At Least Refrain from Negativity and Ill-will

I remember when I first told people that I was going to be a nun, one immediate response was, ‘Well, how selfish! Isn’t that awfully self-centred?’ My reply was, ‘Yes. It’s completely self-centred… but until I can understand my own suffering, my own difficulty, I’m not going to be able to help anybody else very much.’ Although I wanted to help, I saw that my capacity for serving others was very limited and that, really, I had to begin here.

We can easily talk about world peace and about caring for others, but actually cultivating loving-kindness demands a lot. It demands a broadening of the heart and our view of the world. For example, I’ve noticed that I can be very picky about things. There are some things that I can feel boundless kindness and love for – but only as long as they are agreeable, and behaving in the way that I want them to behave!

Even with people we love dearly, if they say something that is upsetting, a bit jarring, that channel of limitless, boundless love can close immediately; not to mention with the people that we don’t like, or who might have different views from our own.”

So it does take a bit of reflection to begin to broaden that sphere of mettā, loving kindness. We may manage to do it in an idealistic, intellectual way; we may find we can spread mettā to people we don’t know or that we don’t have to associate with, but that is very different from doing it with those we live with all the time. Then, it’s not always so easy – much as we may want to.

This can be a source of anguish: ‘I really want to like this person – but they drive me nuts!’ I’m sure you have all experienced this with certain people. You may even feel sorry for them – but they still drive you nuts! You can end up feeling that you should love them, but somehow you just can’t.

I have found Ajahn Sumedho’s interpretation of mettā very helpful; he would say: ‘Well, to expect to love somebody is maybe asking too much – but at least refrain from nurturing thoughts of negativity and ill-will towards them.’ So, for me, the starting point for cultivating mettā has been simply the recognition of its absence, or even the presence of its opposite.

This reflection by Ajahn Candasiri is from the book, Friends on the Path, (pdf) pp. 62-63.