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Metta: the Practice of Loving-Kindness

Just about every human being goes through varied degrees of contention in a lifetime, a feeling of swimming against the current of a river. This being a form of suffering in life is, at the base, a concept that spawned Buddhism in the eyes of the Awakened One, Buddha. Life is inherently full of suffering and we all experience it at different levels, some with great foreboding and fear and others with just having a bad day. According to Buddha, one of the practices that can cultivate a vaccine for this type of suffering is the practice of Metta or Loving-Kindness cultivation.

Metta is a Pali word, a language in which the cannon of Buddhism was written a language of Southeast Asia (Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, India, and Nepal) during the First Century BCE (100 BC). Also known as the Classical Era, this time period is most marked as the declining years of the Roman Republic in Europe.

Yet, what is Metta and how can one use it, since it appears to be a tool to thwart the negative in life. At its seed, Metta is a quality of the heart that sees life without conflict or contention. What sounds rather naive is actually very profound and takes work to cultivate. Imagine an experience where one does not fume through the day because of a long commute in traffic or freedom from negative thoughts towards one who may have wronged us. The why we would want to do this can be summed up in a quote from Buddha; "When angry the first reaction is to pick-up a hot coal with the intention of throwing it at your enemy in hopes of causing as much harm as they caused you, yet the only person who is harmed is you by the hot coal and burns on your hands".

How does one go about cultivating this golden bit of life lesson left out by our teachers and society? Through training the mind in meditation and re-training the brain to see over and around the mountain as opposed to at the mountain which is the big obstacle. Cultivation of Metta is a mental factor and thus can be created if one wishes to train their mind.

Most Buddhists under practice start with Mindfulness Meditation and then move on to a Metta Meditation method to further progress through what the Buddha had taught yet it is something that can be done by a lay person or a beginner in Buddhist study. Cultivating this line of thinking creates unconflicted relationships, freedom from fear, a greater feeling of connection to the world and as a result a softening of the heart

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