"Metta" Meditation, My Way

Personal experience and how-to

There’s a kind of meditation that’s been working for me really well lately, and I’d like to share how it works.

It has a lot in common with the Buddhist practice of metta (or lovingkindness) meditation, but I am not a Buddhist and I make no claim that what I do is what Buddhists do.

I made this up by trial and error. It seems to be doing good things for me, but I make no promises that it’ll work for everyone; I’m more curious how it goes for other people if they try it out.

Here’s how it goes.

How to Start

You need a comfortable place to sit where you won’t be interrupted, and get rid of any distracting input (no music, no reading material, nothing like that.)

You do not need to sit in any particular posture. You do not need to close your eyes. You do not need to empty your mind of verbal thoughts, or focus exclusively on the sensations of the breath, or anything like that.

In fact, you can actually do this while sitting at your computer with a blank text document open, occasionally stopping to write down your thoughts.

Or you can do it while lying down on the floor, or doing light stretches, or walking.

It helps if you start by doing a quick “internal check in” where you close your eyes, attend to physical sensations (breathing, heartbeat, where is my butt and back contacting the chair, etc) and psychological ones (what am I thinking/feeling/experiencing?)

The “internal check in” is something apparently not everybody knows how to do, and it might be a prerequisite. If you’ve done a bunch of not-too-esoteric things like guided meditations or mindfulness apps or Focusing, then you’re golden. You just want to make sure you’re “in the present moment” and “in your body”, attending to the meditation.

The Perspective Shift

The key thing is to embody the perspective of someone all-knowing and all-benevolent.

Let’s break that down a bit.

“Someone”

I don’t really think the specifics matter very much.

You could think of it as God, or as a god/goddess/supernatural being, or as an aspect of yourself, or as an abstract principle.

I don’t think a specific (living or dead) real-world person is a good idea for this. You’re going to be idealizing this Someone completely, and it may not be safe to put that much uncritical trust in a person.

“All-Knowing”

Imagine that this Someone knows everything you know and more.

Wise, intelligent, aware, in every conceivable way.

Not in any sense clueless, naive, narrow-minded, or deluded.

There is nothing you could tell this Someone that he/she/they/it couldn’t understand.

“All-Benevolent”

Imagine that this Someone is 100% on your side.

Genuinely friendly, benign, safe, kind. Genuinely wants the best for you. Genuinely supportive of your desires, whatever they may be.

Aligned with everything you find beautiful, fun, joyful, awesome, pleasant, precious.

In no sense is this Someone trying to hurt you, out to get you, or opposed to you getting what you want/need/love.

Personally, I found this required me to imagine a female Someone, so from here on out I will be referring to Her.

“Embody”

This is the essential part.

You have to “identify as”, or “take the perspective of”, this all-knowing, all-benevolent Someone.

It does not work to merely imagine that you are talking to Her.

Pronouns matter. Instead of thinking something like “I should have a drink of water”, you want to be thinking “You should have a drink of water.”

The second person singular (“you”) refers to your “mere mortal” self. The first person singular (“I”) refers to the all-knowing all-benevolent Someone.

I’m convinced that the core thing in this practice is just that perspective shift.

You hear it in a bunch of therapy advice as well. “Talk to yourself the way you would talk to a friend you cared about.” What DBT calls Wise Mind, what IFS just calls Self, is pretty much the same thing I’m pointing at.

You need to experience speaking-from, playing the role of, the wise/kind “I” rather than the confused/clueless/struggling “me”.

And — importantly — you have to locate a version of a wise/kind voice that you actually trust. You do not necessarily want to model your parent or therapist or teacher or an author or the abstracted persona of Spirituality or Mental Health.

You want to model someone you would like and feel safe around if you met them — safer, perhaps, and more likable, than anyone you have ever met in real life.

If you have issues around authority figures, then don’t imagine an authority — imagine a sort of magically intimate best friend or twin. Someone you would whisper secrets to.

And then, once you have that trust, you just “speak as” Her, and trust whatever She says.

Simplicio¹: “But…but… I can’t just believe everything I think! I’m fallible! I don’t have a magical means of access to truth!”

Salviati: “Cool, that’s no problem, because She knows that. Don’t have Her say anything you know to be fake, superstitious, or unreliable! Model Her as smarter than you, not as dumbed down! E.g., don’t try to use Her as an oracle to predict the weather a year from now, because you know that’s impossible and therefore so does She.”

What you get out of this is a friendly/benevolent orientation towards yourself.

It allows you to “treat yourself well”.

Simplicio: “But what if treating myself well is…bad? What if I’m too easy on myself or indulge myself too much and I become complacent or pathetic or corrupt?”

Salviati: “If it’s bad in any way, then it’s not what She wants! When it comes to “treating yourself well”, you need to imagine that implicitly included in the word “well” is every single thing that’s important to you, including ethics/ambitions/virtues/consequences/etc. She isn’t a naive hedonist. She takes everything into account.”

Simplicio: “So then she’s not on the side of my hedonistic/lazy/selfish aspects?”

Salviati: “She’s on the side of all aspects of you. Literally everything. And She’s going to work with you to make sure that, as much as possible, everything good happens, in every sense that matters to you. There’s no guarantee that everything you want is simultaneously possible, but She’s going to try to get you as close as She can. In practice this generally means unlocking more access to feeling really good AND unlocking greater capacities to live up to your ideals/aspirations/values.”

Application: Suffering

Once you have a feel for the “perspective shift”, once you can “identify as” the Benevolent Perspective, you can start to experiment with “ok, what would She think about this issue?”

Turn Her “gaze”, shine Her “light”, onto whatever problem is currently top of mind or causing you the most distress.

1. Allow Her to just observe what’s going on. “You feel bad [in some specific way] because [reason].”

2. Remember that She is opposed to this state of affairs. She thinks it is sad that you are in this situation feeling bad. She wants you to be in a better situation and feeling better. There is nothing wrong or shameful about the fact that you feel bad. There is nothing wrong or shameful about wishing to feel better. Yes, even if you know there’s something unhealthy/messed-up about your current attitude (eg something like “you’re resentful of someone else’s success”), it is totally valid to wish this whole situation hurt less.

3. Now, given that, just see if She has any insights or ideas for things to try.

There’s a whole zoo of insights and ideas I’ve had from doing this, and I’ll write about some of them in later posts, but here I’ll just say that there are certain commonalities between these “Benevolent Perspective insights.”

A lot of them use the metaphor of opening up, or unlocking. The way you might unlock greater range of motion in a joint by relaxing the muscles around it.

“Allow yourself to…” or “See if you can…” or “What if it’s possible to…” or “What if you don’t have to…”

There’s no guarantees, no “this will definitely work”, but rather “now that you notice this possibility, it seems clearly worth trying.”

Often just having Her look closely at what hurts will reveal that you have barely even tried to do the thing that you already know will help.

Why? Maybe you felt on some level that you ought not feel bad in that way, or that you ought to keep feeling bad. Maybe you were mistaken about what exactly your problem was, and you were frantically salving a different spot than the sore that actually needed ointment. Maybe you were clenched so tight around “there’s no solution to my problem” that you were actively tuning out the parts of your mind that were suggesting solutions.

There’s kind of a thing like “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise”, except it’s more like “if you actually listened to yourself complain, and took that complaint seriously, you would ever actually address the issue, and then you wouldn’t need to complain any more! Finish the job!”

The general purpose technique for suffering is “shine light on what hurts, and see if you can find something to do that’s like “following through”, “finishing the job”, “taking the pain seriously”.”

If there’s something like a tradeoff (like “I need to do this thing that sucks in order to get this other thing that’s good”) then it helps just to see the tradeoff, from Her clear and kind perspective. And then ask, “is this really a tradeoff, or could I get the good thing without paying the cost?” Even if the answer is “no,” you’ll feel better once you’ve asked the question.

The key is, you have to start out believing that She is looking for an omniwin scenario — good in every way, pleasant AND easy AND virtuous AND effective AND beautiful AND consistent with all your goals and commitments. You may not get your wish, but it helps just knowing that She is aiming for that, and aiming to take all your concerns/priorities/desires into account. Nothing gets repressed or rejected. Nothing gets forcefully overridden. If there’s a concern or objection or downside, that always gets brought into the light, never shoved under the rug. And She’s always looking for a “paradise” where everything, for everyone, is abundant/joyful/healthy/glorious/meaningful/etc — no premature giving up on things being “better”. (Mark Lippman’s writing is really good at articulating this “global wayfinding” or “omniwin” attitude.)

Once you believe that “omniwin” is actually the goal, it can very suddenly be much less upsetting that the present reality is bad in some way. You feel like “ok, but We’re Working On It.”²

In my experience, this is a super powerful technique for dealing with stress or negative emotions — much better than any behavioral intervention I’ve tried (including exercise or social interaction).

It can take a long time to “work through” it all, but the result is usually feeling a lot better, sometimes even feeling an extreme rush of euphoria.

It also can give me ideas for concrete things to do about problems, and the motivation to follow up on them.

I wouldn’t say I’m “all the way there” in terms of “promptly follow through on all actions you notice are worth doing”. It’s a work in progress. ³

But this is the main thing.

You’ll notice it’s not very “strict” or “programmatic” the way a lot of meditation is supposed to be. It’s lightweight and pleasant. I’m not trying to be a badass, log lots of hours sitting in perfect posture, annihilate my “self”, become “enlightened”, or anything like that.

I do notice that it’s surprisingly easy to “procrastinate on” or “not get around” to doing this meditation even though it feels really good, so it takes a little bit of effort for me to make sure it gets done most days. But it’s always very obviously worth it.

I’m not in a position to have opinions one way or another about somebody else’s meditation practice, though I’m open to & curious about other people’s opinions about mine.

In subsequent posts I’ll go into specific insights or reframes or theories downstream of this “metta” or “Benevolent Perspective” thing.

1. This dialogue format itself — Simplicio asking the naive questions or presenting common misconceptions, Salviati explaining the right answers — is an example of the same perspective shift I’m pointing at. You want to “identify as” Salviati, not Simplicio.

2. I find that it’s important somehow that it’s “we’re working on it”, not “I’m working on it”. There’s a sort of sense of camaraderie/alliance that’s critical to the felt sense of trust that progress is being made. Even when it’s literally inside my own head and I’m not asking for help.

3. I do think that it’s a step in the right direction to notice more things of the form “I could do this thing and I bet it would be good” even if I haven’t actually gotten around to doing it. It’s a sort of loosening or opening of possibilities that can be preliminary to actual action.

“Actions speak louder than words” is true and important, but it’s also possible to cling to it excessively and refuse to allow yourself the “good kind of” daydreaming. Like, “I shouldn’t even imagine doing this better new thing if I don’t have a track record of doing it or a firm commitment to definitely do it, otherwise it’s just idle fantasy.” And that’s silly. Opening your mind to the possibility of doing something, “idly fantasizing” for a while without commitment, can sometimes be worthwhile.