metta meditation practice to expand love in your life

“What you do for yourself any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for other’s you’re doing for yourself.”

— Pema Chodron

Metta is often translated as loving-kindness and described with words like benevolence and friendliness. It is an ancient meditation technique that couples creative visualization with mental affirmations to help develop and nurture compassion for yourself and others. Ultimately, Metta is a way of conditioning ourselves to experience the world and all beings (including ourselves) with patience, kindness, and love. 

In 1997, I had already been practicing yoga regularly for a few years when I began metta (loving-kindness) meditation through my work with Pema Chodron and Sharon Salzberg. And, without even knowing it at the time, I began transforming my relationship with my father.

Instead of focusing on the ways I felt I wasn’t being loved or cared for by him, I began to feel empathy and compassion for the ways he couldn’t experience love, or wasn’t loved or cared for as a child. Somehow, somewhere along the way, I just stopped tightening up around him. I relaxed and opened to him just as he was, without anger. And, as I shifted and softened, at the same time, my dad became more loving and available to me.

In the last three months of his life, humbled by his cancer, I could describe my dad for the first time as being openhearted. Had I not been present, had I not already forged a loving relationship with him in my own heart, I would have missed this final opportunity to connect with him. But I didn’t, And I am so grateful to feel at peace with my father, his death, and our life together.

February 14, 2011, was my most heart-opening Valentine’s Day to date. I remember vividly how exactly when the sun rose, my father passed on.

If you had asked me a few years before his death what it would be like for me to go through this loss, and the three months of his fatal illness, my answer would have included words like anxious, scared, frozen, tight, and angry. But, amazingly, the experience was nothing like that.

While it was difficult on many levels, painful and sad for me beyond words, it was also transformational. And, unexpectedly, I discovered that I was able to be grounded, open, and present throughout our three-month good-bye. I did not panic or freeze up as I witnessed him in pain, coming to terms with the end of his life, and letting go of his body. Instead, I felt more connected to him, my family, and life than at any other time I can remember. In fact, it felt more like the process of falling in love than losing love—more expanding than contracting. This was a total surprise. And I credit my practice for the grace I was able to receive.