Quotes About Maitri

True love is made of four elements: loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. In Sanskrit, these are, maitri, karuna, mudita, and upeksha.

There are four elements that make up true love, the four immeasurable minds. They are maitri (loving kindness), karuna (compassion), mudita (joy), and upeksha (equanimity, nondiscrimination).

However, maitri is not just being kind and nice. It is the understanding that one has to become one with the situation. That does not particularly mean that one becomes entirely without personality and has to accept whatever the other person suggests. Rather, you have to overcome the barrier that you have formed between yourself and others. If you remove this barrier and open yourself, then automatically real understanding and clarity will develop in your mind.

It was a stronger, more positive attitude, exhibiting maitri, 'benevolence', which is entailed in acting 'for the sake of others', and this is ultimately 'the highest dharma'.

The formal practice of loving-kindness or maitri has seven stages. We begin by engendering loving-kindness for ourselves and then expand it at out own pace to include loved ones, friends, neutral persons, those who irritate us, all of the above as a group, and finally, all beings throughout time and space. We gradually widen the circle of loving-kindness.

For an aspiring bodhisattva, the essential practice is to cultivate maitri, or loving-kindness.

Saying "thinking" is a very interesting point in the meditation. It's the point at which we can consciously train in gentleness and in developing a nonjudgmental attitude. The word for loving-kindness in Sanskrit is maitri. Maitri is also translated as unconditional friendliness. So each time you say to yourself "thinking," you are cultivating that unconditional friendliness toward whatever arises in your mind.

This is called maitri—developing loving-kindness and an unconditional friendship with ourselves.

To what do we really commit ourselves? Is it to playing it safe and manipulating our life and our whole world, so that it will give us security and confirmation? Or is our commitment to deeper and deeper levels of maitri? The question always remains: In what do we take refuge? Do we take refuge in small, self-satisfied actions, speech, and mind? Or do we take refuge in warriorship, in taking a leap, in going beyond our usual safety zones?

It is only when we begin to relax with ourselves that meditation becomes a transformative process. Only when we relate with ourselves without moralizing, without harshness, without deception, can we let go of harmful patterns. Without maitri (metta), renunciation of old habits becomes abusive. This is an important point.