📿 Loving-Kindness Meditation is Building a Fire

Or: Practice gathering kindling that will set the whole stack ablaze

Hello you, Adreanna here for this weekend’s dispatch of The Laundry —

We’re 30 days away from the first day of Spring which means that we’re also in the dregs of winter. Between the bleak weather and the bleak political news, I’ve been willing myself to consider what I’ve come to love about this season, as a way of both sending winter off the stage with a wave and a kiss, and also to prevent myself from clawing at the itch of cabin fever that’s set in.

It’s always helpful to remind myself — as it is with any experience, really — that I will only experience so many winters; they are limited in my lifetime and I don’t know which will be my last. As the Buddhist teaching on the Four Reminders goes: Death is swift and comes without warning. This body will be a corpse. Experiences hit differently when I imagine that they very well could be my last. This is the ultimate gratitude practice, in my opinion.

There are things about winter that are easy to love. Root vegetable stews. Soft cashmere. Lamplight. All things cozy. There are also things about winter I can work my way around to appreciating with a little bit of effort, though they might also present as difficult. Like the awkward tiptoe dance I do across the slick icy driveway, for instance. It’s not pleasant, and ALSO - it’s genuine physical comedy. I smile as I imagine how insane I look wobbling through space and defying gravity.

One of my favorite parts of winter this year has been our newly rehabilitated fireplace, which has been keeping our home roasty-toasty. Like any household, we have our morning ritual. We wake up, roll out of bed, and feed the cats first because the cats will scream like a fire alarm until they’re tended to. As the coffee is brewing, Lodro builds our morning fire. Earlier this week I was watching him and noting the process that makes our morning fire catch. If you’ve ever built a fire, you likely already know that you can’t just pile a bunch of wood together, light a match and watch it go up in flames. There’s a layering process, a tending to the flame, that reminds me of how we go about building an open-hearted feeling in loving-kindness meditation.

I’ve always considered loving-kindness (Metta) meditation to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing in the best possible sense. It presents as a soft, cuddly, sentimental practice and also when we really go for it, when we give ourselves over to it, loving-kindness is a practice with teeth. It’s fairly radical, in that it (gently) asks us to question our assumptions about what we find difficult in others and unsightly in ourselves. And then it asks us to begin chipping away at our bias and judgements. To stretch towards inhabiting a more magnanimous, inclusive, generous perspective. This, in my opinion, is always a useful practice, but especially right now in a (political and societal) season when so many of us are resisting the hopelessness caused by watching the erosion of care for humanity.

As Sharon Salzberg writes in Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation :

“Loving kindness is a form of love that truly is an ability, and, as research scientists have show, it can be learned. It is the ability to take some risks with our awareness-to look at ourselves and others with kindness instead of reflexive criticism; to include in our concern those to whom we normally pay no attention; to care for ourselves unconditionally… It is the ability to gather our attention and really listen to others, even those we've written off as not worth our time. It is the ability to see the humanity in people we don't know and the pain in people we find difficult.”

Which brings me back to watching Lodro build out our morning fire.