Choose Compassion over Fear

May I be safe, happy, healthy, and live in ease.

May all beings be safe, happy, healthy, and live in ease.

Our second bodhisattva practice is loving kindness. Metta in Pali, Maitri in Sanskrit - a word that could just as easily be translated as ‘unconditional friendliness’. You probably are already familiar with this practice of extending loving kindness to oneself and others, and Paul Gilbert through his Compassionate Mind, has helped it become very popular as an extension of the whole secular mindfulness thing. Because of this, here I want to focus not so much on the mechanics of how to do the practice, these we can find elsewhere, but rather explore what we might find happening in ourselves when we do it. What it may evoke within our own wounded selves.

• The famous spiritual bypass. This one we all know, using our practice as a means to avoid feeling difficult emotions. Admittedly this is a tricky one because practicing does feel good (sometimes), but the give away is in the quiet motivation. If I’m doing it to feel good then I must then be wanting to get away from feeling bad. So no acceptance and equanimity.

• Wiping my own needs out. This is the dangerous motivation for those of us who have learnt that the only way to be loved and accepted is the play nice and be compliant. So what about the angry part that doesn’t want to be nice anymore, that wants to shout, jump up and down and say NO and ME?

• Premature forgiveness. Similar to above, building false bridges to avoid having to feel the emotions caused by the others actions. Hurt, betrayal, isolation, disappointment and of course, anger and the desire for revenge.

• The creation of a spiritual person, the luminous me. This, the denial of my own emotional needs and premature forgiveness, all require that we ignore, repress, deny parts of ourselves, difficult and dark emotions, that these defences are designed to keep at bay. I can’t be lovely and luminous if visibly seething with anger, desperately sad, envious or off with the dissociation fairies. All the things Jungians describe as our shadow.

• And then there are several that revolve around narcissism. Too quickly moving to the powerful place of being kind and generous as a means to avoid the vulnerability of feeling guilt, being remorseful and taking responsibility for what we have done or said.

• Feeling pity rather than compassion. Pity is condescension, a ‘top down’ position towards someone lesser than ourselves and as such signals the narcissistic terror of being properly in touch with anything that might make us feel vulnerable, fearful or depressed.

• And one for the narcissist in recovery. Feeling guilty or anxious about not actually feeling anything and then turning unkindly towards that part of ourselves that has yet to find the courage or the means to more fully open our heart.

• Lastly, one that reveals a very big rupture in our ability to trust being in relationship with another human being. By overly emphasising the universality of the bodhisattva’s wish to help all sentient beings - a vast universe of suffering - it may be a means for those of us who have what psychologists call a ‘disorganised attachment’ to avoid the fear that has built up around our most basic need to be loved and have our love received. Intimacy evokes terror. Practicing loving kindness makes it feel worse.

It’s very easy to get lead astray by the Dharma’s emphasis on the importance of avoiding self-cherishing and not cultivating the ‘wolf of hate’. And there is also the general anxiety about putting too much emphasis on our own personal history because it might encourage making our sense of self even more solid and intractable. However, I believe, that a really skilful understanding of our loving kindness practice must include bringing mindfulness and unconditional friendliness to these disavowed, hidden and often shameful parts of our experience. These are our obscurations - ‘beautiful monsters’ - the fearful contractions that hide our buddha-nature. And without them there would be no path so as such they are not simply to be tolerated, but rather celebrated, cherished and knowing that when held in awareness they will dissolve on their own accord. They are our gateway to awakening.

NW. 24 January 2026