Loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity are rigorous meditation practices, used for the most part to cultivate one-pointed concentrated attention, out of which the powers of these evoked qualities emerge, transfiguring the heart. Just naming these qualities of heart explicitly and making their role explicit in our practice may help us to recognize them when they arise spontaneously during mindfulness practice. As well as to incline the heart and mind in that direction more frequently, especially in difficult times.
These practices, and in particular loving kindness, can often serve very practically as a necessary and skillful antidote to mind states such as ferocious rage, which may, at the time of their arising, be simply too strong to attend to via direct observation unless ones practice is very developed. At such times formal loving-kindness practice can function to soften one’s relationship to such overwhelmingly afflictive mind states, so that we can avoid succumbing completely to their energies. It makes them more approachable and it makes them less intractable.
But with practice direct observation itself, on its own, becomes the embodiment of loving-kindness and compassion all by itself, and is capable of embracing any mindstate, however afflictive are toxic. And in the seeing of it and the knowing of it—in open-hearted non-reactive, non-judgemental presence—we can see into the nature of the anger or grief for whatever it is. And in the seeing, in the embracing of it, in the knowing of it, as we have seen, it attenuates, weakens, evaporates, very much like touching a soap bubble or like writing on water. What emerges in such moments is nothing less than loving-kindness itself arising naturally from extended silence, without any invitation because it’s never not already here.
