Sending Metta to Ourselves

Over last Christmas break I ‘attended’ a virtual metta retreat organized by Ajahn Sona and the Birken Forest Monastery. I put attended in quotes because I wasn’t able to sit as much as I would have liked, or even attend all the events. Nonetheless I made it a point of practicing metta every day, and did my best to attend dharma talks and sit as much as I could. What I love about metta is how creative the practice feels, and Ajahn Sona really encouraged that aspects of the practice. While metta as I knew it was a process with distinct steps — first I send love to myself, then my teacher or spiritual friend, etc. — Ajahn Sona encouraged us to connect more with the direct feeling of metta and to build it up inside ourselves. The steps can help with that, but needn’t be dogmatically followed.

One of the teachings from that retreat that really stuck with me after it ended was a simple metaphor that Ajahn Sona used to describe metta. He likened it to building up a campfire. Start the fire with kindling and dry wood, sending love to ourselves or dear friend or whoever it comes easy for. And later, as the feeling grows stronger, extended it out. Eventually it will get hot enough that you can start burning the old wet logs that you have lying around. Now, naive me heard that and thought, well, I don’t think I have any wet logs lying around so to speak, I mean not really… Dear reader, it may come as no surprise that I did in fact have a some wet logs lying around in my heart.

For me, when I really got a good metta feeling going, the places that I found needed this kind of love where often aspects of my own life. Feelings of loneliness, resentment towards family that I didn’t even realize I was carrying around, struggle with aspects of my own character, shortcoming, and so on. It was a kind of breakthrough to realize that I could send love to parts of myself that were struggling, or hurting. It seems so obvious writing it now, but I had never conceptualized these things as needing love, they were just painful parts of my life.

This perspective shift brought about by Ajahn Sons and metta reminds me of Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s analogy of the “committee of the mind”. As Thanissaro Bhikkhu puts it,

…there are many different ideas of ‘you’ in your mind, each with its own agenda. Each of these ‘yous’ is a member of the committee of the mind. This is why the mind is less like a single mind and more like an unruly throng of people: lots of different voices, with lots of different opinions about what you should do. (See: https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/meditation-month-excerpt-committee-mind/).

Thanissaro points out that many committee members have ulterior motives and can engage in shading dealings to try and get their way. In my case, there are aspects of my inner life that are deeply aligned with practice and ethical living. There is a ‘me’ that is committed to protecting the environment and a ‘me’ that sometimes caves in and orders uber eats on the weekend even though there’s members of my inner committee quick to remind me that the gig economy is cruel and exploitative and the waste I produce ordering food this way is harmful. There’s other me’s too, one’s that lurk below the surface: monster and shadows, wounded things, sadness, and trauma.

For me Ajahn Sona’s wet logs are just these members of my inner committee. I can chose to send love to shadowy parts of my self. Not only does it feel good, but it is incredibly effective in a strategic sense. Often these parts of ourselves are trying, in their own way, to keep us safe. This is a central tenant of Inner Family Systems (IFS) a therapeutic modality that, without going into too much details, encourages us to identify challenging aspects of ourselves and to meet them with love and curiosity. The idea is that treating parts of ourselves that we dislike or have some kind of negative attachment towards with anger or criticism is counter productive. Instead, once we understand why these parts of ourselves are doing what they are doing we can uncover compassionate skillful means to put them at ease and stop their shenanigans.

One of the pitfalls of the precepts for me has been realizing how easily they can became a powerful tool for labelling members of my inner committee as ‘bad’, or ignorant, or whatever. Now before you state the obvious caveat that every book on precepts I’ve read re-iterates, I know that the precepts aren’t supposed to be used in this way. But nonetheless, if you give my inner critic a set of rules, it’ll find a way to use them to find myself falling short. Metta provides a healthier approach. The precepts can help us identify where to began investigating, and metta has the power to dissolve obstacles and win over our errant committee members.