Shantideva speaks about the perfection of meditation in terms of a deep realisation of the sameness of self and other and so releasing boundless metta. It would be wonderful if we could sail straight into this transcendental love whenever we sit to do the metta bhavana, but you may have noticed that things are not usually that straightforward to say the least! This week we’ll be directly exploring and practising a fundamental principle of metta practice, whereby we learn to cultivate kindness and awareness in relation to whatever arises in our experience right here and now. This allows us to plant and nurture seeds of metta even when the practice seems to be far off what we think it should be.