preference.

In other words, love is not another species of wanting. The Buddha suggested that wanting and fear are two sides of the same coin: the coin of clinging. It seems like wanting and fear are such different states, but at the felt experience level, what is shared is a certain kind of motivational desperation.

There is some interesting brain science that highlights the shared neurobiology of wanting and fear—a kind of motivational pressure or salience that is either negatively or positively valenced, making something wanted or feared. Both states contract the mind. Both states make this moment in and of itself essentially meaningless. You turn the moment into a transaction. Fear and wanting turn life into a dollar store or something.

Metta¹ is the mind made vast. Loving-kindness practice is stepping out of wanting and fear. So love is not some strong form of wanting; it is an entirely different motivational stance. It is an openness and a receptivity. It is what is left in the wake of letting go. Love is what is left when the motivational desperation fades away.

Metta—loving-kindness—functions in many ways, but first there is a purification practice. By purification practice, I technically mean extinction learning. Much pain depends on avoidance. Not all, but much pain depends on avoidance, and the medicine is often to approach the avoided experience, the feared experience, to drain the affective charge from our anxiety and avoidance.

Mindfulness is one type of approach, moving towards. A lot of the instructions we give are about moving towards. Love, in a sense, is an even deeper approach than mindfulness. Not always, but often, the more fully we permit ourselves to experience what is avoided, the more completely we are released from that pain. The more efficient the extinction learning is, the more thoroughly the knots of pain, avoidance, and anxiety untangle. Love is like the fullest approach we can make. We get so close with our love to our pain, or whatever it may be, that it starts to unwind. This is kindness as a kind of purification practice.

We should unpack what is meant by love. That is not everybody's favorite word. I know some of you probably are cringing, "Love, love, love." So what is meant by this? A mentor years ago once said, "Matthew, there's a difference between kindness and niceness, and you're being nice."

The kind of love I'm speaking about is not niceness. There is a love that is tangled up with possessiveness, and a love that relinquishes control entirely—a love that is a kind of pure generosity, giving dāna².

There is an attached love, and that is okay; I'm not dismissive of that. We are not monastics, and we are going to have to pick our spot. Partners, parents, children, ethical commitments—some attachment I feel is irreducible to those relationships. A friend I've known for many years, since his now teenage daughter was born, was asked not so long ago, "How are you?" He quoted Susan Orlean³ to say, "A parent is only as happy as their least happy child."

I thought about a line from the songwriter Ani DiFranco, who said something like, "I'll be your lover even after our atoms are dispersed. We'll be pushing up daisies and my crush will just be getting worse."⁴ It is kind of romantic. Can we consent to the dukkha⁵ that we know is encoded in that? Not be surprised that that is going to hurt? Can we bear that with grace and not resort to some utopian fantasy of love completely devoid of all attachment? It is not a perfectionistic path. We have a tendency to try to shoehorn our spiritual ideals into every aspect of our life, but it is not natural. So we recognize we live in some measure of ambivalence. We can consent to the forms of possessiveness inherent in some kinds of love, even as we try to let go.

And we cultivate a love that is devoid of possessiveness. Loving-kindness is a kind of love that seeks no control. The proximate cause is the capacity to see goodness. Love in the face of goodness—that is the wellspring of metta.

Amidst the ascendency of hatred, confusion, and hypocrisy, I become so sensitive to goodness, forthrightness, and honesty. It sometimes feels like oxygen; my heart is just longing. Can we be honest? Can we recognize goodness? In psychology, there is a phenomena known as "moral elevation," whereby witnessing acts of moral beauty—they might be huge, they might be seemingly trivial—inspires and elevates. We become more devoted to goodness. Just witnessing somebody being kind in small or dramatic ways makes us more pro-social.

It is important for us to see that. Loving-kindness is its own kind of inner moral elevation, in the sense that you become moved by your own goodness. You touch into that, not in a self-congratulatory way, not even in the sense that this quality is "mine"—no, it’s the melodrama of self again. But we sense into these qualities of the heart and we become uplifted in the same way that we might become uplifted in seeing moral beauty in another.

And we abide. Vihāra⁶—rest, a place of rest, an abode. Abide in love. The sense of the warmth radiating from our own body-mind. It is maybe very quiet. No control, no "other side" of our love. Nothing excluded. And part of the function is just the healing and rejuvenation for the heart in that.

Part of the function of that practice is to dramatize the pain of hatred and divisiveness, of separation and aversion. Hatred is meant to become less and less tenable. It will still grab us, but we abide in metta to make it less and less tenable.

I offer this for your consideration. Please pick up what is useful and leave the rest behind.