Metta in everyday life
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Metta, or lovingkindness, is something that should not only be cultivated on the cushion.
We can take our metta out of the meditation and into our lives, and in practicing it we can develop it. It’s like anything else; practice helps us to become better at what we do. Of course we’ll make mistakes, but that’s just a part of the process of learning any skill.
Really what we’re talking about here is ethics. But this isn’t ethics understood in terms of obeying rules, or in terms of escaping punishments and earning rewards (metta has its rewards, but they are simply the natural consequences of our actions, not something handed out by an external judge).
Our ability to practice metta in everyday life is naturally going to affect our meditation. So the relationship between meditation and daily life is a two-way street. Each has effects on the other. If we are trying to cultivate metta in meditation but are acting in our daily lives in a way that undermines our metta, then we’re obviously going to get “stuck” in our development.
In fact this might be one of the most common causes of lack of progress in meditation - that we are busy undoing the effects of our meditation while at work or with our families. So we need to look at every aspect of our lives and see to what extent it helps or hinders our development of metta.
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