1: What Will You Get From This Course?
Transcript, in case you prefer to read
Hey! Welcome to the Absorbed in Love course!
This course is going to be a guide to using loving-kindness meditation as a concentration practice. I’m Ollie, and this is a topic that’s very close to my heart, so I’m really very glad that you’re here on this course with me, and thanks for joining!
So these videos are going to be a brief introduction to the course; I’m going to cover what I hope you’ll get from this course; a bit about what loving-kindness practice is, how I think about concentration, and why metta is such a good practice for cultivating it. I’ll also give you a brief overview of the structure of the course.
Maybe a bit about my background with metta practice, to start. I’ll use the term metta a lot; metta is just the pali word for loving-kindness.
I first tried loving-kindness practice when I was about 17, and when I first tried it, I really didn’t like it. I didn’t get it, it just didn’t click with me. And I just wasn’t interested in it. Funnily enough, I dismissed it because at the time my main interest was in concentration; I was chasing bliss and absorption states - and loving-kindness was presented as though it was something unrelated. The image of meditation practice options that I picked up at the time was that you could do: concentration meditation, which would lead into these incredible states of bliss and ecstasy and light, or you could do insight meditation, which would give you deep psychedelic insights into the nature of reality and the self, and breakthroughs that end suffering, or you could do loving-kindness meditation, which is nice. It’s nice to do. It’s something that makes you a nice person. So I was like, well, that’s boring, I’m gonna go for the incredible bliss and insight experiences, thank you very much!
Over time though, I would sometimes come back to metta, and occasionally get little glimpses where some metta opened up. And it felt like something very valuable was happening in those moments, something that actually I wasn't experiencing very much with the other practices I was doing. It felt like a kind of love that would touch parts of myself that those other practices weren’t reaching. And it felt more connected to my real life, in a way that other practices didn’t. I could go on a meditation retreat and experience a lot of joy and absorption states, and even some insights, but I found that when I came off retreat, I still felt more or less the same shame, and the same social anxiety, and so on, as I ever did. It somehow didn’t touch a lot of that real life suffering. But those moments of metta did; there was something healing, that actually changed my relationship to myself and with other people, and with life, at least at times; a kind of healing that was missing elsewhere.
So you’d think that would have motivated me to explore it more, but the truth is that it didn’t. I didn’t really know what to make of it, and I still had this idea that more concentration was what I needed. The other stuff - more access to love, and feeling less burdened by shame and so on, somehow didn’t seem relevant to this rigid idea I had of “concentration”.
But gradually, as my understanding and experience of concentration deepened, I began to see how inseparable metta and concentration are, and I started to bring it into my practice more and more intentionally, and that’s been one of the more rewarding things I’ve done in my practice - and my life, actually.
One of the motivations for this course was simply that I found it hard to find clear metta meditation instructions; they were mostly along the lines of: “just keep repeating phrases until something happens”, which I never found very effective, and I always felt confused about what I should actually be doing in metta meditation. It seemed to me that most teachers were describing what it feels like after a lot of practice, rather than how to actually practise effectively. So this course will give you more clarity, and more of a deliberate and structured approach to cultivating metta. Another thing this course will help with is - obviously - using metta as a concentration practice. Again, I found few good instructions for this, despite all the discourse about concentration and jhanas and so on, and I think metta has been extremely underhyped as a concentration practice; in my experience it’s extremely effective, one of if not the best object for concentration.
So, you’ll get better at metta, and better at concentration. There’s another thing that I hope you’ll get from this course; which is that your meditation practice will actually be a source of real support in your life.
Earlier on in my practice I think I was trying to use concentration as a way to get further away from the problems in my life. When I was in a good meditation session, or a good retreat, my shame, my anxiety, my issues with family and friends; those things felt distant and irrelevant. That felt like a relief, so I naturally wanted to keep moving in that direction, away from my everyday life problems. I had a sense that perhaps if my practice got good enough, those problems would feel pleasantly distant and irrelevant all the time. But unfortunately I had to stop meditating and keep living my life at certain times, and there were these pesky parts of me that kept caring about things like my self-image and relationships. And what I was doing when I was trying to get distance from those problems was really getting distance from those parts of myself. And so this ended up creating a split within myself.
It wasn’t until much later that I realised a good practice should - at some point - help you to go towards those mundane problems, not away from them. It should help to make you a more integrated person, not more divided.
This course is in part born from that realisation. That shift integrated my practice with my life in a way that improved both. And metta practice is such a supportive bridge for making that shift.
So that’s why I wanted to make this course: it will help you to deepen your metta practice, help you to deepen your concentration practice, and make your meditation practice a source of real healing and support in your life.
2: About Metta & Samadhi
Transcript
So, let’s talk a little now about the content of the course. Loving-kindness practice is intended to cultivate metta, so it’s probably about time that I said a little about what metta actually is, to start off with.
Metta is the intention of kindness, and the felt sense in the body that comes with that.