For this week, I want to explore something I’ve been toying with anyway, an apparently Buddhist-practice called Metta, I think; I will do some research and post right here this week. It’s a form of chanting / mantra meditation, and the focus is compassion. I have a small chant that I will recite daily; it’s from Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion. She has an exercise in her book that is ‘Developing your own self-compassion mantra’. Here’s what I developed, and voila!

Here’s my chant for the week:
I attend to my moments of suffering;
Suffering is just a part of every life;
My I embrace myself with love and gentleness in these moments;
May I give to myself genuine compassion.

Before I started the exercises and meditation, I took her self-compassion test on her website. Yeech… the high score is 5, the average score is 3. I scored a 1.4 – the word ‘merciless’ comes to mind. In Kristin Neff’s book on Self Compassion, she talks about trying to motivate yourself with something she refers to as ‘the demoralising whip’. That’s me all over; it’s how I was disciplined and motivated as both a child and an adult, so it’s all I knew, up to this point. She also addresses the fear of giving that up, for fear of becoming spoiled, lazy and unmotivated. I really, really need to pay attention, because those are the very things I was accused of as a child, and punished for, with shaming and blaming and the demoralising whip. The only way I ever learned to ‘motivate’ myself was to be an emotional punching bag. The ‘definition’ for ‘compassion’ in my family is ‘spoiling’. My family as a whole is actually Calvinism in a modern-day context. No wonder I’ve been an anxious, driven wreck my entire life!

And yes, the Buddhist practice is know as a metta meditation. To summarize, the practice is briefly explained as:

The Pali word ‘Metta‘ is commonly translated in English as ‘loving-kindness.’  Metta signifies friendship and non-violence as well as “a strong wish for the happiness of others.”  Though it refers to many seemingly disparate ideas, Metta is in fact a very specific form of love — a caring for another independent of all self-interest — and thus is likened to one’s love for one’s child or parent. Understandably, this energy is often difficult to describe with words; however, in the practice of Metta meditation, one recites specific words and phrases in order to evoke this “boundless warm-hearted feeling.”  The strength of this feeling is not limited to or by family, religion, or social class.  Indeed, Metta is a tool that permits one’s generosity and kindness to be applied to all beings and, as a consequence, one finds true happiness in another person’s happiness, no matter who the individual is.
– Yale Education Psychology Department

Some great sources and resources:

Neff, Kristin. Self-compassion: Stop Beating Yourself up and Leave Insecurity behind. New York: William Morrow, 2011. Print.

Loving-Kindness. The Revolutionary Art of Happiness by Sharon Salzberg (1995). Boston: Shambhala.

Richo, David. How to Be an Adult in Relationships: the Five Keys to Mindful Loving. Boston: Shambhala, 2002. Print.

http://info.med.yale.edu/psych/3s/metta.html