Something that has felt pretty important to me lately is figuring out how to better express metta. I am fairly internally-focused, and I often feel as if I would be a more complete person if I let my thoughts and emotions be expressed more often. This is especially true with metta; it is common for me to sit with metta for someone, let it go when it is time to do so, and then have the thought arise that the metta could have been expressed externally, could have led to something further. So, I have been working with how to let that happen.
I came up with one practice that seems to be helpful in that regard, although it is very new to me and I am still exploring it. It seems to be helpful to sit with metta for someone, and when it comes time to let the metta go, ask the following:
- Does this metta want to be expressed? It doesn’t always; sometimes it feels OK to let it be as it is. If the answer is no, I let it be. If the answer is yes, then I can ask one more question:
- How can I express this metta that I am feeling for this other person? There’s not always an answer, but sometimes there is. And when there is, it is often a very clear answer!
When I feel metta for someone off of the cushion, out in the world, it is often clouded with all of the random debris that the mind generates. Even more so, when I have the intention to express it, the mind almost always generates doubt, reasons why I should not express it: it tells me that I would feel awkward, or that I don’t have time, or that person doesn’t really deserve to be happy. The mind is endlessly inventive when it comes to creating reasons not do something outside of my comfort zone. However, when I ask these questions during my sitting practice, the random debris is less present and sticky, and the reasons not to express metta are less insistent–that is the product of a concentrated mind. This clarity leads to certainty in the rightness of however I have determined to express the metta. This certainty is very motivating. When you know the right thing to do, without doubt, all that there is left to do is do the thing. It is still early days in figuring out how this works for me, but asking these questions as a coda to a sitting metta practice feels very promising.
