I wonder whether it is a nice-to-have but basically separate from meditation essentials.
I’ve heard teachers with a Theravada background talk about two “wings to awakening”: wisdom (or insight) and compassion. The claim is that without developing both in a relatively even way, you can end up badly unbalanced and unable to achieve full realization of the practice. I’ve heard that non-westernized versions tend to teach metta before insight meditation, though I don’t recall the exact justification off the top of my head.
It seems to me that without at least some of the discipline that comes from doing a sit-and-be-aware meditation for a while, it could be substantially more difficult to really dig in on the wishing-people-well stuff. On the other hand, I’ve heard several teachers say that we have a self-compassion problem in the west that makes insight meditation harder to do effectively/*. Maybe there’s something to the wings thing after all?
/* Apparently westerners (and particularly Americans) tend to have a nasty habit of berating ourselves for being bad at meditation instead of just starting again when we get distracted.
Glad they were interesting!
I’ve heard teachers with a Theravada background talk about two “wings to awakening”: wisdom (or insight) and compassion. The claim is that without developing both in a relatively even way, you can end up badly unbalanced and unable to achieve full realization of the practice. I’ve heard that non-westernized versions tend to teach metta before insight meditation, though I don’t recall the exact justification off the top of my head.
It seems to me that without at least some of the discipline that comes from doing a sit-and-be-aware meditation for a while, it could be substantially more difficult to really dig in on the wishing-people-well stuff. On the other hand, I’ve heard several teachers say that we have a self-compassion problem in the west that makes insight meditation harder to do effectively/*. Maybe there’s something to the wings thing after all?
/* Apparently westerners (and particularly Americans) tend to have a nasty habit of berating ourselves for being bad at meditation instead of just starting again when we get distracted.