Unpacking the essence of Maitri

No matter what meditation practice we are practising, it is important to become aware of and consciously cultivate an attitude of Maitri. Maitri is a Sanskrit word that means loving kindness or friendliness.

Pema encourages us to cultivate an attitude of Maitri, or unconditional friendship with ourselves. If there’s one word that rings through the entirety of the book, “How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends With Your Mind”, it is this word that Pema Chodron has chosen to focus on.

Any meditation practice we engage in will have an object we would have to place our attention on. What will inevitably happen is that our minds will wander when we place our attention on an object.

Maintaining stable and steady attention on the meditation objection can be challenging.  Even if you are an experienced meditator, there will be days when you won’t be able to stabilise your attention, and you will notice that your mind is just bouncing off.

Noticing the critical inner voice

Some meditators (like me!) have a vigilant attitude toward meditation. We constantly judge ourselves in our heads whenever we go about our lives, and this tendency is strongest when we sit down to meditate.

This inner voice perks up with loud proclamations, “Ah ha, you just got lost in your fantasy.”  “Where is your breath? Can you even find your breath?” “Why do you sit and meditate? You lost it yesterday and reacted right after your meditation session.”

This voice is the loudest when we are trying to get back to our cushions after a break in our practice. It is so persistent that we often don’t notice that it is even there—a voice that is critical of everything we do. (Right now, the voice in my head tells me, who even reads your newsletter, you should stop writing. It is useless!)

Pema explains Maitri as,

Cultivating Maitri becomes essential to noticing and changing the quality of this inner voice so that we can offer ourselves the kindness and gentleness we often give to others in pain. We do that by being there for ourselves, even when we abandon ourselves, and coming back and staying gently.

There is a point in the meditation practice when we notice that our mind has wandered far from the meditation object. There is a short pause; the mind quickly swerves into reactivity. When we notice that our mind has wandered, we can gently bring our minds back to the object of meditation and cut through the tirade.

Actively Cultivating Maitri in Our Practice

To further expand on how we can cultivate Maitri in our meditation practice, Pema describes three attitudes which we further develop. They are attitudes of

1. Staying

2. Coming Back

3. Gentleness

Staying

During the first few years of my meditation practice, I was restless. That restlessness manifested in my behaviour during meditation practice (it does sometimes now, too). If I had forgotten to put my phone on silent, and a message notification came in during the sitting, I would have been preoccupied with it during the entire session.

I often opened my eyes and checked the notification to see what it was. If there had been a phone call during the sitting, even if I did not pick up the call, my mind would have spun 100 stories of disaster around that phone call.

It has taken years and years of sitting to let go of that restlessness when it arises. To notice that, ah, a message has come, and now let me stay with my object of attention.

Coming Back

When our mind wanders, and we bring it back to our object of meditation, the attitude we adopt in meditation practice is “keep coming back.”

We come back and keep coming back—ten times, a thousand times, a million times in our practice. We keep coming back. Coming back is the practice. It is not a failure.

Gentleness

Pema says that training our minds is like training a dog. If the dog is trained harshly, it can obey the commands but becomes highly neurotic. A dog trained with gentleness and love is a joy to be with.

I have seen this with long-term Vipassana Practitioners, who do two sittings a day without fail. However, they have trained in Shamata and Vipassana by sheer force of control, not with gentleness or kindness. This is apparent when they are still volatile, reactive, and disconnected from themselves and others off the cushion.

In the next edition, we will explore the benefits of sharing our experiences, sangha and being our own meditation instructor.

We conclude this edition with our tiny story of the week from the website Makes Me Think.

P.S. I am quickly running out of stories! Send me one of your favourites, and I’d love to feature them in the newsletter.

Rediscover This Book

Today, while I was browsing in a secondhand bookshop, I found a copy of a book that had been stolen from me when I was a kid.

I opened it and saw, on the first page, in familiar hand writing, my own name. It had been a gift from my (now late) grandfather.

Next to my name, my grandfather wrote, “I hope you rediscover this book someday when you’re older, and it makes you think about the important things in life.”