What could be more pleasant than meditating on love? In this article I want to explore a little how a simple meditation on love/loving kindness will actually stimulate a complex and challenging developmental process for us if we do it sincerely and consistently. What I will do first of all is outline a very simple meditation on what is called wishing love, then we can have a look at an example of the sort of stuff that love meditations can bring up.
A simple meditation on wishing love.
This meditation is called wishing love because it focuses on 4 benevolent wishes that we direct toward living beings which are:
May everyone be happy,
May everyone be free from misery,
May no one ever be separated from their happiness,
May everyone have equanimity, free from hatred and attachment.
In Tibetan Buddhism these four wishes are called the four immeasurables, because they take all living beings as their object. However we can alter the structure of the sentences to direct the wishes to ourself (may I be happy), or a specific group of people (may my friends/family/so-and-so be happy). So, by altering the structure of the verse we can make it a meditation on love directed to self, others, or all living beings. We can even structure it in such a way that we spend the first 5 minutes focusing on ourself, the second 5 mins on a group, and the third 5mins focusing on all living beings.
The challenge.
So there you go, a simple, flexible format for meditating on wishing love, where does the challenge lie you ask? The challenge comes because what happens is that as soon as you try and develop these types of loving wishes toward self and others, all the things in your mind that are NOT compatible with these wishes will start to come to the surface and start to object to or block our expression of these wishes. Here is an example from my own experience. I am generally ok with directing love toward myself, toward all living beings, Gaia, the Planet, the Universe, and specific groups of living beings including some humans. However, when I think of humans in general here are some of the type of dialogues that come up:
Loving wish “May humans be happy” – Mental response: “Hold on, I’m looking at humans every day, aren’t they the wilfully selfish, self centred, animal abusing, planet polluting consumer zombies that are the source of all the problems on the earth? I’m supposed to love them? I don’t even like them!”
Loving wish “May all humans be free from suffering” – Mental response: “Since they are creating so many problems with their egos, don’t they deserve what is coming to them? Wouldn’t it be justice?”
As you can see, my mind has plenty of issues in this area, how did I / do I get around this? Some of the points being raised are indeed legitimate! I get to the fourth wish:
“May all humans have equanimity, free from hatred and attachment” – Mental response: “Ok, I can get behind that one, if they did not have hatred, attachment, pride, egoism and all the other delusions in their mind, they would not be so harmful to themselves and the planet, I can get behind this wish!”
So, in this case my solution is found in the fourth wish, I feel I can legitimately extend a loving wish that humans be free from delusions, as it resolves the somewhat legitimate objections that have been raised; I can wish humans happiness and freedom from pain by becoming free from their delusions, which will also stop them causing so much carnage! I can also start to channel some of the anger and aggression that humans stimulate in me toward doing things that will help humans overcome their delusions (see article “In order to be happy sometimes you have to get mad as hell!”)
From this example we can see that the meditation on love stimulates some quite challenging developmental processes, and for each person there will be different challenges. People with low self esteem will have trouble connecting to the wish for themselves to be happy. People who are habitually self or family centred will have trouble wishing happiness to others whom they may not know. My basic point here is that this sort of developmental challenge is where the real benefits of the meditation is. Love is not just about connecting to a soft, rosy emotional feeling, it is about truly caring about ourself and others enough to look deeply into the dynamic of our mind and our life and to get to the bottom of the human issues that we face. To REALLY meditate on love you have to care enough to get through all the uncomfortable stuff, so that your wish to give yourself and others happiness is coming from a very deep and stable place.
Good luck!
Read next article on the "four different levels of love".
