mettaartlove practice or not a hater anymore

"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

Comments

[Jordan Schachter]

I love this idea of loving successful rich artists as a means to overcome jealousy and hatred. Your connection to the Art World reminds me of Indie filmmakers to Hollywood. I know many watch shows like Entourage and are both sickened and yet compelled to watch. Perhaps people can be inspired by your approach, that is, to be happy for them (sorry, I don’t know if Indie Filmmakers could go so far as to “love” Hollywood!).

Simply, Be Happy for them that they are able to make a living making their multimillion dollar films, and be happy for them that they can enjoy a material lifestyle as a reward for their efforts and not hold obsessive jealousy.

In my view, obsession, whether expressed as jealousy or a simulation of love, is one’s attempt to get something from the Other. Whereas love, true love, is about what you can give the other. Your work is quite Buddhist and inspirational.

I wanted to ask you one question, I wondered about the risks to you both emotionally and physically. Physically - whether men expect something sexual and Emotionally - how you can turn on and off your emotions so easily? Your ability to do it several times a day is remarkable.

[jen harmon]

Your writing on loving the art world....well its
good/big/love/ at this time in our culture! being
true about envy and hate..... saying hard yucky
things...well it connects...other people can be like '
"yeah I feel that all myself"...or I know I struggle
with that too.....that is pretty much the role of the
artist --- to be truth in some way.

[emily]

* eyes wide open * *oh* *smile* *tears* *wow* *maybe I...* *I heard that...* *that's big...* *sigh*

[Dakota Shepard]

thank you for doing this. it's so good to see a possibility for love anywhere, especially when you feel like your "big, bratty evil, jealous girl" is showing! we've all got one, huh? somebody monstered us and we monstered right back... there's always someone who will support hate towards others or ones-self. it's inspiring to see a movement in the other direction, thank you again.