Transcript
Welcome to Section 6, which I’m calling Unveiling Love. We’re going to be experimenting with a different approach to metta practice in this section. So far, we have been working with the idea that metta is something that you have to generate, something that you have to do, actively. And then when it’s built up big enough, stable enough, like a big fire, then you can finally leave it alone. Or like a spinning top, that you have to put a lot of energy into before it’s stable.
In this section, we are going to work with a different understanding of metta: that it is not something you have to generate, but rather something that already naturally characterises the nature of mind, when nothing’s in the way. Your task is simply to notice what’s obscuring it, and notice the loving space around that.
You may have already experienced this a little bit if you’ve played around with the practices in Section 5, but don’t worry if not.
Increasingly in metta practice, it feels as though metta is simply what awareness is like when you’re not getting in the way. And so it’s a matter of doing less, not more. Of simply not obscuring that natural goodness.
In the Tao te ching, it says:
Pursue knowledge, gain daily
Pursue Tao, lose daily.
Lose and again lose,
Arrive at non-doing.
Non-doing,
And nothing not done.
There’s already a space of awareness which contains the activity of your mind; your thinking, desire, aversion, your numbness, fear, boredom, analysing, etc. That space of awareness is already there, but we tend to identify with the narrow activity that arises within it instead. When we’re identified and narrowed down in that way, we get overwhelmed by those emotions and caught up in the content of our thoughts.
In this section you’ll get some experience with stepping back and identifying less with the content in your mind, and more with that calm, open, kind, spacious awareness that contains it.
The practices we’ll be using are drawn from a kind of therapy called Internal Family Systems, or IFS, which contains some very effective practices for this kind of work. You don’t need to have had any prior experience with IFS, and even if you have struggled or not connected with the material in the previous sections, don’t despair! This section introduces a very different approach which may be just what you need if the other practices somehow haven’t connected.
So I’ve linked to a more in-depth introduction to IFS below, which I’d encourage you to read, but I’ll give a very brief introduction here as well in case this is new to you.
IFS sees the mind as being made up of ‘parts’. When we say “part of me feels this way but part of me feels that way”; when we notice internal conflicts about what we want to do or how we feel about something, we’re noticing parts.
We’re usually identified with one part of another. When we’re identified with a part, it’s called being ‘blended’ with that part; it’s like that part is in the driver’s seat of our minds. When we’re blended with a part of us, we feel the emotions of that part as ours, see the perspective and beliefs of that part as the truth, speak and act the way that part wants us to.
After a breakup, for example, you might be blended with a part that misses your ex desperately, and then a minute later be blended with a part that hates them, and then be blended with a third part that doesn’t like being so conflicted and wants some clarity on how you should feel. And your thoughts, feelings, and behaviour might change a lot depending on which part’s blended.
IFS helps you to unblend from your parts. When you unblend from a part, you might go from feeling “I am anxious” to being aware of anxiety arising in the space of awareness, but without feeling like it’s “yours”, and without feeling overwhelmed by it. It’s like you’re taking the perspective of the space of awareness itself, rather than the content arising within it.
Though most of us aren’t used to it, it is possible to not be blended with any parts; in IFS this is called being in Self - with a capital ‘S’. Self is the aspect of you that’s not a part. Self is characterised by a calm, spacious presence, with no agenda to get rid of any aspect of yourself, but this loving, compassionate understanding. This calm, compassionate, courageous capacity is often referred to as ‘Self-energy’. And when your parts gain an increasing trust in Self, then your system can be increasingly ‘Self-led’, which just means that your parts know they can be heard and their needs can be met without them needing to fight to blend with you. And this allows that natural metta that characterises Self to be more spontaneously present, even in everyday life.
Furthermore, when a part trusts that it doesn’t have to blend with you to be heard, it won’t act in such extreme ways, and it’s easier to appreciate the gifts of that part. Parts which previously seemed to be causing trouble or creating ‘hindrances’, can be appreciated and loved for their positive qualities and the gifts that they can contribute to your life. There’s no such thing as a ‘bad’ part; all parts are just doing what seems best to them to help you to be safe and happy. Though they can often get stuck in extreme roles, they’re not defined by those roles, and you can help free them up to use their natural gifts and energies in a way that feels good, rather than constraining.
When you see that there really are no bad parts; that they all have a place and something to contribute, and they trust in Self rather than all fighting to blend, then there’s a lot less energy spent on fighting between parts that don’t like each other, and again - that natural metta is unveiled.
So we’ll explore in this section how the view and practices from IFS can begin to help you to unblend from parts and experience the loving energy that intrinsically characterises your mind.
These practices can go very deep, and you may find that some parts of you hold a lot of pain, and that are unwilling to unblend. That’s always ok, and we never want to push past parts or try to force them to unblend. If you run into parts like this, it can be incredibly helpful to work with an IFS practitioner. I found that, with parts that held a lot of pain, and were very tightly holding onto their roles, it was about a hundred times easier and more effective to work with somebody to help me hold space for those parts. And I still sometimes find it necessary to get somebody else to help me do this work. So you might want to book a call with either me or another IFS practitioner; it can be really worth it.
So I really haven’t gone into much detail about what this looks like as a form of therapy, and I’d encourage you to check out the resources I’ve linked below if you’re interested. But this section will be an introduction to some practices inspired by the model, to help you to experience the love and kindness that’s inherent to awareness when you’re not blended with parts.
We’ll practise noticing parts and recognising how they show up, and learning to see ‘hindrances’ as the activity of parts who are just trying to do their best to keep you protected and happy. We’ll also get some practice with unblending from parts, befriending them, and experiencing the Self-energy or metta that’s revealed when you do so. There’ll also be a practice to work with parts in a difficult conflict with each other, and to direct Self-energy to others as a kind of metta practice.
I hope that with some practice in this section, you’ll experience the effortless metta that characterises the nature of awareness; and that it helps you to find more spaciousness and love around painful patterns that arise both on and off the meditation cushion.
Rumi said: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it”. And that’s really the heart of this section.
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