Transcript
Alright, welcome to Section 5: letting the fire spread. So let’s start with a quick recap of what we’ve covered so far on this course.
We started learning how to create a spark of metta, and some supportive attitudes to make it easier to create those sparks. Then we looked at how to get a spark of metta to ‘catch’ - to sustain the felt sense and begin to support it in spreading and growing. And we’ve worked with how to bring metta to hindrances in such a way that’s supportive of metta and unification of mind, rather than intensifying a battle between parts of your mind.
So at this point in the course, you should be able to get some metta going, and to spread that feeling so the felt sense is fairly stable in your experience. Note again that stability doesn’t mean intensity. Again, it’s not so important if the metta is gentle, or subtle, only that the felt sense, that flavour of metta, is fairly stable in the energy body.
In this section, we're going to explore how to let go of any remaining unnecessary effort. To come back to that building a fire metaphor, at a certain point, you don’t need to keep creating sparks or fanning the flames. The fire’s going, it’s stable, it’s self-sustaining. Now your job is to just sit back, not get in the way, and enjoy it, bask in it, lose yourself in the beauty of it. We’ll play with a few approaches to do that.
One approach is fully embodying the metta. That embodiment is something that’s quite important when it comes to making metta stable enough to sustain itself in a way that allows you to get absorbed in it. When the metta isn’t embodied, it can feel kind of thin, or insubstantial. So we’ll start by saturating the whole body with the felt sense of metta, encouraging it to spread.
Sometimes the metta isn’t so embodied when you’re trying to subtly tune out of some aspect of your experience, or use metta to escape something, or if you think that being absorbed in metta should mean being cut off from your bodily experience, cut off from your senses. So one thing is just to note that it’s good to be really in your body, in touch with your bodily experience when it comes to doing metta practice; and if you’re not, that’s probably pointing to something that you’re trying to avoid; pointing to a disharmony a source of disunification. Metta becomes fully embodied when you’re fully present with your whole being. Then it’s not just experienced as an abstract, mental thing - it’s as present and tangible as your body. It’s a felt, physical presence. It’s embodied. And again, when it’s embodied, it has much more of that stability, it’s easier to let go into it.
More embodiment makes it easier to be fully receptive to the felt sense. And this leads into the next practice, which is simply holding a receptive space for the metta; and this is like the last and most subtle kind of scaffolding practice, which is simply holding space; like the kind of ‘effort’ that goes into listening out for a sound, or holding a hand lightly open to receive something. It’s a simple remaining open. A remaining open that doesn’t get caught in push or pull, and doesn’t lose presence by tuning out, becoming dull. So that’s another way we’re going to approach dropping scaffolding practices: holding space, watching, listening and learning to trust that space of awareness to be enough to support the metta.
We’ll also experiment with letting go even of that subtle effort to hold space. Just as listening does itself, and there’s no effort that you can direct into your ears that will make them work any better, metta also does itself. When awareness isn’t being obscured by involvement in thoughts, and dissociation or tension in the body, there’s already metta there. And there are times when you can let go of almost all effort, and it’s like the metta is holding you, rather than you holding the metta.
And we’ll work with noticing and dropping subtle efforts that might remain, that are sometimes reflective of views about what your experience ‘should’ be like. And getting used to what it’s like to let go of any and all shoulds.
One of the things that makes it hard to let go of effort is the sense that you still have to suppress your mind. So we’ll practise noticing that, when awareness is coloured by metta in this way, even if there’s a thought that arises, it doesn’t have to disrupt that field of metta, so you don’t have to get involved in fighting with it; you can just remain holding that space, staying receptive, and let the distraction be held by that spacious, open, loving awareness as it passes through the mind. So when you’re familiar with this experience of metta being undisrupted by distractions, like how the sky is undisrupted when you throw a stone in the air, it’s easier to trust and let go into the felt sense of metta; trust that you can allow rather than having to fight with your own mind.
Finally, there are some short metta games in this section, which you can try any time, and are there to help you bring metta off-cushion and to playfully explore different aspects of metta, and help to loosen views about what metta ‘should’ be like. These games will help to support your metta practice on and off-cushion, and will - I hope - be kind of fun just to play around with. I hope these informal metta games will help to let go of any subtle effort or sense of strict formality that can be triggered just from the framing of a formal, sitting meditation practice, that needs to be done in a certain posture, for a certain length of time, in silence, and so on. Sometimes what’s best is just playing with these things - like kids learn best by playing.
So this section is about that shift from actively cultivating metta to just resting in it. It’s about letting go of effort.
But one point it’s to make here is that you don’t need to worry about whether you’ve perfectly let go of all effort. For one thing, you’ll still sometimes find that you need to go back to more structured approaches of the earlier sections, bringing in a more effortful, more structured scaffolding practice; that’s not a failure, that’s a success in being responsive to what’s needed; and you may find that you only need to do that for very short periods of time and then you can let go again.
And when it comes to dropping that effort, it’s asymptotic; I think perhaps there’s always or almost always at least some very slight degree of effort that’s needed in practice.
Because no matter how stable your metta is, how good your samadhi is, the mind will still be changing, and so there’s a degree of responsiveness that’s needed. I find the analogy of a tightrope walker helpful; it’s not like an expert tightrope walker is more static, like a statue; they’re not passive or inert, they still need to move and adjust. The stability, and the apparent effortlessness comes from their sensitivity and responsiveness to subtle movements, and the joy in that activity. And from the outside it looks completely fluid and has this kind of effortless grace and stability.
Their experience of effortlessness comes from being responsive, not passive or rigid, and the same thing is true of a skilled meditator.
So the nature of the engagement with the metta; how it feels to be basking in it, is kind of like how a tightrope walker is engaged in balance; it’s not a fixed thing; it’s dynamic; there can be a quality of playfulness. There are always these micro-adjustments that suggest themselves; perhaps enjoying different aspects of the metta, for instance the flavour may shift from joy to compassion to a pleasant stillness, or moving organically from receiving metta to sending it, to just enjoying the felt sense, or noticing that it feels good to spread it through the body more, or radiate it outwards more, so just like how you’d enjoy watching the flames of a fire change, enjoy the motion of them.
So what I’m trying to point to is that enjoying the metta, basking in the metta, even - and in fact especially when that feels effortless, is always, to a greater or lesser degree, a dynamic activity, not a static, motionless mental state. And of course sometimes it will be changing more quickly, like a river and sometimes very slow, very steady, like a tide.
So to tie this back to the question of effort, because you’ll recall that in this section we’re letting go of effort; and that picture of responsive dynamism that I just laid out might sound quite effortful, right? Well, we’re letting go of unnecessary effort, and finding that increasingly, only a very light touch is needed. You need to impose less and less structure. And learning to trust that. So again, it’s asymptotic; we’re moving towards a lighter and lighter touch. And that is increasingly characterised by a feeling of effortlessness, like it’s doing itself. Even while: awareness is functioning, it’s open, the metta is being felt vividly, distractions are being known, and so on, but it’s like - are you doing it, or is it just happening by itself? Is it effort, that responsiveness, or is it just happening by itself? Well, at a certain point it doesn’t really matter. You’re in this feeling of flow, it’s certainly very far from the kind of imposed wilful effort; it’s a seamless unification with the ongoing activity of basking in the metta.
So to recap: getting absorbed into metta is a matter of responsiveness, not fixity. And we’re learning to develop a lighter touch with that responsiveness, until you’re almost exerting no effort at all, you’re just in this joyful flow that feels effortless or almost effortless. The mind wants to be in that flow and the meditation is almost doing itself.
The practices in this section; the embodying, the holding space, and experimenting with dropping effort; that’s the direction they’re pointing in, and what you’ll start getting some experience of in this section. And with practice you’ll be able to spend more and more time there, and find your way back into that flow more quickly when you lose it.