Transcript
The overall structure of the course follows this metaphor of starting a fire.
When you’re starting a fire the first step is to find a way of making sparks. The second step is getting the sparks to catch on some tinder, and then - third step - you help the flame to spread and become stable. And at a certain point you have a self-sustaining fire, which you can just sit back and enjoy, and let it keep growing by itself - which is the fourth step. The progression of metta looks quite similar; that’s the progression that we’re going to go through with this course as well: finding a way to create sparks, getting them to catch into a stable flame, nourishing that flame, and then sitting back and enjoying the fire.
So Section One is called spark practices; these will be a bunch of practices to try to start getting a felt sense of metta - which is your metaphorical spark that you can start working with.
Section Two is about supportive approaches to the spark practices. It gives you some ways of playing with intentions, different emphases when doing those practices that make it more likely for metta to arise.
Section Three is about getting that fire to catch. You’ve made some sparks, but they’re small and fleeting, and you want to use them to get the tinder to catch light into a more stable flame. And in this section we’ll work on getting that felt sense of metta to begin to “catch”- to hold space for it in a way that it can become more stable in your experience.
Section Four is about hindrances: working with common obstacles to metta practice that may come up. I’ve placed Section Four here because I expect this is where some common hindrances to metta might start to become particularly limiting factors, but you can actually go to this section at any time.
Section Five is called letting the fire spread. So you’ve created a spark, you’ve got it to catch into a flame, and once you’ve tended the fire, created supportive conditions for the fire to spread, then your work is to just sit back and to enjoy it! You don’t have to keep making sparks at it, don’t have to keep fussing with it after a certain point. So this section will be about how to create supportive conditions for that to happen, and then actually how to start trusting and relaxing back into less of an active, “doing” mode, and more just enjoying, and getting absorbed into that experience.
The final section, Section Six, is called Unveiling Metta and is a bit of an odd one out. Here the course departs from the fire making model. That metaphor, and most metta practice instructions, imply that metta is something you have to generate, something you have to create with effort. This section introduces this model that actually, metta isn’t something that needs to be generated, it’s more like something that’s unveiled. Once you get out of the way, you can notice that the nature of mind is already, naturally, characterised by metta; love is part of the nature of awareness, and you actually have to be doing something actively to obscure that - but the mental habits that do obscure it are so tenacious that it’s ordinarily hard to notice. This section is about learning to recognise and become familiar with that aspect of the nature of mind. This section you can also do at any time. I expect it will be very accessible after you’ve worked through the other material, but there’s no reason not to do it earlier if you want to try it, and actually some of the material here can sometimes really work to provide another approach to unblock some metta if you’re finding the other practices difficult.
You might be wondering how long the course will take to complete, and I actually don’t have any recommendations on that - I’d just say as long as it needs to. If you complete one meditation every day it will take you about six weeks, but you may want to stay with certain practices or certain sections for much longer than that to really get used to them. You also may want to skip certain sections, and come back to them later, and that’s also fine; use the course however you think will be of most benefit to you.
Ok, so that’s everything for now. Thank you for being on this course, and I’m sending you much metta.