The Path of Love - Tasshin Fogleman

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Shinzen Young

Thank you to Soryu Forall

Thank you to Harrison “Kaishin” Heyl for inspiring me to do loving kindness practice, and who is one of the purest embodiments of metta that I have ever had the privilege of meeting

Thank you to Rob Burbea

Thank you to Cedric Reeves

Thanks to Visakan Veerasamy for planting the seed of writing a book on loving kindness in my mind, and for inspiring me so deeply

Thank you to Sasha Chapin, for aiding me with my writing practice and for helping this book find its voice

Part 1: Why Love

This section of the book discusses what Love is, and why we might want to cultivate it.

My Mettā Story

This is a book about happiness. It’s about how I found a reliable, safe, healthy way to be happy, and how you can, too.

My Childhood

Content Warning: bullying, suicide, depression

I’ve gone from that boy to this man, from a fate of suicide to a freedom from it. Loving kindness has been a critical part of that journey

That’s why loving kindness matters to me so much—because you can make yourself happy, at will, on demand, at any time

How I Started Practicing Loving Kindness

I was  helping to start OAK, the California branch of the   Monastic Academy . There were just three of us there: me, Jōshin, and Kaishin. They are both lovely people. But it was a small townhouse, and we were spending all day together, every day : meditating, cooking, eating, mopping the floor, doing fundraising . Living in close proximity, with the pressure to actually get a monastery started, created a tremendous amount of friction

We were angry, stressed, and at the edge of our capacities as humans – and I was contributing to that

I had to change my own mind. I had to become a different person for OAK to work. I didn’t know what to do, but I resolved to make the changes within myself that were necessary. Happily , I didn’t have to look far for an example of how to change. I was living with Kaishin, one of the kindest, most loving people I have ever met. It struck me that he was living in the same exact place and circumstances that I was, but he was far happier. He gave me a clear example of how different it could be for me.

*I spent the next three months doing exclusively loving kindness practice. Any time that I sat for formal meditation practice, I did loving kindness . Consistent practice of loving kindness did what I hoped it would. I stopped feeling angry and frustrated all of the time. I felt happier and clearer, and I started acting with more kindness towards Jōshin and Kaishin. * At that point, I had already been practicing meditation for about seven years . But I wish I had started seriously doing loving kindness practice far earlier.

I think of loving kindness practice as a  “sane default”   - a good default meditation technique if you’re just starting out

Loving Kindness And The Brahmavihārās

thoughts of good will towards yourself and others, and feelings of happiness, unconditional love, joy, and care.

Mettā is a very specific kind of love: unconditional love. When you see a baby, you feel this kind of love

As you practice mettā, you develop the ability to see that same intrinsically perfect, deeply lovable nature within every person, every living being

Loving kindness or mettā is one of the four Brahmavihārās (divine abodes or heavenly realms ) or the Four Immeasurables,  a list of four virtues:

loving kindness (mettā) : an unconditional attitude of friendliness, love, goodwill, and well-wishing towards all beings

compassion   (karuṇā) : acknowledging the suffering of others, feeling for them, recognizing their struggles and challenges; desiring that their suffering might end

sympathetic joy (muditā) : a feeling of joy or happiness when noticing the joy, happiness, and successes of others

equanimity (upekkhā) : acceptance of self, other, world, and this moment, without push or pull, clinging or aversion

Much of this book discusses loving kindness in particular, but the same ideas and practices apply to the other three brahmavihārās

The Benefits of Cultivating Loving Kindness

The Buddha said that loving kindness practice has eleven benefits

Risks and Safety

When you do loving kindness, you learn to open your heart. This means being open to everything that you’re feeling: not only feelings of love, delight, and happiness, but also deep grief, rage, terror, confusion, heartbreak

It also means staying open to other  people’s feelings

It also means you need  to practice cultivating equanimity, upekkhā , so that you can be at ease with the highest highs and lowest lows of feeling the feelings with your heart

While you might start meditating with the intention to be happier and less stressed, you may find that meditation practices can increase stress, or bring up feelings of depression or anxiety. This is true for most meditation techniques and spiritual practices, and loving kindness is no exception

Here is a non-exhaustive list of some possible negative or difficult experiences and feelings you might encounter while doing loving kindness practice:
Boredom or frustration
Resistance to loving kindness: a feeling of it being “fake,” forced, or artificial, or simply uncomfortable and unfamiliar
Difficulty loving yourself, varying degrees of self-hatred

Part 2: How to Cultivate Love

Make It Your Own

One of my favorite mettā exercises is visualizing myself shooting red and gold laser beams of love out of my hands, directed towards different people in my life

No one ever anticipated the sheer quantity of joy this practice has brought me. And yet, it works. For whatever reason, this particular visualization makes me ridiculously happy. With any meditation technique, it’s helpful to be creative as you practice

You are the world’s foremost expert on your own experience

My friend Erica tells me that the best mettā instruction she ever received was that there's really no wrong way to do metta