In practice, it’s common to disregard small, subtle, or fleeting manifestations of metta as ‘not the real deal’. I certainly remember feeling like “no, this isn’t good enough! I’m looking for proper metta, big metta! I don’t know if this even counts as metta at all.”
It’s natural to compare your experience to the best experiences of metta you’ve felt in the past, or descriptions you’ve read about from others.
But I think the single most important piece of advice I could give to anybody cultivating metta, is to lower the bar for what ‘counts’.
When it comes to these scaffolding practices, there is no manifestation of metta too small to count as a spark of metta. Anything that registers in conscious experience as even a hair’s breath above complete neutrality, you can count as metta. Nothing bad happens if you do this; you won’t get sloppy. You’ll just be appreciating the metta that’s actually there. This is the best way to cultivate it; to appreciate and savour even it’s most subtle, uncertain, and unstable forms.
Duration: 26:01