Becoming the Embodiment of Metta in your Daily life

Bell Namotassa Bhagavato Arhatto Sama Sambuddhassa Namotassa Bhagavato Arhatto Sama Sambuddhassa Namotassa Bhagavato Arhatto Sama Sambuddhassa Therefore,

You should train yourselves thus.

We will develop and cultivate the liberation of mind by limitless goodwill.

Make it our vehicle.

Make it our basis.

Stabilize it.

Exercise ourselves in it.

And fully perfect it.

Thus should you train yourselves.

This is the words of the Buddha.

The Buddha exhorting us how we should train in Metta.

So we have come to the halfway point of this retreat.

You've learned a lot about Metta so far and you're going to continue to learn a lot about Metta.

There's more talks to go.

Today,

What I'd like to discuss with you is how we,

What do we do?

How do we make practicing Metta our livelihood?

And what do we do in our daily lives to develop this practice?

So,

But first,

I wanted to start out with talking a little bit about the definition.

Bhanteji explained to you why he calls Metta loving friendliness as opposed to loving kindness.

I like to add something that I found within the last year that I found to be interesting regarding the word Metta.

Where the loving part comes from.

The word Mitta just means friend or friendly,

Friendliness.

Where does loving come from?

And one of the ways that you could translate Metta using looking at the roots is from the root Mid.

The root Mid is an interesting root because it means to love.

But it also means to grow fat or to grow large.

So you could say that Metta is to grow large or grow fat with friendliness.

And this,

So we grow our minds,

We grow our mind limitlessly with Metta,

With goodwill.

And so the Metta mindset is important to develop and it's important to understand that Metta is not magic.

It's like I said during the guided meditation this morning.

When we practice Metta,

We're not expecting all kinds of miracles and all kinds of things to happen.

We're not really necessarily expecting that we have like our brain waves are going out into the world and going to other people and all these kinds of things.

Metta is for one reason.

Metta is for the directly counteracting ill will in our minds.

And one of my favorite,

It's not a Buddhist poem,

But I think it encapsulates Metta very well.

It's called Outwitted by Edward Markham and it goes like this.

They drew a circle that shut me out,

Heretic rebel,

A thing to flout.

But love and I had the wit to win.

We drew a circle that took them in.

That is Metta.

Regardless of what other people think about you or they like you,

They draw it,

They go into their own circle and they keep you out of the circle.

It doesn't matter.

Instead of saying,

Hmm,

I'm just going to make my own circle over here.

We encircle everybody.

That is Metta.

Limitless goodwill.

So,

Bhante Panjuratana spoke at length about anger yesterday,

So I'm not going to go too much into it,

But I wanted to speak very briefly.

And what you heard in the beginning that I spoke about the liberation of mind,

That is called Ceto Vimuti.

So,

If we have Metta Ceto Vimuti,

We are liberating our mind or freeing our mind through Metta.

What are we freeing our mind from?

Of.

Of anger,

Ill will,

Aversion.

The very first lines of the Dhammapada go,

Talk about the mind.

The mind is the master,

Mind is the maker.

All actions are led by the mind.

Mind is their master,

Mind is their maker.

Actors speak with a defiled state of mind,

Then suffering follows as the cartwheel follows the foot of the ox.

So,

This gives us an incentive.

We don't want to have a mind like this.

Think about the simile that the Buddha is talking about.

The cartwheel following the foot of the ox.

Think about this poor ox latched to this heavy burden and it's pulling the burden just over and over and over,

Pulling the burden.

And maybe there's even a driver on top of it and he's whipping the ox.

Move faster.

And if you have ever maybe carried anything behind you like a wheelbarrow,

You might even notice that sometimes the wheels nip at your heels.

So,

The ox is getting nipped at.

It's a pretty miserable simile.

And that simile is a heavy mind,

A mind of anger,

A mind of ill will and an unskillful mind.

What's the opposite of that?

Actors speak with a pure state of mind,

Then happiness follows you like your shadow follows you without departing.

When you are free from ill will and anger and you have this mind of meta,

This mind of good will,

It's like your shadow.

It's light.

You don't even notice your shadow is over there.

It's not weighing you down.

It's not causing you to suffer because you have this mind liberated from these defilements.

And so this is why we practice meta,

To do this,

To directly counteract our ill will and make it so that we abandon this in our mind.

Because there's three roots,

Right?

The Buddha talks about three roots that arise or three poisons in relation to craving.

First one is greed.

Second one is hatred.

The third one is delusion.

The Buddha describes nibbana as the abandoning of greed,

Hatred and delusion.

That's one of the ways he describes nibbana most often.

So meta is going against one of the three roots that hold us in samsara.

That's the importance of meta.

This is the importance of why we should develop this as part of our daily practice and our daily life.

Even there's a sutta in the Anguttara Nikaya called subduing hatred,

Where the Buddha says if there's somebody,

Somebody has arisen hatred or ill will or aversion in you,

What do you do?

He gives five things.

Three of them are,

First one is meta.

The first thing you do is you practice meta for this person.

Second thing is practicing compassion.

Third is practicing equanimity.

Fourth is forgetting or ignoring the person.

And the fifth is understanding that they're a being that's subject to their own actions.

These are these five things.

But the very first thing is practicing meta for this person.

There's very,

Very few places in the ancient text where the Buddha talks specifically about practicing meta towards an individual.

This is one of those places.

So there's a wonderful story called the Angure-Eating Demon.

And I want to tell you this story briefly here.

This story is very,

Very ancient.

It goes back to some of the old,

The oldest texts,

And it's been retold over the thousands of years in Buddhism.

But the way the story goes is this.

There's Saka.

Saka is king of the devas,

King of the gods.

And Saka is a very,

He practices the Dhamma,

And he's a very,

You know,

A good disciple of the Dhamma,

And practicing him doing good things and practicing meta and all these things.

So the king of the gods is away.

And while the king of the gods is away,

This demon,

This really ugly,

Nasty,

Big demon,

Just comes into the throne room and sits right down on Saka's throne.

And so all his attendants,

All the devas are all really angry,

Like,

How dare you do that?

You can't do this.

Get out of the throne.

And so they're all cursing him and,

You know,

Just being really angry that this demon would do this.

Well,

There's a reason why he's called the Angure-Eating Demon.

Every time he was thrown an insult,

Every time there was ill will thrown at him,

He became more handsome,

More good-looking,

Until he was this very,

Very,

You know,

Radiant-looking,

Anger-eating demon.

And you think to yourself,

That's kind of weird.

Well,

How does that work?

But if you think about it,

What happens when you feed anger?

You're feeding your anger.

Your anger,

The anger wants you to do this.

You're giving it what it wants.

So you don't want,

So that's what happens when you feed this anger-eating demon.

And so then the story goes that Saka came back and saw this demon.

And of course,

Saka didn't,

You know,

Start,

And,

You know,

Right off the top,

Start yelling and screaming at him.

He says,

Oh,

My name is Saka.

I'm the king of the gods.

And he was very kind to him.

And the more kind he was to him,

The more ugly the demon got until the demon was done and the demon left.

So that's a very ancient story about the anger-eating demon.

And so if we practice metta,

What we want to do is there's a wonderful little thing from the Dhammapada that says,

Happy we live.

This is from the Sukhavaga.

There's a whole section of the Dhammapada on happiness.

Happy we live.

Friendly amidst the hostile.

Amidst hostile people we live free from hatred.

That's the end goal.

That's what we want to do as practitioners.

And of course,

As Bhante said yesterday,

Hatred is never appeased by hatred.

Only by goodwill,

By non-hatred,

Is this appeased.

This is an ancient law.

So what's the first step?

What's the first thing we do to look at making metta our livelihood?

Well,

As I have been alluding to,

This is requiring a persistent vigilance against aversion and ill-will that arise in your mind in every aspect of your life.

It's about being mindful.

As Bhante Panurasana spoke about and Bhanteji spoke about,

This is a mindfulness.

When we read the Karaniya Metta Sutta,

One should develop this mindfulness.

We need the mindfulness to be able to see when anger arises in our mind.

That's the only way that we can understand it.

And that's the only way that we can begin to counteract it.

And so the first step is to develop this consistent mindfulness in our practice.

So when we are mindful and we develop our mindfulness,

When something happens,

Normally something happens and we don't even think about it if we're not mindful instantly and then we're just on this roller coaster of anger.

And you can't get off the roller coaster mid-ride.

That's why Bhanteji says,

If somebody is angry at you or coming at you with a bat,

You don't give the Metta.

Metta doesn't work mid-ride in the middle of the anger.

Metta is for the time before that so that when you see that anger arise,

You know you have the techniques,

You have the skills,

And you have the ability to counteract or to let go of that anger before it leeches into unskillful words and actions.

So whatever situation that we have in life,

We can apply the correct medicine.

Metta has been called the cooling bomb.

Now this is something that we do to,

Like Bhante said,

Nobody wants to be around fire.

Nobody wants to get burned.

We cool the fire with Metta.

And so when we have these,

One of the things obviously that we can do is we apply the four Brahma Vaharas in our life.

And I'll talk a little bit later on about the four Brahma Vaharas.

Another thing that's very helpful is to kind of view things that happen in our life as something that is teaching us or at the very least giving us an opportunity to practice.

When things happen and somebody does something to us,

Instead of taking it very personal and getting angry and feeding and propagating these thoughts in our minds,

We can say,

Oh,

Okay,

Now this is a chance for me to practice.

And I've done for however many years or however many lifetimes in the past,

I've propagated these thoughts and just let them go on and on and on.

But for now,

Now from now on,

I want to do this.

I want to counteract these thoughts and practice in this way.

So Metta,

To talk a little bit about the Noble Eightfold Path.

I don't need to go into detail.

I think most of you,

This is not a beginner retreat.

Most of you know what the Noble Eightfold Path is.

The Noble Eightfold Path is this wonderful package that the Buddha gives us on how to live,

If we want to lead down the road to freedom,

If we want to end our journey in samsara,

End our suffering.

So the Buddha put it in this nice package for us and gave it to us and said,

Here,

This is how you practice.

And so some people,

I've heard it asked here before,

People say they know all about these lists,

37 this,

Five this,

All this.

And they say,

I don't see Metta in any of these lists.

Where is it?

Well,

The obvious answer is it's everywhere.

Metta suffuses the practice.

It suffuses this Noble Eightfold Path.

You think about the Noble Eightfold Path can be divided into three sections.

There's Sila.

Sila is following our precepts,

Is training ourselves to do skillful thoughts,

Words,

And deeds that are beneficial to ourselves and others.

That is Metta.

I'll speak about that a little bit later.

That is Metta.

Because you're doing this,

What you're doing has far-reaching effects beyond just your own mind.

So that's our Sila.

Samadhi is our practicing,

Well,

Let me say the Sila is right intention,

Right livelihood,

Right speech.

So we are living our lives like a gift to all beings.

That's Metta.

And Samadhi,

The Samadhi division is right effort.

Right effort is abandoning unskillful mind states,

Abiding in skillful mind states.

Your mind states not only affect you,

But they affect those around you.

Right mindfulness,

Right concentration.

Being mindful allows us to make better choices,

To act with wisdom,

To act with insight.

And when we develop insight,

We understand Metta.

It was interesting,

I was talking with Bhante,

And we were talking about Metta,

And this was a couple weeks ago,

And he said,

Until you see deeply impermanence,

Your Metta is surface level.

When you understand with insight,

Your Metta is deep and it comes naturally.

So even just the development of this insight is Metta.

Everything that you do in this noble eightfold paractus is suffused with Metta.

And of course,

It's also in the Panya division,

Which is right view and right intention.

It's right there and right intention.

Right intention is threefold.

Having thoughts of letting go,

Of renunciation,

As opposed to clinging and grasping and covetousness.

Having thoughts of goodwill instead of ill will,

And having thoughts of harmlessness or compassion instead of harmfulness.

So just by living this practice,

You are a force of Metta.

It's very important for us to understand this.

Not only are we a force of Metta,

There's other factors.

There's the Brahma,

The Haras,

The four divine abodes.

At the end of the Metta Sutta,

You can see that the Buddha says that this is a divine abode.

This is a divine abiding.

And that is because your mind,

If you've ever had a mind full of anger,

Oh,

It's so horrible.

It's so heavy.

It's so burdensome.

And then you notice when your mind is free of anger,

Just like the shadow.

And so when you notice this,

It's like heaven.

It's like you're free of this hell that was in your mind.

And you are abiding with Brahma.

Brahma is the highest god.

You're abiding in this heavenly mind state.

And so obviously the first of the Brahma,

The Haras,

Is Metta,

Which we've been talking about.

And one of the things also I wanted to say is when you read the Suttas,

When the Buddha is talking about Metta,

He's almost always talking about practicing the others as well.

That introduction that I read to you,

Right after that is,

Abide,

Cultivating the next one,

Compassion,

Cultivating appreciative joy,

Cultivating equanimity.

So the Buddha is telling us to practice these all together.

They work together in this regard.

So the second of the Brahma,

The Haras,

Is Karuna,

Or compassion.

And compassion is important because compassion is understanding.

Compassion is you understand that there are beings that are suffering.

You see somebody who is suffering.

And you have a thought of harmlessness,

A thought of compassion for this person,

A thought of understanding.

Maybe you want to do something to help alleviate this person's suffering.

But the important thing with compassion is that compassion always needs to be coupled with wisdom.

We can do things with compassion that turn out to be not so skillful.

We might have the compassion and intention to do things.

And then afterwards we realize,

Oh,

Well,

I shouldn't have done that because then this happened and this was unskillful and then somebody got hurt from this and all these kind of things.

So it's good to have the compassion.

But you have to watch out because that compassion can be so strong that it overwhelms you.

And it becomes useless in a way.

So that's why one of my favorite terms from another tradition is actually from Pimachodran.

She calls it idiot compassion.

When I first read that,

I was like,

Oh,

That's perfect.

I like that.

You know,

You want to have compassion,

But you want to have compassion with understanding and wisdom.

And so mudita is appreciative joy.

Mudita is directly counteracting that feeling,

The thoughts of jealousy and covetousness and thoughts of,

You know,

This person doesn't deserve that.

Why do they have this and I don't?

That resentment is ill will.

That resentment is anger.

That resentment is part of that mind that is heavy and burdensome and it's not worth it.

So instead of whatever somebody has,

And this is in the guided meditation,

This was part of may all of us find happiness and rejoice in the happiness of others.

You're rejoicing if somebody is successful,

If somebody has something that they like and somebody is happy,

You are happy with them.

You are happy for them.

Whatever they do in their life and their practice,

That's not of your concern.

Don't worry about that.

What you want is you want your concern with your own mind.

You're concerned with whatever is I'm happy for them.

Okay,

Now I come and I focus on my own mind.

Instead of propagating these thoughts of resentment and jealousy,

It's not worth it.

And of course,

When all else fails,

There's upekka or equanimity.

This is a mind that is an even keel,

A mind that is not being caught or dragged between likes and dislikes.

Any many situations in this world,

In our life,

Our experience,

That,

You know,

To use compassion as an example,

We have compassion and we want to do something and we want to,

You know,

Do these grand things,

Right?

But the world sometimes doesn't allow that or the world has other plans.

Equanimity allows us to have this peace of mind when we go up against our expectations and our expectations are not met and destroyed.

We have this equanimous mind.

So it's important to understand,

You know,

All these practices that we're doing,

All this practice I'm going to talk about today is about you,

Is about your mind.

If other people draw you out of the circle,

You know,

You can't do anything about that.

You can,

And if you can't abide in meta for the person,

At least you can abide with the mind equanimous.

So you're not dealing with anger and ill will and all of these negative states.

Okay,

So I want to move now directly into talking more about how we do these things,

How we practice this in our daily lives.

And of course,

Just like I started out in the first guided meditation,

I'm going to talk about meta to self,

Because it's so important.

It's very important.

And you cannot give meta to others unless you have it yourself.

Examine your mind.

You know,

One of the things that I have noticed in terms of my almost in my decade of practices,

That I've let go of,

And what I've let go of a lot is self judgment and extreme self criticism.

Most of my life,

I was really harsh to myself,

Really judgmental to myself.

There were parts of my life I hated myself.

And it was these kind of practices,

And I started developing actually meta for myself before I even knew what meta was,

But it's these kind of practices that helped me to get over that and to allow myself to let go of these self judgment and this criticism in my mind.

Now,

Of course,

I'm not an awakened being.

So I still have those in my mind.

I'm still self judgmental and critical and all these kinds of things sometimes.

But the level of which that I used to be compared to now,

It's an extreme drop.

And because of this,

There was a time where I was,

Humans suck.

These people are horrible.

Why?

Because I was a human.

I hated myself.

I was critical to myself.

So I was critical to everybody else too.

And what happened in the practice is when I dropped the heavy criticism and negativity towards myself,

It dropped for others as well.

So this is important.

So this is not a selfish thing.

This is all of this practice you are doing for yourself,

But you're doing it for others as well because everything you do in this practice affects those around you.

So and of course,

As I was just explaining,

Sometimes the hardest person to give metta to is yourself.

On that first day when I was doing the guided meditation,

Did you think I was going to say like,

The person we most hate and you're thinking,

Oh yeah,

My enemy.

And I said,

Yourself,

Right?

That surprised you,

I'm sure.

Because we don't think about these things.

In this society,

It's very like,

If you think about yourself,

That's selfish.

But in this society,

What I've seen is that we,

In not thinking about ourselves and not taking care of ourselves,

We lose ourselves in others.

We don't take care of ourselves.

We don't make ourselves better.

We'd rather just avoid that,

Ignore it,

And lose ourselves in somebody else,

Try to fix somebody else instead of ourselves.

So this practice is focusing in where we need to be with our own minds,

With our own practice.

And when we work on that,

Then it's much easier to work with other people.

And so there's a simile that came to my mind while I was meditating a couple years ago.

As a child,

I was on a plane a lot visiting relatives,

And if you've been on a plane before,

You know that there's this little safety speech in the beginning.

How many people actually listen to that speech?

Oh,

That's good.

I'm glad some people listen to the speech.

Well,

What do they say in the speech?

You know,

As a young kid,

I was enthralled.

I loved flying,

And I was listening to the safety speech.

And they say,

In the event of decompression,

The air will drop.

And what do they say?

They say,

Please put your own mask on before you put on a child or the person next to you.

And I was like,

Why is that?

You know,

As a kid,

I was like,

That kind of doesn't make sense.

Well,

Then it hit me,

Well,

Duh,

You're useless to other people if you're passed out.

How can you help somebody else if you're passed out?

So you put your own mask on first.

You're stable and secure in yourself,

And then you're able to help others.

This is why it's important to do that.

And it's not only just as something that you sit down and do,

But when you're going through tough times,

Positive self-talk.

There's some times where I'm going through hard times,

And my mind is very filled with these negative mind states.

And I can't meditate,

And meditating sucks,

And all this kind of stuff.

And all I can do is I fall back to giving myself meta.

Sometimes that's all you can do.

You give yourself meta.

I have to say,

Jay,

You're doing a good thing,

I know it's tough,

You can do this,

You can keep going forward.

This positive self-talk,

I know it sounds corny and stupid,

But it works.

It's beneficial.

It's something that I highly suggest.

Because well,

Actually,

I would say once you start to become your own best friend,

Then talking to yourself in that way is a lot less corny.

It actually,

Because you're actually,

Because nobody is like,

Oh,

This is corny.

Why?

Because when you're friends with yourself,

Then it's like,

Okay,

Well,

Yeah,

You can talk to yourself about these things,

Just like you can talk to your friends.

And then of course,

In the Buddhist tradition,

When it comes to,

The Buddha talks about when a monastic or a disciple does something wrong.

There's three things that they do.

The first thing to do is you acknowledge that you did a transgression.

The second thing is that you,

That you,

Oh,

Man,

I just went,

I just blanked out.

So you acknowledge that this has been a transgression.

You make amends in accordance with the Dhamma.

That's usually like asking for forgiveness or apologizing.

Or if you did something wrong,

If you stole or whatever,

You make amends for it.

And the third thing is to have future restraint.

In modern times,

I've heard this,

I've heard,

It's very similar,

It's called AFL,

Acknowledge,

Forgive and learn.

So you acknowledge that you did something stupid.

You forgive yourself.

And if somebody did something to you,

You forgive others.

You make amends for that.

And then you learn from that.

Going back to what I said a couple minutes ago about seeing experiences in life,

Everything is the potential for you to learn from,

All your experiences.

So you can keep this in your mind,

This part of Metta.

Right?

Bhanteji said that forgiveness is the precursor to Metta in his Q&A.

To forgive yourself is to begin to have that goodwill and that friendship for yourself.

And when you have that friendship for yourself,

It's very easy to have friendship for others.

Until then it's going to sound really corny and stupid.

But keep practicing.

It's important.

Okay.

So what are some concrete ways that we want to,

That we,

How do we develop and practice Metta in our daily lives?

How do we make it our livelihood?

First thing is the precepts.

This first thing I'm going to,

I have a list of things.

And the first thing I want to talk about is the precepts.

Peter calls the precepts five faultless gifts to the world.

These are gifts that are ancient,

That nobody can argue with,

And they give a gift of fearlessness to those around you.

Think about people that you know.

Think about people in your life.

There's somebody who you know that they're not going to try to kill you.

They're not going to try to harm you in some way.

They're not going to try to steal from you,

Lie to you.

They're trustworthy people.

What does that give you?

It gives you a gift of fearlessness.

You have to worry about this person,

This person,

These things,

But you don't have to worry about this person.

That's at least one person that you don't have to worry about.

So when you practice these precepts in your daily life,

People know this.

People see it.

People understand.

This is the person I can trust,

And you give that gift of fearlessness to others.

And the Buddha also says that you partake in a part of that as well.

When you give that gift to others,

You get part of that back from other people.

It's part of the benefits of metta,

Which I'm not going to go into.

Hopefully Bante Sila will go into that yesterday,

Where you're dear to human beings,

As Bante Panirattana said,

Dear to non-human beings.

Think about good people in your life,

People that do good things.

They are a rare gift,

And so you want to help them and support them.

Why?

Because they've given you this gift,

And you want to give them back that gift.

So practicing these precepts is important in that regard.

Practicing patience.

The Buddha says that patience,

Patient endurance is the best meditation.

Patience is important.

Patience is hard.

Somebody comes up to us at work or whatever,

And we're busy,

And we don't want to hear it.

We don't want to deal with it.

And what would we normally do?

We're like,

Okay,

Okay.

How do I get this person away from me without being too mean and all these kind of things?

Practice patience.

When you're on a long line,

And maybe at the what you call it,

Food place,

Food shopping — wow.

Well,

Anyway,

So you're on a long line,

Right,

And somebody has a ton of food,

And all of a sudden they come out,

And there's like 30 or 40 different coupons,

And you're like,

Oh,

My God,

I got to do this,

I got to do that.

That's a lesson.

I'm teaching you how to practice patience.

Don't let these experiences go by.

Use these experiences to practice.

That's when you practice patience.

Develop that patience.

Patience is important,

Because patience allows us to have,

To develop that mindfulness,

And that allows us to make sure that our mind doesn't get on these roller coasters of ill will and anger.

We want to be able to have the time to make a choice instead of going with the flow.

Developing equanimity in hard situations,

Knowing when you've done enough,

Knowing when you're hurting yourself and continuing on trying to do something further.

There's times when you have to know,

Okay,

To protect myself,

I have to step away from this.

I have to get away from this.

I have to do something else.

That's equanimity.

You can detach yourself from that situation.

Before you speak,

Before you go up to somebody,

Give them meta,

Practice meta,

Or think how you want to say something in a way that's going to be beneficial to yourself and to the other person.

Practice meta before you speak.

In every interaction that you do,

Practice meta.

When you're going around,

You can practice that meta practice that I taught you today,

Exalted release of mind.

It's very easy to do when you're just doing anything.

When you're just walking around,

Boom,

Your sphere is going out and you're just pervading meta.

It's very easy to do.

You don't even have to use words in that regard.

It's very easy to just pervade meta.

Whenever you have the mindfulness,

Whenever you remember,

Okay,

Now I'm going to pervade meta.

You'll find when you're pervading meta,

When you have a mind of goodwill,

Things just go a lot easier.

Things normally we're worried about,

Oh,

This is going to happen,

And we have this mind of negativity.

What I found even before I was a Buddhist was that if I continued a mind of positivity,

If I had a positive mind,

Things always went better.

Even if it was harder,

It would have been worse off if I had a negative mind.

There's no situation where having meta is bad.

If you have that mindset of goodwill for everybody,

You have everybody's best interest at heart,

Including yourself.

That's why we're not losing ourselves and others.

We are remembering ourselves,

All of us,

Ourselves.

We are part of everybody.

Never forget yourself.

Remembering how to de-escalate a situation instead of escalating a situation.

I went over a little bit about this.

If there's a situation,

Somebody's angry,

Somebody's annoyed,

Somebody doesn't have any patience,

And you're there.

What happens normally?

Maybe they're not angry at you.

Maybe they're just angry at something.

You get drawn in some way or another.

Maybe they're pissed off and they come home and they yell at you.

What do you do?

You yell right back.

Then it just gets worse and worse and worse and worse.

You're escalating a situation.

This is not easy to de-escalate a situation.

This is where it requires mindfulness and goodwill.

When you're confronted with somebody who is so full,

Somebody who is on that roller coaster,

And you know you're not going to be able to just slap them in the roller coaster,

That's not going to work.

They're on that roller coaster.

You don't want to get on with them.

How do you de-escalate the situation?

That takes skill.

That takes practice.

That's not easy.

One of those ways that you can do it is by controlling yourself,

Keeping a mind of meta.

You practice that in this situation.

It's not something that you're going to go out tomorrow and do.

You have to practice this.

Allowing,

Giving a pause.

If somebody is really,

Really angry or really going on a tangent,

What I've found is that if you just don't say anything,

If you just allow silence to happen,

That actually gives them like,

Then they start to realize what they're doing,

And then it starts to de-escalate.

Slowly,

Slowly,

Slowly.

So it's important in that regard,

You don't want to escalate a situation because that is making things worse for yourself,

And it's making things worse for the people involved.

Being able to de-escalate a situation is practicing meta for yourself and for others.

And so those are very basic,

General ways on how to practice meta.

How about some more specific,

With family and friends?

Now this is often,

The closer the people are to us,

This is often the hardest,

Because we have a strong attachment to these family and friends.

We have a strong bond with them,

And so if they do something we don't like or if they go against it,

It hurts even more than the stranger,

Because we have this attachment.

So with family and friends,

It's important to be able to develop equanimity.

Oftentimes it's very easy to practice meta,

Or to have the feelings of goodwill for family members and friends.

Now when there is a time where maybe you don't have that goodwill,

Then you practice goodwill,

Practice meta for that person.

But you also want to practice equanimity,

Not only for family members,

But for everybody in these situations.

But for a family member,

There's many times,

Many people come,

They have lots of hard situations,

Where they can't,

It's very easy,

If you're living with people,

If you go to school,

You go to work with people,

Okay I have to deal with this person for eight hours,

And then I can go home and be away from them.

But when you have to live with somebody,

It's a lot different,

It's a lot harder in that regard.

So this is why developing equanimity is important.

What we don't want to do is we don't want to enable bad behavior.

That's important.

With our relatives or with our children,

With our parents even,

There's been people here who come here and their parents,

They say,

How do I have meta for my parents?

So,

We don't want to enable bad behavior.

We want to be able to have goodwill and compassion and love for our family members.

But we have to be able to protect ourselves and do what we feel,

What we can see with awareness,

With mindfulness and insight,

Is in the best interest for them and for you.

So another good way of practicing meta is to really listen.

Sometimes people don't need for you to say something.

Sometimes it's just important to listen.

Just be an ear for this person.

A spouse or whoever comes home and they're angry and they had a bad day at work.

Don't escalate it.

De-escalate it.

Just be a kind presence.

If you've ever been in the presence of somebody who really emanates meta,

It's just such kindness,

Safety,

Security,

Like you're not getting judged at all.

You want to practice that.

Practice really listening,

Giving an ear,

Trying not to be too judgmental with this regard.

And of course with kids,

Most of my adult life I worked with kids in one aspect or another.

So I've seen a lot of things relating to kids and parents today.

And one of the things that I would like to say in terms of meta is allowing your children to grow.

These days it's very common for people to be very controlling of the children.

The children can feel very stifled and feel very locked in.

Instead of maybe,

I'm almost 40 so I'm not that young and I'm not that old.

But I remember what it was like to be able to just go out and play and do all these kinds of things that kids used to be able to do.

Whereas today it's very restricted and very regimental and all these kinds of things and kids are getting very stifled.

So we really want to think about practicing this meta for the children and allowing them to be children,

Allowing them to grow.

Sometimes that's hard because it requires some equanimity.

Parents don't want their children to get hurt.

They don't want anything bad to happen to the children.

But if the children don't learn and don't understand from bad experiences,

Right,

How do they know how to become,

When they become adults,

How to handle things in life?

So it's important to have that,

To have meta for children in this regard.

Examine your own intentions and examine what you really feel is best for the children.

So what about work or school?

When you're at work,

You're at school,

Whatever,

At your desk,

Just when you have a second,

When you remember,

When you have a mindfulness,

Boom,

Emanate meta out to everybody at work,

All your coworkers.

When you're walking around,

Just emanate meta.

Pervade your metas.

Put that sphere out and encompass all of wherever you're working,

Office building,

Whatever building.

You know,

Just pervade,

You can really see,

It's easy in some ways to develop,

Have meta and compassion for your coworkers,

Because you're doing the same job in many ways that they are.

So you understand a little bit more what they're going through.

So you can have compassion for them and have meta for them.

And for the people who don't like you or cause you trouble,

Have equanimity for them.

You practice this with your coworkers,

Because you're going to be with them for at least eight hours a day,

Sometimes more.

And so you can,

In eight hours is a lot of,

Is a big chunk of your day.

So you want to make that eight hours as heavenly as possible,

As opposed to like a hell.

Having mudita,

Having appreciative joy for others,

Somebody gets a promotion instead of,

Oh,

I deserve that promotion,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

You know,

Okay,

I didn't get this promotion,

It's okay.

I have joy that they got this promotion or that they got this or that they got that.

Having compassion for your coworkers.

And sometimes just being able to pause at work is very important.

As a practitioner,

What you can do,

What you have a unique ability to do is actually provide a atmosphere that people might not experience otherwise.

I'll give an example.

When I was in child protective services and I had my own little pod,

On the outside of my pod I had for all my case files there was a cabinet.

And I was getting into Buddhism and I liked all these kind of things.

I found out of the store that there was this one foot square Zen garden.

And I was like,

You know what,

I'm going to have a Zen garden at my desk.

I'm going to have fun.

And when I need to,

I'm going to take time and practice and just take a breather out of my day and play in the sand.

And so then I put it there and I would just do it.

And then I noticed as people were coming to talk to me,

Then they would start playing with the Zen garden.

And then it kind of took off from this thing.

I didn't even expect it.

It was just for me to play with the sand a little bit.

And so then I started getting all these little,

Like if you're online at Barnes and Noble,

They have these little box things,

Little trinkets and things.

So I developed this little section where people can just come and just de-stress,

Play with the sand.

And I would use it.

And then some people would just come and they would just use it.

And so it wasn't something that I intentionally begun,

But it was something that became meta for my coworkers.

It became something that they knew that they could come here,

De-stress for a couple of minutes,

Talk to me about whatever,

And then go on with their day.

So this is the power that you have to help others at work.

Instead of thinking of it as just,

Well,

I have to do this to get paid and then I go home.

What can you do,

Not only for other people,

But for your own practice,

Practicing meta,

Practicing meditation,

All these kind of things.

You can do this at work.

So it's important to keep that in mind.

So what about society?

Just society in general.

One of the things that we do here is when we're walking,

When the car goes by,

We wave.

So this is one of these things that you can do.

And when you go for a walk the next couple of days,

Practice,

Wave.

And when you're waving,

You can give meta to that person.

And one of the things that we use is a Pali word called sukihoto,

Which means may you be happy.

So it's very easy to say sukihoto in your mind.

Just to give meta to people as you're going about in society.

While you're driving,

You're stuck in traffic,

While you're on public transport,

Whatever.

In these times,

You can have this mind of meta.

You can wave.

You can even just give a smile.

You know how a smile is such a small thing,

But it's such an important thing that can really change people's days.

It's important to be able to do that.

A couple months ago,

I did a meta retreat in New York City,

And this woman came up to me during the retreat,

And she's like,

I can't do this meta thing.

She had all this negativity.

And the last day,

She came up to me after,

And she's like,

Yesterday I went out and I was waving and practicing.

And this is in New York City.

She's like,

I'm practicing meta and I'm waving.

And there was a woman,

She was came,

And I offered to help her bring in her groceries and all this kind of stuff.

And I said,

Wow.

She's practicing meta.

Of course,

I don't know if I would do that in the middle of New York City.

But that's the power of meta,

What meta can do.

So it's important to think about that in society,

Just giving a smile.

Before I had my career when I was younger and when I worked a lot of different jobs,

There was jobs where I had to be on a register.

And I hated being on a register.

There's people coming,

Just lines and lines of people for eight hours a day.

And most of the time,

People were really,

They were on the phone or they didn't care.

They were grumpy or whatever.

They just wanted their cigarettes and their coffee.

And they didn't want to,

You know,

You could have been a robot.

It doesn't matter.

And so I'm on this register.

And I'm like,

You know,

All this negativity in my mind and I can't believe I'm doing this.

When is the shift almost over?

And then all of a sudden,

One person just goes,

Oh,

Hi,

Joe,

How are you doing today?

And you perk up because you hear your name.

I'm like,

Oh,

I'm not a robot.

Wow.

And then somebody decided to engage you.

Somebody decided to,

With a smile,

Say you saw that your name tag,

Called you by your name,

Said hello.

How are you doing?

That very simple thing,

Just very simple little silly thing.

All of a sudden,

Your mind goes from all this negativity and to boom,

You're happy.

Your mind is peaceful and calm.

And then what happens?

You know,

Okay,

That person leaves.

And then the next person,

And you're like,

Oh,

Okay,

I'm back.

But just for that one split sec,

For that one period of time,

That person gave you a gift,

Didn't they?

Just by having that basic meta,

That basic kindness to the basic humanity of calling you by your name.

So remember that.

And ever since that happened,

Every time I was online,

I remembered that.

And I would say hello,

Call them by their name,

Talk to them,

Because I remembered how it felt.

That's part of compassion,

Is understanding I knew how it was,

So I know what they're going through.

And I want to do something good for them.

That's part of that compassion.

So it's important to,

And this also helps us to not get caught up in the whole the world sucks and human sucks.

These people,

You know,

Humanity is a virus and all these kinds of things.

That's no way to live.

That doesn't help your mind.

That doesn't,

You know,

There's,

It's just such a negative mind state that doesn't help you and it certainly doesn't help the other people that you're going to come into contact with.

So it's just so much better in that regard to practice meta.

And not only for humans,

But also for those that we don't like too much,

Like bugs and animals.

Oh,

Of course,

It's really nice and easy to have,

Oh,

I have met for those cute little dolphins and kittens and all these cute little animals.

And then a spider comes,

Die.

Right?

You know,

So meta has no barriers,

No limitations.

All of these beings we want to have goodwill towards.

And that doesn't mean that we're going to be like,

Oh,

Come here poisonous snake or spider.

You know,

That's where like compassion with wisdom,

That's where wisdom is important.

Meta is not like,

Oh,

I love you big anaconda spider snake.

That's not meta.

That's how you understand,

Okay,

Even if it's like a poisonous snake,

A poisonous spider,

Whatever,

I have met for you being.

We can't really live together because either you're going to kill me or I'm going to kill you.

So maybe we can find a way that we can live separately or whatever.

But you can have meta for this being.

So when you see a spider,

When you're in your kooties or whatever and you see a spider or being,

Have meta for it.

If you don't want to go to sleep with it,

You don't want to live with it,

At least try to capture and release.

Bring it outside.

I know there's some big spiders.

I went to my kootie one day and I went to lie down and right here there's a spider probably about half the size of my hand just hanging out,

Boom.

And I'm like,

Oh,

Hello,

Friend.

I have meta for you.

And then I came and I got the capture and release and I took him outside.

So this is important.

We don't want to limit this.

And when you see that kind of aversion towards a specific something,

That's where you practice your meta.

You have an aversion towards spiders.

You have an aversion towards whatever.

Practice your meta.

There's a sutta where the Buddha,

What happens is a monk gets killed by a snake.

And the monks go to the Buddha and they say,

This monk got killed by a snake.

And the Buddha says,

Well,

If the monk had meta for the snake,

He wouldn't have gotten killed.

And so people think,

Oh,

Yeah,

That's ridiculous.

How can you think about that?

But what the Buddha taught in that was practicing meta towards all of these beings that have the potential to hurt you,

But you practice meta towards them.

And it says,

I have meta for those with no feet,

With two feet,

With four feet,

With many feet.

And it says,

May those with many feet,

Two feet,

Four feet,

May those with these kind of feet not hurt me.

So I have meta for you.

Please have meta for me.

Don't hurt me.

So it's important that you practice this.

And being in warmer weather here in the woods,

You have ample practice for that.

So it's also good to practice with situations and experiences.

Meta is not just for living beings.

Why?

Because we're dealing with ill will in our mind.

We can have ill will towards experiences.

We can have ill will towards inanimate objects.

Dang microphone.

Stupid this,

Stupid that.

It's not that we really think that this inanimate object is a being and we really hate it.

It's aversion in our mind.

And this is the focus of that aversion at the time.

So what you do,

Whatever experience,

Whatever thing,

Whatever situation,

You practice meta towards that.

It's not like you're saying microphone,

May you be well,

Happy and peaceful.

But you say,

Okay,

You know,

Sometimes it's,

You know,

I've anthropomorphized things sometimes like,

Oh,

You know,

Thank you very much for teaching me this lesson,

This kind of thing.

Finding ways that help you in this regard.

And so as I'm over time a little bit,

But I'm almost to the end here,

It's important to make the practice your own.

Everything that we're teaching you here,

The words,

Visuals,

Different techniques,

You practice these things.

See what works for you.

See what doesn't for you.

Try different things.

Try a lot of what I've taught you is what I practice myself.

And it wasn't necessarily what I learned here.

It wasn't necessarily what I learned from somebody else.

So I took what I learned and I put that into practice.

And my own practice morphed and evolved from that.

Like the words that I give to you,

The words that I gave to you,

That's something that I just used for my own practice.

It's not something that somebody taught me how to do it.

I took the practice that I learned from here and that I learned from others.

And I put it into practice and I changed it around.

This is important to do in this practice,

Method practice.

It's interesting because unlike maybe mindfulness of breathing or poor foundations of mindfulness,

Method is pretty wide open.

Buddha gives you these basic general instructions.

And the words and the visuals and all of these things are wide open for you to practice.

Wide open for you to use and to see what works for you.

May you be well happy and peaceful.

For me,

After practicing that for a while,

It became like a mantra and it was too little.

And so other people might see what I taught and what I teach and be like,

Well,

That's too many words.

So it depends on the person.

It depends on the person's practice.

Try it.

See what works for you.

Develop your own practice.

A lot of times I don't even use words.

I'm much more of a visual person with my method.

So I can go around and give meta,

Like when we're doing the meta sutta and I can just have in my mind a picture of the earth and a picture of the galaxy,

Yada yada,

Just expanding my meta.

I don't have to say any words.

I could be chanting other words and I'm giving meta.

So it's wide open for you to make your own and to develop in that regard.

And so in closing,

You always have a choice.

You can abide with a mind of ill will,

The heavy mind,

Or you can practice,

Set the groundwork and move towards abiding with a mind of goodwill,

A mind of compassion,

A mind of appreciative joy.

And when needed be a mind of equanimity.

This is a,

You'll find as you practice this is a much more preferable state of mind to live with because you might have to live with other people,

But you also have to live with yourself,

Live with your own mind.

You can escape your own mind.

You can't escape yourself no matter how hard we try.

So it behooves us to make the choice to live with a mind of limitless goodwill as opposed to a mind of ill will and hatred.

And this practice is indeed,

It's meant to be lived.

It's not meant to be studied and to sit on the cushion and,

Okay,

I'm going to say these words.

When you're out there in life,

Life is teaching you.

You take those lessons,

You take those experiences and you apply these techniques.

You apply this to your life directly.

And that's how you understand how it works.

That's how you understand the benefit to it.

Until you do that,

It's all theoretical.

You want to apply this in your daily life.

It's not easy.

It's not easy at all.

Nothing about this practice is.

We're going against our natural inclinations.

Like the Buddha says,

We're going against the stream in this practice.

That's why it's hard,

But that's also why it's very worth it.

So eventually,

We can reach that ideal that we set in the beginning.

The ideal is happy we live,

Friendly amidst the hostile,

Amidst hostile people we live,

Free from hatred.

No matter what's going on outside,

We can live with mindfulness,

With meta in our own mind.

And in doing so,

We not only change ourselves,

But we change the world around us.

So we keep this in mind and continue this practice.

I wish you much success in your meta practice and continue to be a force for good in your own life with yourself and others.