Metta: The Practice of Lovingkindness

Jack Kornfield: I will read a couple of things that I have read before to some of you in Power of
Awareness, but they're some of my favorite poems or readings. And part of it is in beginning to
teach metta, to evoke that mystery so that we can sense it in ourselves. Remember the poem from
Ellen Bass:
"At gate C22 in the Portland airport, a man in a broad-brimmed leather hat kissed a
woman arriving from Orange County. They kissed and kissed. Long after the other passengers
clicked the handles on their carry-on luggage and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking, the
couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other, like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis
Island, like she'd been released at last from the ICU, snapped out of the coma, survived bone
cancer, and made it down from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.
“Neither of them was young. His beard was gray. She carried a few extra pounds you
could imagine her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish kisses, like the ocean in early
morning when it gathers and swells. We were all watching- passengers waiting for the delayed
flight to San Jose, the pilots and stewardesses, the aproned woman icing Cinnabons. We couldn't
look away. We could taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.
“But the best part was his face. When he drew back and looked at her, his smile, soft with
wonder, almost as though he were a mother still open from giving birth, as your mother must
have looked at you. No matter what happened after, if she beat you or left you lonely now, you
once lay there, the vernix not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you as if you were the first
sunrise from Earth. The whole wing of the airport hushed, all of us trying to slip into that
woman's middle-aged body, her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses, little gold hoop
earrings, tilting our heads up."
So begin to sense what it's like to hear the story. Because stories are really carriers of
something bigger, something that we know in our hearts, and what it's like to feel the longing

© 2022 Sounds True, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach. All rights reserved.
 Metta: The Practice of Lovingkindness

that this poem expresses. Tilting our heads up in that way, underneath it all. Notice how you feel
even now, how it changes listening to this.
So why metta? Why teach metta? Because it's who we are in the end. It's what our true
nature is, which is consciousness and love itself. And we can't get away from it. We are
interconnected. As Archbishop Tutu says, "In Africa, when you ask someone, 'How are you?'
The reply you always get is in the plural, even if you're speaking to just one person. A man
would say, 'We are well, we are not well.' He himself may be quite well, but his grandmother is
not well, so he is not well either. The solitary, isolated human being is really a fiction."
So it's who we are in the deepest way. And without love, awakening is not possible.
When somebody asked my teacher Ajahn Chah, "What is the dhamma? Which is that kind of
multi-meaning word that means teachings and truth and so forth, "What is the dhamma?"
Because he was teaching people dhamma. He said, "The dhamma is the heart." What kind of
heart do we have that lives through this world?
In the game, it turns out, in spiritual life, maybe one of the most important things that we
can say to you, but more than that, that you can communicate to those that you teach, the idea is
not to perfect yourself. As you know, you've already tried that and it's sort of a dicey affair at
best, right? The game is to perfect your love. That's really what it's about.
So Frank Ostaseski, good friend who recently completed a wonderful book called The
Five Invitations, he's the founder of Zen Center Hospice. And he tells a story about a woman
named Jillian who is and author and worked in publishing, and her mother lost her memory and
was unable to live by herself, had dementia. So she brought her mother home to live with her.
And some days or weeks after her mother had been there, Jillian had gone off to work and then
came back home, walked into the living room to find her beloved books, her library, all the
things she cared about, including her sacred Buddhist texts, scattered across the floor.
Her mother announced, "I'm tired of all these dusty old books. I'm going to give them to
my dentist." Jillian was momentarily trapped by her anger. She scolded her mother's attendant,
"How could you let this happen?" And the attendant, who was not caught up in the drama,
replied, "Ma'am, today I packed the books up, and tomorrow I will unpack them. If this gives a
sense of control to a woman who has lost so much, well then, it's OK with me. It doesn't matter
so much. I just love being with her."

© 2022 Sounds True, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach. All rights reserved.
 Metta: The Practice of Lovingkindness

And so you can feel the movement from how it's supposed to be, the image of what your
perfect library, or your perfect home, or the perfect person should be, the movement of the heart
to perfect love, to just say yes. Now of course I don't mean to say that love always says yes. Love
also can say no out of deep love. I don't mean that you turn and roll over and say anything goes.
Some of the most powerful statements of love are the love that say no. No to injustice, no to self-
harm, no to harm of another.
The question for us all as teachers is how to communicate this, and to embody it, and to
invite it in others. And how to teach it in our culture is especially difficult because, as you've
heard the stories or meetings with the Dalai Lama and others, how much self-hatred, how much
self-judgment there is. And also how love can seem weak, unmanly, leave us vulnerable, out of
control, and that what we need is strength.
But people misunderstand the power of love, the power of love that lets mothers lift cars
off children, or Martin Luther King, after his church was bombed, and said, "We will match your
capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical
force with soul force, with love. We will not hate you, but we cannot, in all good conscience,
obey your unjust laws. And we will soon wear you down with our capacity to suffer and with our
love. And winning our freedom, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win
your freedom as well."
So there's a different way of understanding love that's not as a weakness, but as
something that is magnificent and true to us as human beings. And when you teach metta, one of
the first things that you want to do is set the stage for this practice, as I'm doing here, by evoking
it with a poem, or a story, or talk about why it's important.
And I remember coming back from the many, many, many weeks I've spent in the
hospital with my brother over these last years before he died, his long process of sitting in the
hospital there with kids with shaved heads and families all around. We were at Dana-Farber quite
a bit, up by Harvard Medical School, and almost everybody there had somebody tending them,
or a whole family tending them. And not only that, there were all these very, very skilled
attendants, and nurses, and respiratory therapist. Everybody who was helping.
And even though it was a place of suffering, it was also a temple of love. There was so
much care that somehow was attracted because somebody's life was in danger. It was attracted

© 2022 Sounds True, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach. All rights reserved.
 Metta: The Practice of Lovingkindness

by all the families that came, but also by all those who served and worked there. It was so
beautiful. And this is really what matters.
Now, it's hard. Sharon Salzberg, in her wonderful new book Real Love, that's just coming
out this next week or so, writes, from one woman Nora, "You always hear you need to practice
self-love in order to love others. But no one tells you how to love yourself. On the one hand, it
feels like a cure-all. I need to love myself to find a lover. On the other hand, I think a lot of
people seek out romance as a way of not loving themselves. In some sense, self-love is the most
difficult. Here also the most convenient person to hate."
She goes on, "One day when I was in my late 20s, a dear platonic friend said to me, 'Do
you know how much I love you?' I instantly felt a wave of sadness. 'No,' I said, 'I don't know
how much you love me.' 'I know,' he replied gently. And at that moment I became aware that I'd
never even thought of myself as being lovable. And I realized that it was not then possible for me
to really receive love either."
When we learn to love, when we grow in love, and since it's who we are, we're really
returning home to what is our true nature, all these blessings happen. And there's a list, because
the Buddha was a list maker, there is, you know, the Four Noble Truths in the Five Skandhas and
the 10 Paramitas and the Seven Factors of Enlightenment and 12 Links of the Chain of
Becoming and the 52 Mental Factors, and so forth, you know. There's a list of 11 blessings that
come from lovingkindness that are often recited before the practice of it.
Then there's an extended list. Says your dreams becomes sweeter, you fall asleep more
easily as you grow in kindness and wake up contented. And your health gets better, your body
feels better, and angels and devas will love and protect you, and men and women will love you
as you grow in love. And weapons won't harm you, poisons won't work, and if you lose things,
they'll always be returned to you. And people will welcome you everywhere as you grow in love,
and your thoughts become more pleasant.
And animals will sense this and love you, and elephants will bow as you go by. It says. I
don't know. Check it out in the zoo. You can see it. And your voice becomes sweeter, and your
babies are happier in the womb as they grow up. And if you fall off a cliff, a tree will always be
there to catch you as you grow in love. Your countenance becomes serene, and you will see

© 2022 Sounds True, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach. All rights reserved.
 Metta: The Practice of Lovingkindness

beings of light, the Buddhas, the Buddha nature, in every being that you meet. Because as you
grow in love, it means that you are connected to the web of love all around you.
So it's a little bit of a way of setting up lovingkindness by talking about. And people go,
oh yeah, I want that. Even those of mental types and hard of heart and so forth, it piques their
interest. Oh yeah, maybe there's something tasty here, something sweet, something nourishing.
And in evoking it-- and this is something to say to you, you can hear in our teaching style, for
sure-- you want to start collecting your stories and your poems, and those things that you believe
really open and touch the heart.
Now I'm sitting wondering whether I should read a story you've heard. But I think I will
anyway, because we're just kind of swimming in it a little bit, that I've read many times before.
And every time, I'm happy that I read it. It's from Richard Selzer, who is a surgeon at Yale
University. And he sent me a note a few years ago saying, "I know you read some of my stories,"
he's a fantastic essayist, "and I'm really grateful for you keeping them alive." That made me very,
very happy. But this is this story called The Kiss.
"I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face post-operative. Her mouth
twisted in palsy; clown-ish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth,
has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor
the curve of her flesh, I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek I had
to cut the little nerve.
Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together
they dwell in the evening lamp light. Who are they, I ask. They gaze at each other and touch one
another so generously. The woman speaks, 'Will my mouth always be like this,' she asks. 'Yes, I
say, it will. It's because the nerve was cut.' She nods a silent. But the young man smiles. 'I like it,'
he says. 'It's kind of cute.' And all at once. I know who he is. And unaware of my presence, I
lower my gaze, for one is not bold in an encounter with the gods.
And then he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I so close I can see how he twists his
own lips to accommodate to hers to show her that their kiss still works. And I remember that the
gods appeared in ancient Greece as mortals, and I hold my breath and let the wonder in."
There is something about the loving heart that can take the measure of tears and sorrows
that make up our human life, and the beauty that make our human life and meet it in a way that is

© 2022 Sounds True, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach. All rights reserved.
 Metta: The Practice of Lovingkindness

very different than any other way we would approach it. And so when you teach metta, part of
the skill is somehow to bring yourself into the place of love. And then everyone gets to draft
behind you like those big trucks on the highway.
Also, you want to normalize it. It is a practice, and so as it says in the teachings, just as
water drops on a stone and gradually wears it away, or just as the raindrops accumulate in the
water jar, so too, drop by drop, the practice of love begins to bring the heart to flower.
There's a story of a rabbi who used to teach, he said, in the Jewish mystical tradition, that
his disciples to memorize, reflect, and contemplate and place the teachings of the holy words on
their heart. One day, a student asked why the rabbi always used the phrase "on your heart," and
the master replied, "Only the divine can put the teachings into your heart. Here we recite, and
learn, and put them on the heart, hoping that some time when your heart breaks they will fall in."
So it's a practice. It's something that we can train and do. And at times, it can feel
mechanical. And at times, it can bring up its opposite. And we'll talk about the barriers to
lovingkindness. But the practice itself is to include it all, whatever arises, that too.
So a friend and a wonderful author, Father Greg Boyle, who started Homeboy Industries
in Los Angeles, and works for decades with gang kids, street gangs, and so forth-- and I've done
work with these kids so I know them-- wrote a magnificent book called Tattoos on the Heart,
that I think is listed in the material that you have. And one of his jobs, aside from working with
the kids, was to go to the churches in that area, in the barrios, as a priest. He went one morning to
a church where he was going to do a service and there painted across the front of the church he
was these ugly words "wetback church."
And he was taken aback by anti-immigrant fervor that we know. And so he went in,
gathered the folks who were there and first apologized. He said, "I feel so bad that we've been
attacked in this way, that our sacred place has been desecrated." And one of the things our gang
kids coming out of the gangs do is they remove the tags and graffiti. It's one of their jobs. The
city pays them, actually, to do this. "So I'll get them over here and get it off right away. I'm so, so
sorry."
And as he was standing and saying that, one woman, Rosa Saldana, stood up. Little
woman, shook her hands. Never spoke. And she said, "You will not remove that." He said,
"Please?" And then she went on. She said, "If there are people who are cast out, judged,

© 2022 Sounds True, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach. All rights reserved.
 Metta: The Practice of Lovingkindness

despised, rejected because they are mojados-- wetbacks-- then we shall be proud to call ourselves
the wetback church." And there's some way in which what metta asks of us is to take it all into
our heart. And the beautiful thing is that you can do it, that that's what's born into you, that this is
what's possible for you.
Nevertheless, here we go. It sounds good, right? But it's not that easy. There are a lot of
blocks to metta. How many of you had felt at times that practicing lovingkindness has been
difficult? Look around, baby. Everybody listening, those online as well. You know that it's true.
And you could begin to name the different ways it's difficult. We started with self-judgment.
There's so many ways. Sometimes it just bogs down, and you think metta, metta, I'm tired of
doing metta. Too much love. Can't I just get a-- I want a latte, you know. Forget that.
And Sharon Salzberg, again, in this book Real Love, tells a story when she was first
practicing metta as in intensive practice, going, OK, may I be peaceful, may I be happy, may I be
filled with love, her metta phrases, on and on. She said, "It felt very mechanical and nothing was
happening." And she was doing it over and over. And then she was on her way to go downstairs,
maybe to meet with the teacher.
And she dropped the tray that she was carrying with these things on it, and glass shattered
on the floor and all this stuff. And she said to herself, "Sharon, you're such a klutz," which is
what she usually said in her mind. "Sharon, you're such a klutz, but I love you." And then she
said, "Oh, it's working."
And this is something important to communicate to people, that what we're doing is
planting seeds. Now, you'll hear and you'll see it when we practice metta together that for many
people starting with self-compassion and self-love and self-care it's actually too hard. There are
several different metta scripts in the handouts that you have.
And the way that I found it to be more helpful for most people is to start with wherever
the love is most natural, and to begin with one or two people who you love most easily. It can be
your dog. It doesn't matter, you know, you come home, [PANTING] wags its tail, does not care
what mood you're in or what you've done. Just loves you, your dog, he or she. So using
something that evokes the sense of metta in the beginning for people is enormously important.
So one thing is that it bogs down. Another block to metta is grief. That you start to do
metta, and you start to try to evoke the spirit of lovingkindness, and then what you feel is pain or

© 2022 Sounds True, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach. All rights reserved.
 Metta: The Practice of Lovingkindness

sorrow. And I remember this past year a close friend of mine who'd had a not very serious
surgery came home, and then three days later died. Died in her sleep. And her husband is also a
very dear friend, who was born on my birthday on the same day in the same year, so we're sort of
like, I talk about my twin, but he's another brother in some way. I love this man.
And I was doing metta and teaching it, and then I brought into mind this friend of mine
who had just lost his beloved, and I couldn't do metta for him, because it was too painful. He was
in too much pain. And so when grief and sorrow come, you actually have to switch from love to
compassion. And so instead of saying, "May you be well, may be safe, and so forth," which felt
superficial where he was-- he was broken and broken hearted-- I switched to a compassion
practice, "May you be held in compassion. May your pain and sorrow be eased. May your heart
be at peace." And we'll be teaching compassion practice as well.
So you begin to feel, even as you practice in yourself or teach others, that there are
different times to switch between lovingkindness and compassion. And compassion is really
what happens to love when it meets pain and sorrow. It's the quivering of the heart that says, oh
yeah, I am so touched by this. So grief can be a block, and you need to learn how to include it
with the tenderness of compassion.
Also, it can feel dry and numb. And so then what's the way to work with that? It feels like
you're lost in the desert. There's no water in the heart. Everything feels dry, numb, mechanical.
So what to do? Love the desert. Love the dry. Love the lack of water. Love the aridness. Instead
of trying to fix it or change it, bring that same spirit of lovingkindness to the exact experience
that you're having and saying, this is dry. This is numb. May I love this as well.
And again from Frank Ostaseski, he writes about sitting with someone at Zen Center
Hospice who had terminal stomach cancer. And he said, "I decided to try to help him with the
pain by turning his attention to the physical sensations with loving awareness. But as he tried to
open to these sensations, it was too intense, and he screamed, 'I can't. It's too much. It hurts, it
hurts.'" And so Frank told him, "OK, let's try something else." And put his own hand gently on
the man's stomach and said, "How's that," lovingly. And he said, "Oh, that hurts too much."
"Let's try this," Frank went on and put his hand near the man's feet. He said, "That's a
little better." And then Frank put his hands a foot or two away from the man's body, and he said,
"That's lovely, actually." There was no special body work, nothing esoteric, just opening to more

© 2022 Sounds True, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach. All rights reserved.
 Metta: The Practice of Lovingkindness

space. And after a few minutes, from a more relaxed place the fellow said, "Oh, rest in love. Rest
in love." And after that, whenever he'd get in trouble with his pain, he'd push his morphine pump
and just repeat to himself, "Rest in love, rest in love."
So when it's tough, you back off, you make space, and you love it the way that it is.
You're not trying to fix it or change it. You love the dryness. You love the aridness of it.
Another block to metta that people encounter, or you'll encounter in yourself so you'll
know it better than you do know it so then you can articulate it as a teacher to others, which
we've talked a lot about, is the self-judgment, shame, imperfection. And as Oscar Wilde said,
"It's not the perfect but the imperfect who are in need of love."
And so when people meet that self-judgment and shame and so forth, one of the simple
things you can do as a teacher is, especially if you're working, well, in a group or with someone
individually, they raise their hand in a group and say, this is what's happening. So have them
close their eyes and say, "How old were you when you first learned this, when you first felt
this?" Sometimes they'll shake their head like I don't know, but they do. And even if they can't
tell you if you ask what age, then say, "Close your eyes and just tell me the first number that
comes to mind." Six or four or whatever, something in them knows.
Say, "All right, now I want you to picture yourself as that little boy or that little girl,
innocent, filled with spirit that children are filled with such beauty, and imagine what it would be
like to take him or her on your lap." Sometimes when the child is so injured, and some of us have
deep injury as children, you have to ask permission of the child, "Would it be OK for you to
come and sit on my lap? Would that be all right? Or do you want to stand next to me?" You have
to, you know, you're a big person and children are little, and so you have to approach them
gingerly in some way. Would it be all right? OK. Yes, you can. Can I set you on my lap?
And somehow shifting from fine to direct metta or even compassion to yourself, and
instead directing it toward this child that was three or six or whatever age, imagining and
holding, it can be really important. And for people who are undertaking this as a regular practice,
some find it helpful to actually get a picture of themselves, a literal photograph as a child, and
put it out somewhere to remind them of that child, of the spirit in themselves.
Another block to metta is expectations. You want it to work. I want all those gooey,
juicy, surrender into blissful loving feelings. Sometimes they come. Sometimes they don't. I want

© 2022 Sounds True, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach. All rights reserved.
 Metta: The Practice of Lovingkindness

my heart to open. It feels like it's a stone, it's so closed. This is the reality of the heart. We
breathe. The lungs breathe air in and out the body. The cerebrospinal fluid moves.
[EXHALES]
The rhythms of day and night. There are the phases of the moon, and the tides come, and
women's menstrual cycles, and the stock market moves in cycles. The heart opens and closes too.
And as I think I said in The Power of Awareness, the idea isn't just to have your heart open all
the time, and I'm just going to be loving and loving everything all the time, 'cause you can't
breathe then.
And even the heart, like a beautiful flower, like here in California you can watch the
poppies, and in the day they're open and orange and bright. And then as the sun, not even the sun
goes down, it just gets cooler and the sun gets a little lower, and they close up. And the heart and
has its seasons, as you've heard, as the poets say.
And so the expectations that it's supposed to be a certain way, I should have mushy
feelings, or have this or that, those are just expectations to hold with love. And instead, the metta
is to recite and bring the quality, the best of your intentions, and to love what is. To love it when
it's open, and love it when it's closed, to love it when it comes, and also to love it when it goes. A
little bad poem there.
Now, another block is fear. We fear that we will be too vulnerable, that we'll lose ourself,
or lose our ground, or lose our strength. And as we will talk about, the circle of lovingkindness
and the circle of compassion is not complete. It really doesn't work well if one person is left out.
And you know who that person is. As Miss Piggy says, "It's moi!" right? This one. So that when
you cultivate love, so that it doesn't fall, or compassion so that it doesn't fall into co-dependence,
is this loving for this one here as well as for them?
So it has a kind of intelligence in it. And then you can understand that love is also strong.
And it can be fierce. And so one of my greatest teachers of love was this beloved monk and
friend, Amago Sinandhu, who is the Gandhi of Cambodia. And we practiced together in the
forest monasteries. And I helped him in the refugee camps after the Cambodian Holocaust, when
almost a quarter of the population was killed by the Khmer Rouge.
And we were on the border between Thailand and Cambodia in these U.N. camps Sakeo,
Khao-I-Dang, and so forth. Hundreds of thousands of refugees in this very arid place with wire

10

© 2022 Sounds True, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach. All rights reserved.
 Metta: The Practice of Lovingkindness

all around it, and so forth. And all 19 members of his family had been killed, his temple had been
burned, but he was in Thailand in the forest with me during that time. And he was one of the few
elders to remain. He then became the head of all of the Cambodian Buddhist community.
But in the camps, he said, we have to bring something back to these people. They've had
some years now of horror. And so he went to the UNHCR and said, can we open a Buddhist
temple in the middle of the camp? And they gave permission. And so we got some help to make
a big platform, a little roof, and put an altar there, and made it look a little bit like the most
primitive temple you would have found in a village in Cambodia.
And then he said, let's call people who want to come and sit with us. But the Khmer
Rouge underground, which was there in every camp, that it be known that if anybody went into
that temple or went there, that when they got back to Cambodia they would be shot and killed.
So we thought, all right, let's see how many people come. Went through the camp that day,
ringing this big temple gong, and 25,000 people streamed into the central square to see it.
And there was Amago Sinandhu sitting and looking out at the crowd. And you could see
there would be one uncle and two of his nieces, and that was all that was left of the family. A
grandmother and a few children. Everyone else had been killed. And the faces of trauma, which
we will be teaching a lot about as we go on later on, how to deal with trauma. But sitting in the
presence of that, you could feel all their suffering.
And I thought, all right, what can he say in the face of this measure of sorrows? He's a
very pure-hearted being. He put his hands together quite humbly, and he began to chant in Pali,
Sanskrit, and in Cambodian, one of the very first verses from the Buddhist texts that goes,
"Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed." He began to almost sing it, chant it.
"Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law."
And he chanted it over and over, and people began to weep because they hadn't heard
these words for years, since the temples were burned. And they began to sing it with him. Pretty
soon 25,000 people were chanting this. And what I felt was that somehow he spoke a truth that
was even bigger than the sorrows that they carried. Hatred never ends by hatred, but by love
alone is healed.
So love is not a small thing. It's an act of bravery. It has an enormous power. So as you
practice teaching metta, as you teach metta, you'll use phrases, as we do, and they're really an

11

© 2022 Sounds True, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach. All rights reserved.
 Metta: The Practice of Lovingkindness

intention. And in your handout, there is a whole series of different phrases. You have to find the
ones that speak from your heart, and you can invite other people to customize their metta. Some
people say them, some sing them inside. That's also fine.
Let them experiment. Use your favorite, and then read some of the others to them as well.
And then as you start with them, make sure that they sit comfortably. It's very hard to practice
metta if your body is killing you, so you want to start in a comfortable way. And start where it's
easiest. Start with whoever is most beloved, one or two people. I like to do that. And then after
you've opened the metta to this person, may they be well and happy and safe, and may this one
be happy and safe, then in the script that I gave-- and there's several others, Tara's and other
scripts in there.
You can imagine that these people who they love are now gazing back to them and
saying in some way, just as you've wished love for them, now imagine them gazing at you and
wanting the same for you. You can't give it to yourself, but these beloveds, they look at you and
they say, may you, too, be well, be safe, be held in lovingkindness and so forth.
And at that point, you can invite people who are comfortable to put their hand on their
heart. Or if there's a sense of suffering, you can add a few little phrases of compassion. May all
that difficulties be held in compassion. May you be safe and well, and so forth. And then over
time, as we'll work with in this program, you can expand from benefactors and loved ones and
self to all other categories of friends and people you care about, and family and community, and
the globe, and beings of every kind.
And then the difficult ones. And even the difficult ones become important at some point
when you're doing the practice. And you say, well, how could I wish love for some dictator
somewhere who's causing so much suffering? And in my own practice, what has worked, if I put
in my mind some of the crueler dictators of the world, is to say, may you be free from hatred. I
can wish that for anybody. May you be free from greed. May you find peace in your heart.
Because if they find it, then they don't inflict so much on others.
And the thing is to remember that there's no hurry with this. You can't hurry love.
Remember that song? Ursula Le Guin, "Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone. It has to be made
like bread; remade all the time, made new." And in any moment it can change. So you practice
metta formally, maybe seated with people, and you teach them for you as well. And then you can

12

© 2022 Sounds True, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach. All rights reserved.
 Metta: The Practice of Lovingkindness

invite them to practice it on the street. I mean, not looking weird, you're weird enough without
making yourself weirder with some spiritual practice. Or sitting on an airplane or a bus or
something.
But I know when I fly, if I feel, oh, I'm all absorbed in my book or my iPad or movie or
whatever, I'll just gaze around and may that teenage boy over there be safe and happy, and that
grandmother over there, and that man, older person, or that young person there. Just a little bit of
metta, two or three minutes, two minutes, and all of a sudden, it feels like, oh, we're in it
together. And then when the plane lands I could almost wave by, I know you all. It doesn't take
much.
And this is really what we're privileged to do when we know its power, when we know
how important it is. Again from Martin Luther King, where he says, "Never succumb to the
temptation of becoming bitter. As you press for justice, be sure to move with dignity and
discipline, using only the power and the weapons of love." Amazing he uses that word, "the
weapons of love"-- that he would dare do that. But he was in a battle in some way. And the battle
was really the battle of shifting from the separation that is so untrue, and the cause of so much
sorrow, to opening the minds and hearts of the world. To use only the power of love. So you
sense that possibility.
Napoleon said, "You know what astonished me most in my life? That the sword is always
beaten by the spirit, always," he said. That it's the human spirit, more than anything else, in the
end, that determines how humanity will live, and more than that, that determines how you will
live and how those who you teach will live.

13

© 2022 Sounds True, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach. All rights reserved.