Anxiety - Who can help you out of this mess?

Modern life is anxiety-ridden.  A surprising number of my students have diagnosed anxiety disorders.  Things don’t always go our way, and often it feels like they never do.  We spend inordinate amounts of time planning and strategizing to try to get things just as we want them, only to have the balance upset easily.  I have a friend who has caring parents, went to a good private school through high school, went to a good college, got good grades, got into graduate school, successfully received masters and Ph.D. degrees, and now has a job teaching college, which is what she always said she wanted.  Yet daily she complains bitterly about how she has it so much tougher than everyone else and never gets a break.  If you try to point out that things are really pretty good, her response is how you “just don’t understand.”  I wish I could say that this view of the world was unique to her, but I hear it from both of my equally privileged teenage daughters, I hear it on reality TV shows, and I hear it from presidential candidates. I believe I even heard it come out of my mouth during my miserable divorce.  So this seems to be “the Human Condition.”

But does it have to be?

If we examine what is underneath the complaining, self-pity, blaming, and anxiety, it’s the truth of dukkha.  We don’t get what we want.  We get what we don’t want.  We get what we want only to lose it.  We don’t feel the way we want to.  Want want want.  Get, don’t get – it doesn’t matter.  We are discontent soon, no matter what the external circumstances.  This is good news. 

If we are discontent no matter what the external circumstances, why do we keep believing that the solution is something external? Pema Chödrön says you can always ask yourself “Have I felt this before?  Have I done this before?”  If the answer to either of these questions is “yes,” then it’s a clue that it’s time to try something different.

This is not new.  In 1930, Bertrand Russell wrote:

We are all familiar with the type of person, man or woman, who, according to his own account, is perpetually the victim of ingratitude, unkindness, and treachery.  People of this kind are often extraordinarily plausible, and secure warm sympathy from those who have not known them long. There is, as a rule, nothing inherently improbable about each separate story that they relate. The kind of ill-treatment of which they complain does undoubtedly occur.  What in the end rouses the hearer’s suspicions is the multiplicity of villains it has been the sufferer’s ill fortune to meet with.  In accordance with the doctrine of probability, different people living in a given society are likely in the course of their lives to meet with about the same amount of bad treatment.  If one person in a given set receives, according to his own account, universal ill-treatment, the likelihood is that the cause lies in himself, and that he either imagines injuries from which in fact he has not suffered, or unconsciously behaves in such a way as to arouse uncontrollable irritation. (The Conquest of Happiness, pp. 89-90)

From a Buddhist point of view, this conclusion is much too harsh.  The perpetual victim is not particularly different from anyone else – he just makes the same mistake we do more often.  What is the mistake?  It is ignorance of at least six types.  First, we don’t see the multiple causes and conditions of our situation, so it looks like things just “happen to” us.  Second, we see ourselves as separate from the situation, rather than an integral part of the situation.  Third, we see the situation as a series of endpoints, rather than an ongoing organic process. Fourth, we maintain the illusion that we should have more control over our experiences than is actually possible. Fifth, we try to hold ourselves apart from our experiences, as if we need to constantly be defensive, perhaps because we secretly know we can’t control life. Finally, we prefer to blame the situation and others so that we have an overly simplistic story to tell ourselves and others.

There isn’t anything terribly wrong with this pattern, other than that it will continually repeat.  Some people seem so enamored of their stories of suffering that they actively resist doing anything that might truly make themselves happier.  That would be much scarier than continuing to fail and be able to blame others for the failures.

Does this resonate for you?  You aren't actually stuck.  There is tremendous freedom available to you in this next moment.

What is Mindfulness of Breath When You Can't Breathe?

Warning – I describe in some graphic detail the recuperation from a surgery.

I wake up slowly in the recovery room, blood beginning to drain from my nose.  The next 36 hours will become an intriguing study of mindfulness, compassion, self-pity, and watching mind’s neurotic habits.  First thing I notice – I’m not blind.  They said there was 5% chance of blindness from this operation.  That did not seem like a small and comforting number to me.

It started about six months ago – I noticed that my lower left sinus cavity was beginning to feel blocked.  Three different courses of antibiotics over three months didn’t help.  The CAT scan showed that there was no space left in my left sinuses.  There were many nights where I became completely congested and couldn’t breathe, or could only with very strenuous pulling.  Doing mindfulness of breath meditation when one can’t breathe gives a new appreciation for it. 

I often liken mindfulness of breath meditation to working out with very heavy weights.  If you want to build muscle quickly, you do as many repetitions as you can with the heaviest weight you can.  Mindfulness of breath is like the heavy weight, precisely because it is boring as hell.  The breath is with us so constantly and effortlessly that it is very difficult to maintain attention on it.  This makes it easy to drop, and once dropped, easier to notice that we’ve lost focus.  This is why we don’t call watching television “meditating” – it takes no effort. 

When simple breathing takes effort, however, then meditating on it gets much easier.  It stops being boring when you feel like your lungs will never get the oxygen they need.  It stops being boring when you can’t sleep because you can’t breathe.

The surgery was supposed to fix all this.  Unfortunately, by 5 hours after the operation the packing they had inserted into my sinuses has filled with blood completely closing off all air.  This makes swallowing impossible, as the suction needed to swallow creates tremendous pressure and pain in my sinus cavity.  I stop eating and drinking.  It hurts too much and I seem to be immune to the high-powered pain medicine they gave me.

I arrange the easy chair to try to sleep while allowing draining.  The problem is that although I can breathe a little from one nostril when awake, as soon as I fall asleep and relax the soft palate at the back of the throat, it closes down what little air passage I have and I wake up because I can’t breathe.  This means that I sleep in one-second intervals all night.  I do a lot of meditating on the breath, or lack thereof.

What is more annoying, however, is watching what my mind does.  Rather than simply note what is, it pays attention to every little change that seems worse and makes me worry.  Any time things ease up, it ignores that.  I have been told that I should take my narcotics before getting the packing removed the next day because the process is so painful.  Thinking of that keeps me awake.  I keep changing the blood-soaked bandages under my nose, not being particularly grateful that one side is clearly getting better.  By 4 am I am draining so little that I believe I can transfer from the chair to a bed.  I’ve never been able to sleep sitting up, so I am hopeful that I will finally get some of the sleep I desperately need.  Unfortunately, I still can’t breathe at all once I relax control over my throat.  I am not good at mouth breathing, and that seems especially unpleasant given that I had a tube stuck down my throat for the three-hour surgery.  So I continue to drift between daydreaming, resting, and focusing on every tiny change, generously remembering to wake myself up with regular thoughts of not only how much the packing hurts now, but how much it will hurt to remove.  Doing tonglen does little to settle me.  Feeling grateful that I am privileged to have medical care of this quality helps more.

By the afternoon of the next day, I am getting seriously dehydrated because I still can’t swallow.  The pain is reduced but I’m pretty shaky.  Having the packing removed hurts less than I expect.  Nonetheless, the nurse kindly wipes the tears off of my cheek with gauze.  After all the cleaning out is complete, I can feel so much air going through my sinuses that it almost hurts.  I haven’t breathed like this in months.

Unfortunately, within minutes (really, only minutes!) I am already ignoring the breath.  Once it has become easy again, it disappeared.  No more am I aware that I am breathing in long, or short, or laboriously.  Mind is a fickle a**hole.  It is already off wondering whether the lab tests will come back next week showing cancer.

Image sources: HERE and HERE - This was first posted on the Interdependence Project blog.

Were you free to make a choice you didn't know you had? Where free will begins.

In a previous post, I asked you to consider the example of someone insulting or offending us, we get angry and immediately think of things we would like to say or do in response.  What would our motivation be for saying or doing any of them? Although you could spin it in several directions, such as to clarify the others’ mistake, to defend yourself, to get back at him/her, to put the other in his place, to just hit him, etc., they actually have one thing in common – they are motivated by the feeling that they will make you happier if you do it. 

Now here’s the funny thing – if you were to examine the motivation behind why the other person said or did whatever it was that he did, it’s exactly the same reason.  He thought it would make him happier.  In this respect, you two are always on the same wavelength. So one way to work with the negative feelings is to recognize that there is no fundamental difference between either of your perspectives. The problem is that our perspective usually does not include the other’s perspective. 

Humans suck at seeing another’s perspective.  There are many reasons for it, but a lot of it is just how the human brain works.  There is a cognitive bias that is so basic to all human thought that it is called the Fundamental Attribution Error.  When someone does something, especially something annoying, we tend to attribute the causes to something internal and/or essential about that person - he is just a jerk. In contrast, when we do something that could be annoying, however, we tend to attribute the causes to external situations.  We had no other choice, or we're in a hurry.

It's interesting to note that to ourselves, we always have a “good” reason for why we are doing whatever selfish thing it is we’re doing.

The corollary to the fundamental attribution error is what might be called the fundamental self error – that we relate everything to ourselves as if everything is a personal affront or benefit. The other part of a fundamental self error is that we believe there is a fundamental self – something unchanging at the core that things happen to. If we’re a stable permanent thing, then any changes that occur are from the outside happening TO us. We get to pretend constantly that we’re the victim, even of our own feelings. For example, how often have you said, “That thing you did MADE me mad,” or “I fell in love with you because you’re so sweet?" We interpret even our own feelings as something that happened to us because of external circumstances.

The irony is that we take no responsibility for our own actions and reactions, but we call this freedom.

Wouldn’t true freedom be the ability to not feel controlled by the situations and our emotional reactions? Wouldn’t true freedom be the ability to see all the perspectives?  If we believe that free will is the ability to make our own choices, when our perspective is so narrow that we can’t even understand the choices available to us, how can we have any free will? Were you free to make a choice that you didn’t even know you had?

Psychologist Roy Baumeister said, “Self-control counts as a kind of freedom because it begins with not acting on every impulse. The simple brain acts whenever something triggers a response: A hungry creature sees food and eats it. The most recently evolved parts of the human brain have an extensive mechanism for overriding those impulses, which enables us to reject food when we’re hungry, whether it’s because we’re dieting, vegetarian, keeping kosher, or mistrustful of the food.” 

So freedom begins when we STOP acting, or at least slow down the reacting. This is also the first step to being open to seeing other perspectives.  As long as we continue to act in our habitual ways, getting into the same arguments over and over again, continuing to believe that we're right, we will never be free.

This is where meditation can be such valuable training. One technique that can help us begin to slow the automatic processes of reacting down is called Urge Surfing, which can be read about here and there is a nice short guided example available here.

Image sources: Here and here.

Cooling the Fire of Anger with Rain

Although humans like to believe that we’re rational cognitive creatures, we're actually fundamentally very emotional creatures. You might expect that we would be good with something that we have had experience with our whole lives. Yet one of the great ironies is that we are really pretty bad at relating to our own emotions, despite all this experience.

Unfortunately the process of socialization requires that we put artificial limits and layers of “should” all over our children’s emotions as they grow, so that by the time we are adults, we have very complex relationships with our emotions. So in this post, I’m going to describe an approach that can help us have a more honest and direct relationship with our emotions.  This is a technique that we can put into place immediately and right at the very moment that we’re having a difficult time with something.

 

It’s very easy for us to get caught up by our emotions, either by getting lost in our conceptions and story about what is going on, or by "amygdala hijack," where our emotions literally rule our behaviors without our having much freedom to direct the action.  Actually, in both of these scenarios we have very little freedom, as both our cognitive and emotional reactions tend to be conditioned by past experiences.  So how can we start opening up a door to let some new air in, or maybe even give us a new path to walk down?

When you first recognize that you are getting triggered or that you’re caught up in a cascade of thoughts, you can do the RAIN technique. 

Recognize – Pause long enough to recognize what you're feeling and label it (it may be more than one thing); Recognize the situation you’re in, the reactions you may be having, your habitual reactions, etc.

Allow - Accept that this is how it is right now, so there’s no reason to try to pretend otherwise. A complex history of causes and conditions have come together to get to this point, and it has momentum.  It is as it is, and fighting it will be wasted energy, so allow it to be for the moment.

Investigate - Investigate what and how you feel your emotional reaction in the body, what it brings up, where it comes from, what it makes you feel like you “should” do to change the situation, etc. What beliefs do you have? Investigate with an intimate and kind intention.  You are not trying to find where you made mistakes, but to understand what you believe you want or need, and how you experience that in your body.

Non-identification - This is the tricky one.  In one sense, it is a natural outgrowth of the first three, but it can also be enhanced with intention. We usually believe our thoughts and feelings are who we are, and that things are really happening to us - we usually take everything very personally. In fact, we are part of a much bigger fabric or things co-emerging. The situation is in constant motion, and we can step back and let things emerge without our feeling an immediate need to have to do something.  The goal is to separate what we are feeling from the sense of it being a personal attack - we are much more than just the bad feeling we're having right now. We are actually much more stable than this momentary feeling of instability. If we can find that point of balance in the middle of the swirl, we can see it for what it is without taking it as a personal attack.

The RAIN approach allows the situation to unfold with a little more space, where the habitual reactions can be slowed down and examined.  It can allow us to find the “gaps” between feeling and craving, and between craving and grasping (to put it in 12 Nidana terms).  There’s a freedom that is found when we discover the space that is available to us at all times, especially when it feels claustrophobic, like you’re about to be overwhelmed, or like you get stuck.


Image sources: Here, here, and here.

The Wisdom of Anger and the Illusion of Freedom

Anger is a funny emotion, because although it often causes us and those around us suffering, we deep down kind of like it.  We like the feeling of power it gives, the sense of righteousness that sometimes accompanies it, and the feeling of control we can get through it. So although we know we suffer because of it, we often don't really want to change our relationship with it.

Although we believe that our experience of reality is like a camera recording perfectly what it sees, our experience of reality is in fact an active creation of our minds.  If we can watch the cause and effect nature of our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, we can become more accurate and more competent creators of our experiences.

Emotions affect thoughts, thoughts affect emotions, both affect behavior, and each thought or feeling helps to give rise to the next one.  Thoughts beget like thoughts, which is why positive or negative self-talk is important, and also part of why the meditative techniques can have powerful effects.

Let’s talk for a bit about the cycle of what normally happens with anger.  You may be going along, minding your own business doing your job, when your boss comes up and says something that really irks you.  This gets an immediate emotional reaction, which begins a cascade of thoughts, which often intensify the emotion, which continue the thoughts, etc.  As noted by neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, any emotional reaction will run its full course physiologically in 90 seconds unless we continue to feed it.  Our attention gets focused, by which I really mean limited. We perseverate on the issue, and even when we try to stop thinking about it and to get some work done, we often find ourselves distracted by rehearsing some aspect of it again which just keeps the feeling going.  How many of you have had this experience?

The Tibetan word for this stuckness of our emotional reactions is shenpa.  It’s not the emotion itself, but the way that our experience of emotion narrows our vision, enhances the feeling of self and other, and captures our attention.  It is related to our past conditioning, in that we tend to have much the same reactions over and over, even to new insults.  

Recall the classic psychological study of conditioned emotions on Little Albert. Although he initially was not scared of small animals, by pairing the sight of a white rat with a loud sound, he learned to fear not only the rat, but other small animals like white and brown rabbits.  It is likely that for the rest of his life he would have had a habitual reaction to any new white rat or small animal.  He will think that his anxiety is "his."  He won’t remember why he has these feelings, just will accept them as if they are truth and that he's always felt this way.  We do this all the time – we have a reaction that is largely controlled by our past conditioning. The funny thing about it is that we believe it is freedom.

One way karma can be defined is it is an acquired loss of free will (thanks to Ethan Nichtern for this definition).  When we are stuck within the cascade of emotional and cognitive reactions, we are almost always thinking and feeling in ways that have we have practiced many times before.  This is why we have the same arguments over and over with our spouses, parents, children.  We are sick of the argument, and yet we don’t seem to ever find a way out.  If someone tells you that you need to stop reacting the same way, you feel outraged that they’re taking away your freedom.  But are you really free?  The only way to truly exercise freedom is to refrain from doing what you want to do long enough to be able to choose thoughtfully, not based on an emotional reaction or on habit energy.

I do not mean, however, to suggest that we shouldn’t be guided by emotions, nor do I mean to suggest that emotions are somehow bad or that we should learn to reduce or eliminate them. Instead, the Vajrayana view of emotions is particularly useful here - we need to see that emotions have co-emergent properties of wisdom and confusion.  These two properties co-emerge almost at once when you feel an emotion.  The trick is to learn to separate them and to act only from the wisdom side.

The wisdom of anger is seeing clearly that something is wrong.  There has been some injustice, or some goal has been frustrated.   Notice that this wisdom doesn’t necessarily say what one should do.  Finding the skillful action to take is entirely dependent on the exact situation at that moment, which is why our habitual reactions are almost never skillful. It may be that the skillful action to take is no action.

If we act on the wisdom component, it should usually help the situation.  If we act on the confusion component, it will often harm the situation or the other person.

How can we tell the difference?  First, we have to learn to refrain from following our usual patterns.  Until we do that, we cannot even begin to see how our actions contribute to the problems. People don’t like talking about refraining, because they incorrectly believe it is taking away their free will when in fact it is the first step on restoring it to them.

Second, we can begin to watch the course of cause and effect.  Why do we feel what we do?  What exactly do we feel? It’s not usually as simple as simple anger – there’s usually hurt, disappointment, a feeling of loss of control, old resentments, etc. that jostle with it.  We can try to trace where some of these feelings and thoughts come from. We can also watch what happens once we think something – how does it affect our feelings and future thoughts.  Finally, we can watch what happens once we do or say something – how does it change the situation for better or for worse?

Third, we need to begin to understand our motivations for taking action.  Unfortunately, most of our motivations are actually hidden to conscious thought.

For example, Wayne Warburton and his colleagues have done a series of interesting studies about why people behave aggressively when made upset. Here's the general (over-simplified) setup:  First I insult you in some way, so that you are angered.  Then you are put in a room alone and told that you will have to endure a really loud and unpleasant noise for about 30 seconds.  Participants are randomized into a no-control or a having-control condition. In the no-control condition, the noise just comes on at some point. In the having-control condition, you have a button you can press to start the noise when you are ready for it.  In both cases everyone hears the same unpleasant noise.  After hearing it, people are given an opportunity to be mean to someone else (such as the person who insulted them). If they were in the no-control condition, they are much more aggressive than if they had been given a small sense of control from getting to push the button to start the noise.  This (among other experiments they conducted) shows that we will behave aggressively partly to regain a sense of control.  

Given that these motivations to restore a sense of control are unconscious, it takes a lot of work and time to begin to notice what is truly motivating our actions. The story we tell about why we do something is almost never accurate, because it’s designed to show you off in the most positive light possible (both to others and to self).

So if this the steps above will take a lot of training, what can we do right away? We can try to notice the feeling tone that goes with our action, because that’s a little more observable to conscious awareness.   If we are acting with an angry feeling, then whatever action we have chosen is almost certainly coming from the confusion side.  Buddha said that hatred is never solved by hatred.  If instead we act out of a feeling of compassion, then the action has much higher likelihood to work from the wisdom side.

Within the Buddhist framework, we build our karma primarily from intentions. So the same action could build positive outcomes and habits or negative outcomes and habits, depending on the intention behind it.

Going back to the example of someone insulting or offending us, we get angry and immediately think of things we would like to say or do in response.  What is our motivation for saying or doing any of them? Although you could spin it in several directions, such as to clarify the others’ mistake, to defend yourself, to get back at him/her, to put the other in his place, to just hit him, etc., they actually have one thing in common – they are motivated by the feeling that they will make you happier if you do it.  So your motivation is driven by a self motivation. This will almost ensure continued or enhanced division.  This is the confusion aspect of the emotion.

What if, instead, we acted from a motivation of compassion?  This is the wisdom aspect of anger – something is wrong, and we have an opportunity to try to help the situation. So consider the anger that might be built up if one lived with an alcoholic. Tara Brach (Radical Acceptance, 2003, pp. 296-297) relates the story of a family setting up an intervention to send a loved one to a treatment program.  

"I worried about how the participants - his wife, two sons and elderly father - were going to manage being 'loving and nonjudgmental' when each one was so furious with him. They were filled with grievances: the sons who couldn't bring friends home from school because their father was such a loose cannon; the wife who had lost a partner she could count on and who treated her with care; the father who never saw his only son. I feared they'd just curse him out, rather than communicate their caring. 

"I was wrong. Harry came into that room and, he later told me, looked around at the faces of those he loved best in the whole world. They were all looking at him, all there for him. Something happened to the air in the room, he said, it seemed to beat like a pulse. After he sank down in a chair, I suggested that Marge, his wife, begin the confrontation. But, instead of reciting his absences, his missed commitments, she just got up and kissed him. 'Thank you for coming, Harry,' she said. Then, to my surprise, each of the others, even the boys, got up and hugged him....When his family did go on to say what needed saying, Harry was listening. Afterward, he took the [space in the treatment facility] that had been saved for him."

Notice that this approach does not try to eradicate anger, but is about learning to use its wisdom and energy in a way that benefits others rather than satisfies the self.

Above I noted that Buddha said that anger and hatred are never solved by hatred. That is only the first part of what he said – he also said what can solve it:

Animosity does not eradicate animosity. Only by loving kindness is animosity dissolved. This law is ancient and eternal.

- The Dhammapada (translation by Ananda Maitreya, 1995, Parallax Press)

So loving kindness is the direct antidote to anger, and it can help to solve the problems that are fostered and nourished by anger. This approach, however, doesn't come naturally to everyone, but it IS something that can be trained in anyone (although it again takes time).  The technique is called metta or loving-kindness meditation (for more details, see HERE or HERE). Practicing this can begin to train us to be guided by and act from the wisdom side of anger, rather than the confusion side. Gaining relief from our habitual feelings and response patterns truly gives us freedom, rather than the illusion of freedom that we usually have.


Image sources: Here, here, and here. This was first published at www.theidproject.org

The Two Arrows

I've been thinking about how relationships, mindfulness, and meditation work.  All of them seem to share a striking characteristic.  When everyone is happy, they all seem to flow easily.  But when someone is feeling a strong emotion (e.g., anger, fear, jealousy, sadness), they all seem to get harder. This is perhaps one of the real benefits of working on mindfulness in a supportive group - it's not like we're leaving the world behind.  We bring it with us all the time.  Meditation offers us an opportunity to practice the hard things in a little simpler and safer way, so that then we can practice them in the "real" world more easily later.

So, this is one of the goals of mindfulness: to allow us to go through the ups and downs of daily life with a sense of ease, to gain clarity into what is actually happening so that we can act skillfully and thereby make problems better rather than adding fuel to the fire.  In this spirit, the next several posts will examine aspects of dealing with relationships skillfully, even when we're in the middle of a difficult emotion.

To start, consider this question: How often do we say “You did this to me!” when what we really mean is “I didn’t get what I wanted?"

There is a classic Buddhist parable of the two arrows. In brief, the idea is that most people, when hurt, add to the hurt. If shot with an arrow, we spend a lot of effort focused on wondering why we got shot, how we didn't deserve that, how the person who shot the arrow is a  jerk, what we are going to say when we get in front of him/her, etc.  It's like being struck by a second arrow - the first one is physical and the second is mental.  In contrast, if we are able to maintain our mindfulness and not spin off into a story about our pain, we only get struck by one arrow. (For the geeks, here is the original Sallatha Sutra).

I might even go further than this - once we start down the story road, we not only make ourselves feel worse (the second arrow), but then we are more likely to do something that makes the situation worse.  This is a third arrow!

We need to take responsibility for our emotions. We need to stop thinking that something outside us will make everything better. All you can work with is yourself, and this is true even for recurring situations. If you have a difficult boss who makes your life difficult, it is unlikely that you can change your boss. You can, however, change your reactions, your work habits, or even your job.

If we look a little deeper into any interaction, we will notice that whenever someone does something to you, you are at the same time perceiving it.  To quote Ethan Nichtern's riff on the classic Zen koan, "If a person is an ass and there's no one around to see it, is he still an ass?"

We expect that our perception and our point of view is accurate and that any other observer would agree with our perception. This is called the False Consensus Bias, where we assume that whatever we think/feel, most people would agree with.  The classic study (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977) had people read stories that included a conflict and asked them which solution most people would pick, which one they themselves would pick, and what people who pick each of the two sides would be like.  In general, people estimate that most people would pick the same choice they themselves would, and rated them more positively than people who would pick the other choice.

Attention is a narrow spotlight - look at something in your room right now.  As you focus on that 5% of the room, you can't pay attention to the other 95% of what is actually happening now. Your perception is therefore always 95% wrong, and your memory is even worse (especially once you start telling yourself a story about what just happened). So although we can’t overcome the false consensus bias, we can start to recognize that we never have all the information, and that from the other person’s point of view, maybe you’re the ass. 

In truth, usually no one is the ass. We actually just have different perspectives, attention to different aspects, different goals, different motivations, and different approaches.  But because we assume that everyone else must have the same perspective, goals and approaches, we then decide that anyone not following our script must be being difficult.

If we can begin to see that we are very changeable based on what we pay attention to, it may give us the space to pause before we shoot ourselves with the second arrow.

The Brahmaviharas: Loving-Kindness

The idea of cultivating loving-kindness through meditation is one of the ideas that people generally like. Despite its positive connotations, however, it may be useful to consider the darker side that it combats.

The original Pali word metta can be translated into English in many ways, such as loving-kindness, friendliness, good will, benevolence, fellowship, amity, inoffensiveness, and non-violence. It is a wish for the welfare and happiness of others, without the self-interest that is often subtly underneath our friendly behaviors.

As ideal as this sounds, Buddhist practices are not meant to be theoretical - they are meant to be practical. They are designed to achieve specific goals. The Brahmavihara practices are designed to help us alleviate our suffering, which coincidentally alleviates others' suffering. Metta practice is designed (in part) as an antidote to anger. Why, however, should we care about lessening anger? Culturally, we're told that anger is good (at least for men) - it makes us strong.

The Buddha stated that when you are angry, there are seven things that are gratifying and helpful to your enemy.  The seven, in abbreviated form, are:

1. An enemy wishes for his enemy, Let him be ugly.  Anger makes us ugly.
2. An enemy also wishes, Let him lie in pain.  No enemy relishes your lying in comfort.
3. An enemy wishes, Let him have no prosperity.  When you are ruled by and prey to anger, you mistake good for bad and bad for good.  Thus, mistakes are made that harm you.
4. An enemy wishes, Let him not be rich.  When angry, though you may have built up riches by the strength of your arm, earned by sweat, lawfully gained, yet the king’s treasure gains through fines due to your being prey to anger.
5. An enemy wishes, Let him not be famous.  Yet, when ruled by anger, what fame you may have acquired by diligence is lost through being prey to anger.
6. An enemy wishes, Let him have no friends.  When ruled by anger, the friends you do have, companions, and even relatives will keep away  from (or even be harmed by) your anger
7. An enemy wishes, Let him suffer death and hell afterwards.  When angry, prey to anger, ruled by anger, a person misconducts himself in body, speech, and mind, and by this misconduct, reappears in a state of deprivation, in a bad destination, in perdition, even in hell, through his being prey to anger.

For more details, read The Practice of Loving Kindness  

The underlying psychology behind the Brahmavihara practices are that if we can change our minds, then we can have more peace both for ourselves and for others. Metta is the antidote for anger, annoyance, and hatred. The Buddha himself listed 11 benefits of cultivating metta:

"Monks, for one whose awareness-release through good will is cultivated, developed, pursued, handed the reins and taken as a basis, given a grounding, steadied, consolidated, and well-undertaken, eleven benefits can be expected. Which eleven?

"One sleeps easily, wakes easily, dreams no evil dreams. One is dear to human beings, dear to non-human beings. The devas protect one. Neither fire, poison, nor weapons can touch one. One's mind gains concentration quickly. One's complexion is bright. One dies unconfused and — if penetrating no higher — is headed for the Brahma worlds."

 It is worth examining the sutra where the Buddha taught metta practice in some detail. There is, of course, a mythological story that goes along with it (adapted from here):

500 monks received individual instructions from the Buddha, and went to the Himalayan foothills to spend a four-month rainy season retreat living in intensive meditation.  According to the commentary by Buddhaghosa, it “appeared like a glittering blue quartz crystal: it was embellished with a cool, dense, green forest grove and a stretch of ground strewn with sand, resembling a pearl net or a silver sheet, and was furnished with a clean spring of cool water.”  The monks were captivated.  There were also some towns and markets nearby, where they could beg for alms. 

The residents apparently were pleased the monks were here, and offered to build each a hut near the grove so that they could spend their days under the ancient boughs of the majestic trees.  After settling down contentedly into these huts, each monk selected a tree to meditate under by day and night.  It was said that these great trees were inhabited by tree-deities who had celestial mansions with the trees as the base.  The deities did not like to remain above them, so stayed away, assuming the monks wouldn’t stay long.  But after several days, the deities decided to try to scare the monks away by showing them terrifying visions, making dreadful noises, and creating a sickening stench.  The monks soon could no longer concentrate on their meditations.  So they traveled back to the Buddha to ask what should be done. 

He recited the Karaniya Metta Sutta, which they learned by rote in his presence.  Then they went back, meditating on the underlying meaning, and projecting metta toward the wrathful deities.  As they returned, the hearts of the deities became so charged with warm feelings of good will that they invited the monks to occupy the bases of the trees, and helped to maintain them for their retreat. 

The practice of metta is therefore not simply to change our hearts, but it also has the power to change those of others.  It is sometimes likened to cultivating a great tree, that starts as a small seed, but makes it grow into a useful, generous, and noble tree, heavily laden with luscious fruits sending their sweet odor far and wide, attracting others to enjoy it.  These three aspects are included in the Karaniya Metta Sutta (sprouting of seed and growth are verses 1-6, fruition are verses 8-10).

Many Buddhist practices, including the metta practice, are designed to liberate us from suffering through two primary processes: Renunciation and Cultivation.

The Pali commentaries explain:

One loves all beings:  (a) by the non-harassment of all beings and thus avoids harassment;
(b) by being inoffensive (to all beings) and thus avoids offensiveness;  (c) by not torturing (all beings) and thus avoids torturing;  (d) by the non-destruction (of all life) and thus avoids destructiveness;  (e) by being non-vexing (to all beings) and thus avoids vexing;  (f) by projecting the thought, "May all beings be friendly and not hostile";  (g) by projecting the thought," May all beings be happy and not suffer";  (h) by projecting the thought, "May all beings enjoy well-being and not be distressed."In these eight ways one loves all beings; therefore, it is called universal love. And since one conceives (within) this quality (of love), it is of the mind. And since this mind is free from all thoughts of ill-will, the aggregate of love, mind and freedom is defined as universal love leading to freedom of mind.

From the passage above, it can be seen that metta implies both the "outgrowing" of negative traits - renunciation of offensive actions toward others (a through e above) - and the cultivation of positive traits (f through h above).

The traditional approach is to meditate on several phrases in seven phases.  The phrases are "May I be safe. May I have happiness and the causes of happiness. May I be healthy. May I live with ease." There are other phrases that can be used, and you should use the ones that feel best to you.  The seven phases are to start with offering these feelings to your self, then to a loved one, then to friends, then to a neutral person, then a disliked person, then all of the above as a group, and then all beings in all directions.

A few clarifications may be useful. 

Metta is not the same as love, which in Pali is pema.  Metta is instead related to mitta, or friend.  It is universal friendliness to all.  It is good will to all, but it doesn’t mean you become a door mat, sublimating your needs to those of others.

In the Cunda Kammaraputta Sutta, Buddha says the following phrase can be used: 'May these beings be free from animosity, free from oppression, free from trouble, and may they look after themselves with ease!' 

Note the last part, that they look after themselves with ease.  You are not saying you will do it for them.  You are not saying you will have to be there all the time, or be responsible for their happiness.  This is why it’s important to pair metta with equanimity.  It’s too easy to become overwhelmed if we believe that by changing our habits of mind and behavior to be more loving that we accept responsibility for others’ happiness.  As Thanissaro Bhikkhu says, actually, “most beings would be happier knowing that they could depend on themselves rather than having to depend on you.”

For people to be happy, we need to understand the causes of happiness and then act upon them.  If it harms someone, then it won’t lead to true happiness.

Regarding the mother-child part of the Metta Sutta, it’s often misunderstood to mean that we should be willing to give our lives for others.  But this is incorrect.  Buddha is saying that just as the mother works hard with dogged effort to protect her child, so should we work with just as much clarity to protect our good will, our metta. 

Good will is an attitude you can express for everyone without being hypocritical.  It recognizes that people will become truly happy not as a result of your caring for them, but as a result of their own skillful actions, and that the happiness of self-reliance is greater than any happiness that comes from dependency.

Furthermore, it’s more skillful than trying to be loving.  Not everyone is ready or wants your love.  It could actually make things worse to try to be loving toward everyone.  My ex doesn’t want me expressing my love for her.  But she’s totally content when I wish that she find her own happiness.

It’s difficult to generate metta toward a disliked person, and I’m not sure you should try for very long (at least not when just beginning this practice). It's better to pick someone who is only somewhat difficult, rather than the most difficult person in your life. If it's difficult to wish him/her happiness, it may help to start with somewhat different phrases, such as: May I have no hostility toward him/her, may he/she also not have any hostility toward me.  May he/she have happiness and the causes of happiness.