"Just as a mother at the risk of life
Loves and protects her child, her only child,
So one should cultivate this boundless love
To all that live in the whole universe
Extending from a conscious sublime
Upwards and downwards and across the world
Untroubled, free from hate and enmity. . ."
Metta Sutta
A BIG BRATTY EVIL JEALOUS GIRL
I call myself The Love Artist but I am really a big, bratty evil, jealous girl.
I have spent years in contempt,
excruciating envy and resentment of many people in my life but I am
here to speak to my negative obsession with art, specifically with the
art world, the larger international high rolling, high finance art
world. I criticize it's values, I hold it's materialism and capitalism
against it and I am particularly jealous of artists that are
successful, particularly those that do art that, dare I be egotistical
enough to say, mimics my own.
As my work concerns love and the
body, most of those artists are women. I realize these resentments may
be misguided and unsisterly, but rage is rarely rational, particularly
obsessive rage that blooms deep in the unconscious. I hate these
artists more than their shylock dealers that I have sick, and often
misogynist crushes on, dealers that symbolize the art world that
continues to ignore me. Let's face, it, I have contempt for money and
inclusion because I want it too, I want it all. I want to be paid for
what I do with large amounts of cash. I want to be taken care of and
protected. I want to be special in that way, that very special way. I
want to be comfortable and I want to raise my daughters in that safety.
I want to wake up and go to my expansive psuedo crumbling dream ruin of
an immense studio and make art all day. Or not. I am jealous and bitter
and hateful and this hatred is killing me.
Please don’t judge or analyze me, not yet, I know my jealousy is classic.
As
the self proclaimed Love Artist, I sincerely believe in loving
everyone. I also believe that this takes practice, that it is very,
very difficult. The Dalai Lama proposes that we take 10 minutes
without a negative thought about another person. Try it, it is not
easy, every other second your mind starts to drift, like any other kind
of meditation and then suddenly, without thinking, you find yourself
going over some conversation you had with someone that morning and they
really annoyed you, or you are reading something about some celebrity
on the internet and you are thinking, "She really isn't that special
and her butt looks really fat in that picture, I swear I see cellulite"
or you are remembering something from your childhood and you are
hostile, using that event or person as a excuse for why you can't do
that thing you are afraid of now as a total adult and it's really
wrecking your life, and so on.
It is embarrassing to put
those things down on paper but luckily I don’t feel alone in these
revelations. I have learned over the years that I am really not the
center of the universe and that everything is really not only about me.
Yet I can't help but still be obsessed in the tiny chain of events that
my thinking does initiate. . .
THE RIPPLE EFFECT
The seed
for the metta art love project began long ago when I heard, for the
first time, long ago, as the hippy teenager I was, the advice that
sounded something like this: If someone really bugs you and gets under
your skin, it is usually something you dislike about yourself.
I
don't remember where I was when I first heard this but it disturbed and
haunted me like a missing puzzle piece that is gone gone gone, lost --
something you must surrender and accept because fighting this concept
only makes the hole in your heart that nagging resentment creates wider
and wider.
Like a riddle with no answer, I was young and
found it impossible to love myself. Everyone around me was hating in
some form, it was completely socially acceptable, but inside I knew I
was less than I could be and I was relentless to be more, to be
everything.
Really to be everything, to have true ambition, you
must give it all up and love yourself. That might not fit the
description of modus operandi of your typical Type A personality, but
it’s true and it’s radical.
If you love yourself no one else
can bother you. It's not such a spiritual calling, really, this loving
yourself, this forgiving yourself and everyone else. It is just more
time efficient. It is just work, it is just cleaning up, it is just
doing what needs to be done so you can get on with things.
LITTLE THINGS STICK IN YOUR HEAD
In
another spiritual practice that involves all sorts of slogans to keep
yourself on task, someone said to me: If you are angry or stuck on
someone, if someone is really giving you a hard time, pray for that
person, pray for them for 30 days, pray that they will get everything
they are looking for. The idea being that if they were happy and
fulfilled they would no longer bother you, no longer need to take
anything from you or hold anything against you, they would support and
love you or maybe they would just leave you alone, or maybe they don't
even know who you are, maybe they are so far from your world, maybe
they are only in a magazine, but the act of praying for their happiness
will really soften your heart and again, time efficiency and creature
comfort will ensue, and your life will become so much softer as a
result, so much cozier, so much yummier.
This is, I guess,
assuming that one wants one's life to be cozier and yummier but that
question is another cultural analysis, another meditation.
Of
course, it is better for everyone isn’t it, when it’s better for you?
There is that there will be that much less anger in the world – the
ones you hate will be getting everything they want and you won't be
hating anymore. Certainly it would be better for everyone if I
stopped hating, I am like Tony Soprano in the vengeance department,
only in the dirty looks, aloof posture and silent – and this is not to
be taken lightly. There is so much damage to be done with pure
disregard and silent hostility. It's hardly ever true disregard
anyway; the mere act and the energy it eats up negates that.
BIG LOVE
So
I began to take these tools and revelations and inserted them into my
daily spiritual practice, focusing on the people I hated or who merely
bugged me: the man I was sleeping with who lied to me, the other
woman(en) he was sleeping with, my exhusband, my exgirlfriend, my
sister who I hadn't spoken to in a year or so, a gay husband who was
ignoring me . . you get the picture. While I was doing yoga or walking
my dog in the woods, I would imagine them in front of me. I tried
several techniques. Sometimes I imagined that we were one, that the
molecules of our bodies were moving freely inside us, between us and in
each other, that we were the same. Other times I would bundle them
tight, swaddled like a newborn and hand them over to the god of my
choosing that day, a dark giantess, her head wrapped, an old, wizened
aborigine in a cave over a fire, a simple dory floating in a pond,
where they were safe and loved and where I could stop worrying and
fretting about them . .
And everything really did begin to get better. Like quitting smoking, I could breathe, everyday a little more.
One
day I woke up and realized how much of my day was consumed with hating,
even still. I realized I was afraid of the art world, and that fear
bred contempt. It was then that I decided to actively practice metta
art love with the institutions and institutionalized artists that my
inner hater was drawn to like the proverbial moth, flapping, flapping .
. .
And here we begin. For a year, every week, or sometimes
more often, here at mettaartlove.com I am loving the art world, with as
much generosity as I can muster on any given day, as best I can.
"Those
people we find difficult, who are obstructing our path, who are against
us, are the ones for whom we need to find a way to open our hearts and
love them in spite of all those difficulties. Now it's obvious that
there can come a moment when we are convinced that we can't do it – on
the contrary we're becoming more and more negative. We can give in
then, but not by blaming the other person. We can give in and give up
and say, "I'm not developed enough. I can't handle this. I've got to
try another way." . . . There is another way of tackling this by
looking at our own faults and difficulties and realizing that only the
ones we have ourselves are the ones we see in another.
Our
surroundings, our environment, are like a mirror. We wouldn't know
what the other person has unless we knew it ourselves already. Now
there is a possibility that we could (if we wanted to) (sic) have
actually practiced long enough to have overcome some of those
difficulties in ourselves. Then these same ones which we see in
another person no longer bother us because we haven't got them
anymore. All we need is a little bit of compassion that the other
person is still working at it (or maybe not working at it). But as
long as those other traits are very bothersome to us, we can be quite
sure we've got them ourselves."
Metta talk by Ayya Khema
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