By Laura Bennett
A story from the forest – lovingkindness as an antidote to fear
My talk today is about loving-kindness, so I want to begin with the story about how the Buddha first taught lovingkindness.
A group of monks went into the forest to meditate during the rainy season, but the tree spirits who lived there were not happy with their presence and tried to frighten the monks through terrifying sounds, sights, and smells. The monks became so afraid that they returned to the Buddha, saying that they could no longer meditate in that place.
The Buddha did not send them somewhere else. He said: “Monks, go back to the same spot! Fear not! If you want to be free from the harassment caused by the deities, learn this sutta. It will be a theme for meditation as well as a formula for protection.”1
Then he taught them the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta, also known as the Hymn of Universal Love or the Discourse on Loving-kindness. The monks learned it on the spot and went back to the forest, where they met the spirits with goodwill, wishing for their happiness and well-being. In response, it is said that “the hearts of the deities became so charged with warm feelings of goodwill that they materialized themselves in human form and received the monks with great piety.”2 They welcomed and even protected the monks, who were able to meditate in peace.
This story shows that lovingkindness isn’t just a feeling for people we already like. It’s a practice of meeting fear, hostility, and difficulty with goodwill rather than aversion.
That’s what we’ll be talking about today.
This is the first of a series of four talks on what are called the four immeasurables, which are: lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.
In Pali, the language spoken by the Buddha, they are called the brahma-viharas. Brahma means heavenly, and vihara means home or dwelling. So these are the heavenly abodes, the four places the heart can live. The practice isn’t just to visit or take on these qualities for the length of a meditation, it’s about resting in them as our home; it is about establishing love, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity as our place of dwelling in everyday life.3
So, these four qualities aren’t virtues we’re trying to earn, they’re already part of us, though they’ve been covered over by habit, fear, and the long story of “me.” Practice, as it often is, is mostly about uncovering what’s already here.
They’re also called “immeasurable” because they’re so vast and all-embracing that they defy measurement. In a world where we want everything to be quantifiable, that word is a reminder that these qualities can’t be reduced to units. Each person’s unique, present expression of them is enough. There is no lovingkindness that is too small.
Through the series we’ll talk about them one at a time. Today is lovingkindness.
The Pali word is metta, and I appreciate this quote from Venerable Acharya Buddharakkhita, a Buddhist monk, writer, translator and commentator on the Metta Sutta. He said:
“True metta is devoid of self-interest. It evokes within a warm-hearted feeling of fellowship, sympathy and love, which grows boundless with practice and overcomes all social, religious, racial, political and economic barriers. Metta is indeed a universal, unselfish and all-embracing love.”4
At its simplest, lovingkindness is a wish, an aspiration: may you be happy, may you be well, may you be safe, may you live with ease. The phrase in our practice manual is: May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the causes of happiness.
Notice that second part: “and the causes of happiness.” This is more than wishing someone a pleasant day; it’s wishing for the conditions, wisdom, and actions that allow genuine well-being to take root. It’s wishing for safety, health, connection, and a heart at peace with itself. It is an aspiration, not an assumption that everyone is already happy. We are simply orienting ourselves toward the possibility of well-being.
It’s unconditional, non-transactional, and entirely free of strings or expectations. Gyomay Kubose, one of our root teachers, said, “We must find the way of love rather than that of being loved.”5 I come back to that line a lot. Most of us spend a lot of energy on being loved. Lovingkindness turns, instead, toward loving, toward finding the way of love.
Love isn’t clinging, and it isn’t naive
I want to be careful since the word “love,” can mean many things and is often misconstrued.
I think, often, what we call love in our society is really a conditional agreement: I’ll love you if you love me back, or I’ll love you if you’re the way I want you to be. That’s transactional.
The awakened love that lovingkindness points us toward is different. It isn’t a transaction, where we give in order to get something back. And it isn’t a sentimental ideal that asks us to look away from suffering or pretend that people don’t cause harm. Rather, it is a love that can see a person clearly, with all their wounds, flaws, and contradictions, without forgetting their humanity.
John Lewis spoke about this in terms of his experiences during the civil rights movement. He has a poignant quote that I like to remind myself of when I’m working with lovingkindness practice. He said:
“From time to time, we would discuss that, if you have someone attacking you, beating you, spitting on you, you have to think of that person—Years ago that person was an innocent child, an innocent little baby. What happened? Did something go wrong? Did someone teach that person to hate, to abuse others? So you try to appeal to the goodness of every human being and you don’t give up. You never give up on anyone.”6
His words get me every time. He brings us into the visceral reality of what he and others endured, while describing a willingness to understand even those who harmed them. He doesn’t deny or minimize the violence; he asks what might have happened to a person along the way that led them to cause such harm. Much like the story of the forest monks, John Lewis points toward lovingkindness as an antidote to fear and anger, not by pretending those feelings or the conditions that give rise to them don’t exist, but by making room for something other than hatred in our response.
Now, most of us, hopefully, aren’t being beaten or spat on. And still, the kind of love that John Lewis describes can feel impossibly far from what we’re capable of. We might struggle to extend it to the person who cut us off in traffic, or to a family member we’ve stopped calling. Sometimes, even the people we love most can bring us to the limits of our capacity for patience and understanding.
So where do we begin? Where does anyone begin?
I don’t think we have to begin with the most difficult people in our lives. We can begin much closer to home, with the person we have perhaps given up on more times than anyone else: ourselves.
Where we begin: with ourselves
Traditionally, the practice begins with ourselves, and a lot of us flinch right there.
Many of us believe, somewhere underneath, that we don’t quite deserve it. So I want to share something the Buddha expressed: “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”7
Say that to yourself for a moment: I, myself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve my love and affection.
If something in you pushed back, that’s okay. That’s the practice showing you something.
There’s another reason to begin with ourselves. John Makransky, a Lama in the Nyingma Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, points out that we can’t give what we don’t have. If we try to love others while refusing love ourselves, our giving can become brittle. It can turn into obligation, or exhaustion, or quiet resentment.8
So how do we learn to receive? Makransky offers a practice that I love. He asks us to remember the people who, at some point in our lives, simply wished us well. A teacher, an aunt, a neighbor, a friend, a stranger who smiled at us. He calls them benefactors.
We bring them to mind, and then we let that wish in. We don’t do anything with it, we simply receive it. He says most of us were never taught to notice how much love has been moving toward us all along. We notice the cruelty in the news and the disappointments in our families, yet we often miss the countless small kindnesses that have held us up.
Receiving is where this begins. It isn’t where it ends.
This week I’ve been sitting with the line from Gyomay Kubose that I shared earlier: “We must find the way of love rather than that of being loved.”
As I sat with this quote, I started noticing when I was craving love, wanting to be loved, wanting someone to fill a void. It felt like yearning from a place of lack. This quote challenged me to consider, instead: how can I show love in this situation? How may I embody the “way of love” in this moment? Often, I was called to do this through action—love as a verb, expressed through small acts of service.
I have an affirmation I come back to often, and I came back to it a lot this week as I thought about lovingkindness. I say it slowly and really try to embody the fullness of each line in an ever-expanding way.
I am lovable. I am loved. I am loving. I am love.
In beginning with “I am lovable,” I open my heart to receiving. Next, “I am loved” brings in the feeling of being loved, and I think of those benefactors. Then, in “I am loving,” I begin to feel myself as a natural channel of loving energy, not only a receiver. And finally, “I am love,” which I try to feel the way the sun might say I am light, or I am heat: innately and boundlessly. Not as an achievement, but as a nature I can rest in.
So what happens when you try this and the phrases feel hollow, or bitterness rises instead?
Good. That’s part of the practice.
Awakened love asks a more honest question than “can I feel loving?” It asks, what can I genuinely wish right now? What do I have the capacity for in this moment? And part of the practice is noticing where we resist, then turning toward that resistance with curiosity instead of judgment.
Alice Walker says, “The thing about love that I’ve discovered in my life is that one love leads to another. It just gets bigger and bigger. You can let it start anywhere; it can be really tiny. You can start with a daffodil, but if you sincerely see it and if you sincerely love it, then it’s like the key. The daffodil is like a key to the big, big storeroom. Then everything becomes something that is loveable.”9
So start where you can. Don’t begin with the heaviest relationship in your life. Start with something easier, and let the circle widen at its own pace. Really, anyone or anything that arises in your life can be an opportunity to practice lovingkindness.
Here’s a small example from my own life–I recently moved into a new place, and my husband is quite a bit more extroverted than me, so he is often introducing us to our new neighbors. It’s very sweet. But when this happens, I have noticed that my whole body tightens, and I suddenly feel a mix of anxiety, irritability, even anger; a sort of fight, flight, or freeze response. I know it’s not about the neighbors, it’s an old pattern, a tendency toward social anxiety.
Having noticed this internal response on multiple occasions, I have begun to turn toward it with lovingkindness. Instead of making up stories to reinforce the pattern, I try to meet the situation, the feelings, my husband, and myself with lovingkindness. So now, when I feel my body tighten, I try to wish a little ease to the tightness itself, and to my husband, and to the neighbor walking over.
For me, this often means remembering ‘come as you are.’ It means allowing myself and others to be as we are, and it means allowing life to unfold without clinging to expectations or comfort. It allows me to be gentler with myself, and the gentler I am, the more I can live from love rather than fear. Like the monks in the forest, I’m learning to meet my fears, anxieties, and habitual patterns with goodwill.
So that’s the practice. We’re going to practice is briefly, and as we practice, you might notice where your own body tightens. If that happens, try to be gentle with yourself. See if you can simply notice the resistance without judging it. That tightening isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong, it’s part of the practice.
Let’s try it together. Settle into your seat. You can close your eyes or let your gaze rest on the floor.
Take a few slow breaths.
Bring to mind someone who has wished you well. A benefactor. A teacher, a relative, a friend, a stranger, even a pet. Picture them smiling at you. Let in the simple wish that you be happy, the way a body rests in the sun.
From that place, offer the wish to yourself. Silently, in your own rhythm:
May I have happiness and the causes of happiness.
Say it slowly. If different words fit better, use them. If it feels flat, let it be flat, and keep offering it gently.
May I be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I have the ease of well-being.
Now bring to mind someone you love easily. Visualize them, and offer the wish:
May you have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you have the ease of well-being.
Now someone you barely know: a cashier, a neighbor, someone you pass on the street.
May you have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you have the ease of well-being.
If you’re willing, bring to mind someone mildly difficult. Not the most challenging person in your life, just someone who stirs a little friction. Gently notice what happens in your body. If you can, offer the wish:
May you have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you have the ease of well-being.
If you’re having trouble with that one, that’s okay. Offer it to the resistance itself. May this tightness be met with some ease.
Now let the circle widen. This room. This neighborhood. This city. Everyone near and everyone far away, beings we’ll never meet, beings who are suffering right now.
May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be safe. May all beings be happy. May all beings be healthy. May all beings have the ease of well-being.
Now let go of the words, and just rest.
I want to end with a poem that Sharon Salzberg uses to open her chapter on this practice. The poem is by Galway Kinnell:
‘The bud
Stands for all things,
Even for those things that don’t flower,
For everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
Though sometimes it is necessary
To reteach a thing its loveliness,
To put a hand on the brow
Of the flower,
And retell it in words and in touch,
It is lovely
Until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.’
Sharon Salzberg goes on to say that ”’To reteach a thing its loveliness’ is the nature of metta. Through lovingkindness, everyone and everything can flower again from within. When we recover knowledge of our own loveliness and that of others, self-blessing happens naturally and beautifully.”10
I love that. Sometimes it’s necessary to reteach something, or someone, its loveliness. That’s what I hope we’re practicing, not a technique for producing nice feelings, but a way of remembering what we’re made of, and offering that remembering to each other until we can each flower from within.
This week, I encourage you to try one small thing. Once a day, at a stoplight or a checkout line or the kitchen sink, silently offer may you have happiness and the causes of happiness to someone in your life–whether it’s yourself, a loved one, a difficult person in your life, or maybe someone you’ll never speak to. And see what changes.
Next time we’ll turn to compassion, which grows right out of what we’ve begun today.
Thank you. Namu Amida Butsu.
1. Acharya Buddharakkhita, “Metta: The Philosophy and Practice of Universal Love,” Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), last modified November 30, 2013, accesstoinsight.org.
2. Buddharakkhita, “Metta: The Philosophy and Practice.”
3. Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1995), 1.
4. Buddharakkhita, “Metta: The Philosophy and Practice.”
5. Kubose, Gyomay M. Everyday Suchness. Chicago: American Buddhist Association, 1967.
6. Krista Tippett, host, “John Lewis — Love in Action,” On Being with Krista Tippett, podcast, July 23, 2020, https://onbeing.org/programs/john-lewis-love-in-action/.
7. Salzberg, Lovingkindness, 25.
8. John Makransky, “Receiving Love: Key to Life, Key to the Spiritual Path,” in Awakening Through Love: Unveiling Your Deepest Goodness (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2007), 5.
9. Alice Walker and Sharon Salzberg, “A Wind Through the Heart,” Shambhala Sun, January 1997, 22.
10. Salzberg, Lovingkindness, 18.
