Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / The Radiance of Metta - Jomon Martin, Zen Teacher

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The Radiance of Metta - Jomon Martin, Zen Teacher · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:00
  Jomon: Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week. So I'd like to continue our conversation and focus this whole month of June on metta which is an important practice in Buddhism. Metta is often translated as loving kindness or goodwill or benevolence.
• 0:48
  This wish for the well-being of ourselves and others and that there's no distinction between the wish that we would ourselves be well, our nearest and dearest, as well as acquaintances and even those with whom we have difficulty. Sometimes I like to think of metta as this sort of radiance like the sun that is both light and light giving, and in the same way the sun radiates outward, radiates light, radiates heat, offers freely and without any expectancy for anything in return is just completely generously offering itself. And with that generosity look what happens, it's this unimaginable, unlimited amount of life that results from from that wish. So metta is a lot like that that the sun shines equally on us all. It doesn't say well, not not you so much.
• 2:10
  Even though it may feel like that sometimes maybe. If you're depressed, it probably feels a lot like that, but that's not how it is. The sun shines on all of us equally. And we have different practices in Buddhism to cultivate this wish for well-being, to turn our minds which may be habituated to kind of settling into some negativity perhaps. There are ways to turn the mind, to brighten the mind.
• 2:54
  So let's do a little meta practice right now. And you can shift your posture if you want, you don't have to, but if you and if you'd like to close your eyes you can, you can also keep them open just at your usual 45 degree angle or so, just letting your eyes rest somewhere, letting the body settle, let go of any extra tension or holding, maybe notice the breath, feeling the breath as it reaches the belly. And a couple times just give it a full exhale, let the belly move towards the spine all the way out. And you might notice that the inhale just takes care of itself eventually, you don't actually have to do anything. Just letting that inhale flow in and see if you can just once again empty the lungs entirely, let the belly move towards the spine and when it's time the inhale arises, then you can settle into a natural breath.
• 4:14
  You're not pushing the exhale anymore, But we are gonna focus on the breath and use some phrases of loving kindness. And I like to start with imagining someone that's near and dear, someone with whom you have a very easy and uncomplicated loving relationship. This might be a child or a pet or someone who's really helped you, a benefactor. And you can just bring them to mind, see their face maybe envisioning them doing something that they love doing, something that makes them happy. And on each out breath, saying silently to yourself, you be free from fear and anxiety.
• 5:10
  You can use their name if you like.
• 5:14
  Jomon: May you be at ease. May you be deeply happy.
• 5:25
  Jomon: You can amend these phrases or focus on one of them, whichever you like. But with each out breath as if you could breathe this experience into them or shine it from your heart to theirs or allow them to absorb the rays of this wish that you're emanating from your own heart. May you be free from fear and anxiety.
• 6:00
  Jomon: May you be at ease. May you be deeply happy.
• 6:18
  Jomon: It could also be envisioning or feeling of warmth and well-being. Maybe maybe it's more of a sensation if you're more of a somatic person or a visual person, this light, this beam of light that you get to share. You may or may not have a emotional tone in this practice, but you might. Invoke a sense of warmth or affection, lightness, care. If you could transmit that to this other being.
• 7:15
  And now turning the attention, just shining that light, turning it as if you could turn a light and right now shining it on yourself or just allowing this sunshine to build within your own heart and flow out into your own body this warmth, this light, this life giving kindness and well wishing for your own being. May I be free from fear and anxiety. May I be free from fear and anxiety. Each breath just sweeping through the body like cobwebs. You just sweep the body free from these knots or entanglements of fear and anxiety and letting them go.
• 8:11
  Jomon: Each out breath.
• 8:19
  Jomon: May I be at ease.
• 8:26
  Jomon: May I be deeply happy.
• 8:33
  Jomon: It is not selfish to wish happiness towards this being. We are not separate from anyone else. So in a way, it just goes right through us. And is immediately offered to the world. May I be free.
• 8:55
  Jomon: May I be at ease. May I be deeply happy.
• 9:17
  Jomon: And now perhaps bringing to mind someone that you don't know, someone you don't know well. Maybe that is someone right here in this room, a stranger or an acquaintance. Maybe it's someone you saw on the news or group of people, the same wish shining out from your heart, the same generous radiance that's boundless that you can share with this being or beings knowing that they too just like you and me want to be happy. Just like you and me, they want to be free from fear and anxiety. We share the same humanity.
• 10:27
  May you be free from fear and anxiety.
• 10:36
  Jomon: May you be at ease. May you be deeply happy.
• 10:47
  Jomon: This heartfelt wish, generosity without discrimination, this person you don't even know.
• 10:58
  Jomon: May you be deeply happy.
• 11:14
  Jomon: And now if you'd like to bring to mind someone with whom you might have some difficulty, This does not have to be the most difficult person in your life. You could try just with someone you're a little irritated with from time to time. Maybe a little friction. Again this is someone who also wants to be happy, who doesn't want to suffer. Can you offer them this same wish, the same light that shines on everyone?
• 11:56
  May you be free from fear and anxiety.
• 12:07
  Jomon: May you be at ease, And may you be deeply happy, deeply satisfied.
• 12:36
  Jomon: And can you take this wish and expand it out in all directions offering it freely in the way that the sun also expands in all direction, this radiance and life giving heat and light so that it touches an ever expanding spaciousness, perhaps including everyone in this room, this building as it emanates out above and below. Can it include everyone in this part of the city? The whole city, the whole region, All the creatures in the ground and in the water and in the air and on land, every being, all beings without exception including yourself in this ever expanding bubble of loving kindness? Can it include the whole planet, the universe? Can it be boundless?
• 14:10
  May all beings be free. May all beings be at ease. May all beings be happy. Okay. That was a meta meditation.
• 14:35
  Pretty classical, although in the classical meta, we usually start with our self. I find that that's hard for some people though. Is that hard for anyone here? Does it feel a little bit like, oh, that's selfish, I shouldn't be doing that. Yeah.
• 14:52
  But it gets a little constricted sometimes in that part. So I like to start with puppies and kittens and all that good stuff. You could just focus your metta practice on that beloved one or one or two children or pets or you could really just, or the benefactors actually, talked about last week in here who loved you into being as Mr. Rogers would say. Who are the people that loved you into being?
• 15:37
  Who are the people that wanted the best for you as you were growing up and who helped you arrive and be exactly where you are right now. You can bring those benefactors to mind even right now. Bring them in here and allow that to be part of your foundation for this practice. And you could just stay with that. One of the really helpful ways to work with metta is to invite a sense of ease, invite a sense of rest, invite a sense of well-being so that we can settle into our meditation and concentrate.
• 16:24
  Now it is I hate to talk about meditation in any way as a means to an end. Not great to really look at it that way, and at the same time it's skillful, it's very skillful to turn the mind in this way. It's difficult to rest, to find this, invite this sense of restful alertness if we're ruminating about how much, you know, how much we wanna kill somebody. Like that's actually not gonna help or that person that did you wrong, how dare they? That's that's kinda antithetical to the whole project here but we can notice that and if there is, there may be something we need to do to deal with our life situation.
• 17:19
  It's not to say just ignore it or pretend it's not happening, but can we shift our state of mind so that we can be a little more open, a little more available to this moment as it is and not in our ruminating, repetitive, that same movie that we keep watching over and over again. So I keep being really interested, mean also I wanna say we could do meta for ourselves and this I kinda challenge all of you who get a little constricted around that to really just do that as much as you can, to really offer yourself metta as the primary focus, as kind of your main meditation that you do for a while. You could do meta for yourself pretty exclusively for months. It would be probably really helpful to just get good and comfortable with that, to just get really adept offering yourself the same kind of care and appreciation that we might usually reserve for anybody else outside of ourselves. So I again challenge you to that, but I am very interested also in the other categories, especially now.
• 18:48
  Here we are, our country ostensibly at war both with some other countries that also within ourselves, within each other. There is so much division and just a real failure to see each other, isn't it? We we see these cartoons of each other, don't we? So more and more I see the wisdom of this practice, the wisdom of a practice that encourages us to focus this life giving radiance onto people we don't even know. People we would call strangers, people we would maybe assume things about if we weren't turning our mind to this generosity of spirit towards them and this assumption of their full humanity that That if we don't do that, what are we doing?
• 20:09
  We're just seeing what someone's wearing or how they are in the world and making a bunch of assumptions. And maybe we push away, maybe we move towards, but to offer this loving kindness to someone it really humanizes them. If you can even pick out a specific person that you don't actually know and then let that be the focus. When I lived in Portland, I don't know if they have tamale guys in Vancouver. Do you have them where they come around in the neighborhoods?
• 20:50
  The big He had a big Guatemalan colored blanket in this big box, like a cooler, and he had that slung over his shoulder. His name is Miguel, I've come to find out. And these hot tamales in a bag, like five of them, chicken or cheese, and he just kinda like come around and whenever he'd come around, you could just buy some of the tamales from him. And so he'd come regularly enough that I decided Miguel is gonna be my acquaintance for the for the living kindness. So whenever I did that, could think of him.
• 21:26
  I still can see his face right now. I hope he's okay. And I did this for a little while and then I realized that he was no longer an acquaintance. He he was someone I really cared about, and that's how I even got to know his name. And there was this one time he came to our house, and it just started pouring raining, And he just sat down on the on the bench right out on our porch and just kind of waited it in our porch.
• 22:00
  And he and he felt comfortable enough to do that. Like, it was totally okay. And I was so pleased that he felt comfortable enough to do that, not walk around in the pouring rain. So it is just a a powerful thing to to get to see someone differently like that and so how valuable it is for us to have this capacity to humanize each other, people we don't even know. And we can see how there might be a tendency or a habit to hoard our goodwill, to hoard our assumptions of goodness, right, to to say no, just for me or my family and my people and my kind of whatever and not them.
• 22:53
  And and we know how that turns out. We know where that ends up, don't we? It's small, it seems so small doesn't it? But when it's allowed to proliferate it is fatal. So here is this important medicine, here is this important capacity for us to see what how how it truly is, and then there's this whole like what about the difficult person?
• 23:24
  Not only that, not only are we gonna like, go with the stranger people and the them people, but the difficult one. Like, the difficult one. Now, I always say, don't you don't have to do the most difficult person. Usually, a lot of people like to start there. A lot of people like to just, like, try that first.
• 23:42
  So they just learn meta, you've got your baby deer legs meta practice and then you go straight for Godzilla. You don't have to do that. The this category was formerly, you know, traditionally or classically translated as the enemy even. So I don't know if you have enemies, but this would be the category for your enemy. We call it a difficult person, and then I was reading about meta and somebody said that even the difficult person is kind of like you're blaming them, like they're difficult.
• 24:21
  So so this one teacher was like, they call it the person with whom I have difficulty, which is kind of a lot. Right? So I just call it the final boss. And if you don't play video games, a final boss is the video game gets harder and harder challenges and enemies and the final boss is the most difficult one at the end of the game. So if you if you do decide to offer meta to your final boss, there I have disclaimers around this.
• 24:57
  Some people have experienced some really painful stuff from at the hands of other human beings and so you do not have to do this. You do not have to do this until you feel good and ready to do this. It is totally up to you and there's no pressure or hurry to do this because this practice is not actually a off the shelf one size fits all kind of thing. It really is ideally practiced in you know, with with some community or teacher or you know, whatever else, your therapist, stuff like that. So you would be the number one expert about when it might be time to work with that difficult one.
• 25:45
  Also, doing meta in this category for a difficult person, the final boss, that's not the same of as approving of what they did or forgetting about it or agreeing with it or signing up for it to happen again. None of that is necessarily true to actually do this practice. And also, sometimes this gets wrapped up in the word forgiveness, and that word may or may not suit you. That's more of a Christian term, and and we and we have a kind of a different outlook in Buddhism, which I think the 12 steps tend to do a little better job of articulating, is letting go of resentments. Letting go of resentments is a nice way to so that's you get to kind of decide when you're gonna let those go.
• 26:47
  And it may be that the final boss is yourself. It may be that offering meta to yourself is actually the hardest thing. You could do it for anybody else, but it's that like, oh, this really feels wrong somehow to do this, then then I you might be the final boss. You might be the one that really might benefit from you know, switching those first two categories. Start with the beloveds and then try to offer it to yourself.
• 27:21
  Sometimes I think of it as like when I'm offering myself metta that I'm filling this vast reservoir of loving kindness that I can then have available to offer to others. There's a story about, it's one of my favorite stories of meta, and I think it applies to meta for the final boss. And it's a Theravadan monk named Finisaro Biku and he tells this story about his teacher. Meta and the story is called Meta is Goodwill. She often used the word loving kindness and that sure feels like huggy and cuddly and warm and fuzzy and everything and maybe you don't actually have that genuine feeling towards somebody, but you might have some goodwill wish for their well-being.
• 28:25
  So metta is goodwill. It goes like this. Ajaan Fuang, my teacher, once discovered that a snake had moved into his room. Now these are Thai forest monks and they have taken on all of the precepts that the Buddha, the precepts of ethical behavior, all 200 and some precepts of the Buddha. So, you know, they don't beg for their food, they only eat you know, before noon, they don't touch money, all these things and they live in these little huts basically, a single hut just with their robes and that's all they have.
• 29:07
  So the snake had moved into his room. Every time he entered the room, he saw it slip into a narrow space behind a storage cabinet and even though he tried leaving the door to the room open during the daytime, the snake wasn't willing to leave. Now this is also in Sri Lanka and probably the snakes are venomous. It's like not like here in Oregon where it's like, oh, aren't they cute? No.
• 29:35
  This actually is kind of a problem. So for three days, they lived together. He was very careful not to startle the snake or make it feel threatened by his presence. But finally on the evening of the third day, as he was sitting in meditation, he addressed the snake quietly in his mind. He said, look, it's not that I don't like you.
• 30:03
  I don't have any bad feelings for you, but our minds work in different ways. It would be very easy for there to be a misunderstanding between us. Now there are lots of places out in the woods where you can live without the uneasiness of living with me. That's his thought, his wish. And as he sat there spreading thoughts of metta to the snake, the snake left.
• 30:36
  I love that story because it allows us to practice loving kindness. It doesn't mean you have to want the person close to you, it doesn't mean you have to want them close to you physically or emotionally, it's not that lovey dovey huggy thing, it's goodwill, it's I wish you ease, I wish you peace over there. So for me, with my final boss, I had a I had a actual boss and I was fired. This was years ago. And as a overachiever and like personal do gooder, this didn't I was I did not see it coming.
• 31:18
  And I was totally upset about it and you know, had a a certain certainly a personal freak out and carried that resentment for quite a while until it you know, for so long and it became clear that actually, it didn't actually even take that long. Several months, it became clear that my life was actually much much better working somewhere else. So it was it didn't square anymore with the resentment I was carrying to this person. Like I I actually was doing way better. So I realized I had to deal with this.
• 32:00
  I had to it was it was time to let this resentment go. So that story actually was really helpful because I didn't wanna just welcome that person into my life. I didn't wanna make it so that they could just turn my life upside down again. It was like building a nice fence between both of us, like a little picket fence between neighbors and that I could wave, you know, from my yard and they could wave back and I didn't have to like have my stomach clenched every time I see this person or like dive into my house and turn off the lights and pretend like I'm not home and avoid them. It was not like a cold war.
• 32:39
  It was not like a militarized border. Just a nice fence that I knew I would not be their pal, but I was also not gonna hold on to this resentment either. So that enabled me to really make that genuine wish for their well-being because I knew that I was over here and they were over there. So there's really no downside except losing all the self righteousness that I had built up over the in between time. That helped me feel kinda safe for some something innocent somehow contributed to my story about how I had been wronged.
• 33:21
  So that was my primary practice for a while, like a few months just towards this person. I I generate the wish with the with my dog and, you know, all the people that I love and offer to myself and Miguel and and I focus on this person. And I don't know how it softened, but it did. I don't remember exactly, you know, there wasn't like a moment, but at some point it did. Like you can't see your fingernails growing, but you know they are.
• 33:54
  There's a result there somewhere. There's a change that happens eventually. It's like the sun of meta, the sunshine of meta shining on these little you know, we have these now. If you've noticed in the fruit trees, there's little hard green things that are bitter right now. You bit one, it would not taste good.
• 34:17
  It's like that's like the resentment, and we just beam this meta onto this little unripe fruits, and over time, they they change. They're they're warmed. They're they they grow. They they ripen. They sweeten.
• 34:38
  And they sometimes eventually just fall right off on their own, don't they? And then if it's left there, it even transforms completely into something else, becomes compost basically or food for other beings. So after all this time, after all this ripening with my former final boss, I ended up writing him a thank you letter. It was the turn of a new year and I realized I was really free of resentment and that I had actually benefited from the time I had worked for him and I was able to really outline all the ways that he had helped me, all the professional opportunities I had and for the learning environment and the good qualities that were in him and letting him know I didn't have any more ill will and really felt fine about running into them sometime. Sincerely wished him all the very best and you know, he then wrote me and apologized.
• 35:42
  He he apologized to me also in person which not everybody gets that. It's pretty great if that happens but may or may not happen. And you can do matzah for people who are deceased for sure. It is letting go of our own resentment. So That's really what I want to say that you know one of the things that we focused on in our practice today was just noticing, returning to again and again how everything is changing.
• 36:24
  Everything is impermanent. Although there is, what is it that's not? What is it that doesn't change? What is it that's always here? What is it that is not born does not die?
• 36:36
  That's that's a great question. As we notice all of the things that are born and die, all of the things that do begin exist and disappear. We could try to hold a grudge forever, you know, and with the world the way it is, sometimes I take this odd comfort in the simple fact that the earth actually is going to be swallowed by the sun at some point. Like why is that comforting to me? But it is.
• 37:10
  Like there's something really natural about just everything ends, everything. And that makes it so sweet, doesn't it? That we get to be here. We get to be here right now together and feeling this breath, feeling this life. Let's not waste it on holding a grudge.
• 37:39
  I mean, you may need to for a while. Again, this is totally your call. There's everybody's different. But what what do you want your life to be about? What is your life about?
• 37:53
  And what do you want your life to be about? Given that we don't know when it will end. I mean, I probably waited a little too long with my grudge and got a little rotten and stinky and you know, compostable, but it still ended up fine. It made good compost. Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice.
• 38:33
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