The word that changed everything: maitri

When you are unkind to yourself, where do you feel it? Most people, when I ask, point to the chest or the stomach. Not the head. The body knows first.

For years I believed the way to become better was to be harder on myself. Push. Criticise. Compare. If I was disappointed enough in who I was, surely I would change. It is a common belief, and a quiet kind of violence. It also does not work.

Then I met a word. Maitri (loving-kindness), sometimes written as its Pali cousin metta. In the Buddhist tradition it means unconditional friendliness, and the first person it is offered to is yourself. The teacher Pema Chödrön writes about maitri as making friends with who you already are, the messy and the tender and the unfinished parts included. When I first read that, something in me exhaled.

I saw this most clearly after I became a mother, when the woman in the mirror was one I no longer recognised. My instinct was to judge her back into shape. What actually helped was the opposite. A hand on the heart. A slower breath. The willingness to say, quietly, this is hard, and I am here.

Maitri is not soft in the way we sometimes fear kindness is soft. It is the ground that real change grows from. You can only work with what you can bear to look at, and you can only bear to look at what you are not attacking.

There is an old idea in the Indian tradition of the guest. Atithi devo bhava (the guest is God). We prepare the house, we make chai, we offer the good cup. What if you treated your own difficult feelings as guests rather than intruders? Not indulged, not obeyed, but welcomed in, offered a seat, asked what they came to say.

Try this, gently, once. The next time you notice the inner voice sharpening, place a hand where you feel it and speak to yourself as you would to a friend who was frightened. Not to talk yourself out of the feeling. Just to keep yourself company inside it.

Maitri did not fix me. It brought me home. And from home, it turns out, you can go almost anywhere.