A gentle voice offers this insight and inquiry on a chilly, late January evening. The voice belongs to a body resting supine on a mat-covered hardwood floor, gazing to the ceiling, and tucked into a soft blanket. I am at the side, listening attentively, taking notes. “Because the world just works better that way, you know?” It’s an observation, a declaration of unshakable truth, topped off with a question that I interpret to be at once rhetorical - not meant to be answered - and an invitation, meant to be contemplated and considered deeply.
Do I know? I think I do. I am beginning to know.
I am learning.
My teachers are my ‘students,’ those who have participated in a personal metta meditation project.
Three months ago, I began an exploration that turned expedition.
I invited someone to a guided 1-to-1 metta (or, loving-kindness) meditation with me, followed by a conversational interview about how they experienced the practice. At the end, I invited them to connect me to someone who they thought might benefit from / enjoy / be open to the same. And again. Again.
And thus I have found myself (truly, found myself) in all sorts of places, both known and unknown to me, guiding people through a version of metta and then listening while they reflected back their experiences, and shared these reflections — and, as it turned out, often so much more of their intimate life stories - with me. I have felt gratitude and awe by the generous way in which people have let me in, and allowed me to hold space for and with them, as we each entered into a slice of the unknown.
As I come upon the 3-month mark of this journey, I am feeling called to catalogue my observations and to offer a few insights that I have gained so far.
I bestow this first post’s title with a quoted response to the act of offering loving-kindness to all beings everywhere, the final stop on the itinerary. “As I picture it, when I was doing the meditation, everyone - all the people, and also the animals, and too the magical creatures - everyone, everywhere, was filled with peace, and so everyone was kind to each other.”
This, imagined by an adolescent. Long pause. For a moment, I think that is the end of the interview, and I prepare to close. And then, “because the world just works better that way, you know?”
And that was how we ended. A world whole, healed, resting in a state of total peace. You may wonder how we got there, and how in the world we can possibly get there…
