I've been back in the United States for the first time in 13 years. And what I didn't expect was how much of my inner life would come with me, unchanged.
Reconnecting with friends and family has been beautiful and disorienting in equal measure. I catch myself watching other people's lives and measuring my own against them. Where am I standing? Where am I starting from? The comparisons come fast and uninvited. The anxiety they produce has been real.
This is the terrain where my metta practice has become most essential.
What metta looks like for me right now
Metta is the Buddhist practice of loving kindness. It can feel abstract until it doesn't.
What's made it concrete for me lately is the physical dimension of it. When I notice a judgmental thought creating tension in my body, I close my eyes and repeat: May I accept this moment exactly as it is. May I rest in love and ease. May I feel peace. And as I breathe, I imagine luminous yellow light filling my body slowly, from my toes to the top of my head, like water rising in a cup.
It sounds simple. It changes something.
The goal isn't to get rid of the anxiety or the comparison. The goal is to be with it in a loving way. What I've noticed is that when I do this, the feelings shift. They go from something almost unbearable to something I can get curious about. Sometimes I can even touch a clarity that points me toward a next step.
For the next month, I've committed to responding to feelings of inadequacy with metta instead of criticism. I've spent most of my life deepening those feelings with more judgment. That's not working. This is.
What makes it hard
When I first started practicing metta, it felt mechanical. I was generating feelings of love that weren't arising on their own. It felt fake, even when I directed that warmth toward people I genuinely loved.
It reminded me of the feeling of exercising after a long period of being sedentary. Stiff. Uncoordinated. Like the muscles exist but can't quite fire yet.
My teacher Jack Kornfield offers a beautiful entry point: imagine someone who loves you deeply, and let their gaze rest on you. Let their warmth land. For me, that's an easier door into self-love than trying to generate it from scratch. I often start there.
The more I practice, the smoother it gets. Not easier exactly, but more available.
Three ways I sustain self-compassion
The first is basic but foundational: staying present enough to notice when I've been swept into the trance of unworthiness. Mindfulness in daily life is what makes that noticing possible. If I can see the thought arising, I can choose not to follow it.
The second is a reframe that has genuinely changed how I relate to my own mistakes. Imagine walking down the road, bumping into someone, and spilling your groceries everywhere. Your first reaction is anger. Then you look up and realize the person is blind. Their groceries are also on the ground. Everything shifts. Suddenly you feel concern instead of resentment.
What changed? Only the story you were telling yourself.
I've found that I can extend much more compassion to myself when I see my own mistakes, my blind spots, my judgments, as arising from limitation rather than malice. Not as proof of unworthiness, but as evidence that I couldn't see the full picture. That's not an excuse. It's just a more accurate reading of how human minds work.
The third is RAIN, a mindfulness practice of Recognizing, Allowing, Investigating, and Nurturing. I'm good at the first three. The Nurture step is where I consistently fall short.
Usually, after I recognize the emotion, allow it to be there, and investigate what it feels like in my body, I feel a wave of relief and drop the practice. The relief feels like enough. But it's not the same as asking the vulnerable part of me what it actually needs, and then trying to offer that. That final step is where the real work lives, and I keep learning how to stay for it.
What's been hardest to say out loud
Self-compassion is genuinely difficult for me because self-judgment was my primary training for most of my life. It wasn't modeled differently in my family. Mistakes were collected and held until a breaking point, then used as evidence of not being enough.
I internalized that framework. I made it my own. I thought that scrutinizing my mistakes and disciplining myself through punishing behaviors was how you became a better person.
I know now that it isn't. But knowing and doing are not the same thing. I still catch myself falling into those patterns of thinking, and occasionally into the behaviors themselves.
What I'm building, slowly, are new responses. RAIN. Metta. The practice of staying for the Nurture. These are not cures. They're skills. And skills take time.