Metta for Yourself

It’s important that you not regard meditation as a chore. It’s an opportunity. You’ve got some time to be by yourself to look at your own mind, straighten things out a little bit inside. If you don’t straighten them out, how are they going to get straightened out? No one else can come into your mind and do the work for you. Other people can give you recommendations, give you advice, set examples. But it’s up to you to decide that the example is good and that you want to follow it.

And here we are, working on own happinesses. It’s a very tangible way of embodying that wish we repeat—“May I be happy”—because your happiness will have to depend on your actions. And where do your actions come from? They come from the mind. So you want to focus in on the mind. Make sure that it’s in good shape. If it’s not, you can have some ideas about how you can get it in better shape. As the Buddha said, nobody else can help you as much as your own mind. Nobody else can harm you as much as your own mind. So you have to be very careful with it. Treat it well. Teach it. You treat it well by giving it a good place to stay with the breath. You teach it by the way you talk to it and by the images you hold in mind.

There are three fabrications the Buddha talks about. They’re really important, because we make ourselves miserable sometimes by the way we breathe, by the way we talk to ourselves, by the images we hold in mind. Or we can make ourselves really happy doing the same three things—but in a different way, of course. So you want to pay attention to what you’re doing right here, right now.

All too often, though, when we’re in the world, our attention gets scattered outside. Other people, other issues, are coming up outside, and they demand our attention. They insist that they’re important. But they’re not nearly as important as the shape of your mind. So you’ve got to have your sense of priorities clear—and have a very strong sense that what you do right now really is important. They tell you that what they’re doing out there is important, but they can’t help you in the way that you can help yourself. They can’t harm you in the way that you can harm yourself. So you have to be very careful with yourself. Give yourself a lot of attention. Give your mind a lot of attention. And be confident that this is something you can do and is worth doing.

Some people see this as a huge job. And it is a large job, and they decide that it’s just too much, but it’s not too much. Think of all the suffering that we’ve gone through. That’s an awful lot. If we don’t straighten out our minds now, there’s going to be a lot more in the future.

So break the job down into small pieces that you can manage and stick with it. That’s how the mind grows. That’s how you show goodwill for yourself. When you say, “May I be happy,” that’s something you have to follow through with. It’s not just an idle wish. It's a determination. So make sure you follow it as far as you can.