Metta Is Restraint

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. It could be anywhere at all. Don’t let your preconceived notions get in the way of sensing where the breath actually feels like it’s coming in, where it feels like it’s going out—where it feels like it’s moving in the body. Wherever those feelings are most prominent, focus your attention there.

Then ask yourself: Is it comfortable? If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If not, you can change. Try different rhythms of breathing. You can change the texture—heavy, light. See what kind of breathing feels satisfying for the body right now.

The word for meditation in Pali, bhavana, means “to develop.” As you stick with this exercise, it develops good qualities in the mind. In the West, when we talk about meditating, we think it means thinking long and hard about a topic. Here you’re going to be thinking long and hard about the breath. but the thinking isn’t discursive. It’s focused on what feels good right now—and what you can do to make it feel better.

In other words, you’re thinking about what you’re doing here in the immediate present. That way your thinking and your awareness stay together. When they stay together like this, you can get more reflective, see what you’re doing, and see where you’re causing yourself unnecessary suffering, unnecessary stress, either in the body or in the mind.

This is a way of showing goodwill for yourself. It does require, though, some restraint. We tend to think of goodwill as a quality that’s wide open and expansive. And there is that side to it because we’re supposed to have goodwill for all beings. If you have ill will for anybody, it’s likely that you’re going to do something unskillful with that person. That’s where you have to restrain yourself.

The Buddha talks about goodwill as a kind of restraint. This is what you’re restraining: your tendency toward ill will. You realize that if you act on unskillful intentions, it’s going to harm you as well as the other person. What gets accomplished by that harm? The Buddha asks you to look at this. If you don’t look at the harm you’re doing right now, that’s ignorance.

You may think it’s going to serve a purpose down the line. But if you actually have ill will for somebody, it’s not going to be skillful, right here, right now. And down the line, it’s going to get worse.

So goodwill is a kind of restraint. You restrain yourself from your impulses that would be harmful to yourself or to other people. And as you’re meditating, focused on the breath, this is a good way of developing that kind of restraint because you’ll have to restrain yourself from following other thoughts. You keep turning the mind toward the breath, toward the breath. Any habits that would pull you outside, any thoughts that you’ve been thinking as you came here to the monastery, you just put those aside. Try to be right here. Restrain your mind from things that are unskillful.

Of course, when you exercise that kind of restraint, it’s not confining. It’s actually liberating. You’re freeing yourself from all sorts of unskillful things. So this is a kind of restraint that, instead of tying you down or hemming you in, opens the way to what’s really for your own well-being and for the well-being of others.

So this is a good way of showing goodwill for yourself, training the mind like this, so that it can develop qualities of mindfulness, alertness. It can develop its good intentions, strengthen its good intentions. As you stick with your good intentions, you get to see how far they actually do lead to good results and how far they don’t. That way, you can become more and more skillful. If you approach your life as a skill, that’s when you begin to see that the more knowledge you bring to what you’re doing right here, right now, the better you’re going to be—and the better the people around you are going to be as well.