The Grammar of Social Metta

Vince Fakhoury Horn on the grammar of social metta—why a metta phrase needs a wish and only optionally a subject, how Sharon Salzberg’s “pith metta” shortens the phrase once the wish starts coming true, and why open-heartedness is a byproduct of the practice rather than its purpose, so there is always more to aspire to.

💬 Transcript

Vince Horn: Today as we continue to unfold the social metta instructions I wanted to talk a little bit about the grammar of social metta, meaning the linguistic structure of how this practice works at least as far as I understand, which is very much an emerging understanding. And I think talking about grammar with this stuff is really helpful, because as one of my mentors Ken Wilber often points out, you know, you can be a completely fluent speaker without having any understanding of the grammar of the language you’re speaking.

In fact that’s how all of us learn language, unless you have like linguistic professor parents or something, who are teaching you grammar early. You know, we all learn to speak without knowing the rules of the language. And then later in school, you know, we go to school and still most of us don’t learn the grammar of the language we’re speaking.

And so, to know the grammar, to know how something works is not required to do it. But it’s very much helpful if you’re going to try to help other people do it, or if you wanna have a deeper understanding of what you’re doing. So I wanted to just share a little bit of sort of the grammar here of what we’re working with.

At the heart of how we’re working with social metta, and I think this is because it’s an out-loud practice, and out-loud practices seem to really be aided by words. We’re working with a phrase, this metta phrase, and we started with a very simple phrase: may it arise.

May loving awareness arise. May compassionate presence arise. May happiness arise. Whatever the it is, working with a quality of presence or of a dimension of the open heart and inviting it to arise. That’s a simple phrase and it has in that phrase a wish. This is the kind of one of the key parts of the metta phrase, is there’s a wish embedded in the phrase.

There’s something that we’re wishing for, in this case, compassionate presence. Now I’d say at the very minimum, a metta phrase has to have a wish. There has to be something that we’re wishing for. That’s kind of what makes it a metta phrase. It’s a well wish. It’s a prayer using other language.

Metta is Buddhist prayer in a wa