I’ve been preparing for a talk I’m giving on Wednesday on Maitri and I thought that perhaps I can just share some of notes from the material I’ve read:

  • What we need most is to love ourselves
  • Only when we love ourselves, can we love others
  • Through loving ourselves, we become lovable
  • Accepting, relaxing, opening, feeling warmth
  • We and others are fundamentally good
  • Maitri allows us to make friends with ourselves
  • Unconditional friendliness
  • Embrace both sanity and confusion
  • Accepting ourselves as we are is the key to opening our heart
  • 6 aspects of maitri: familiarity,accommodation, relaxation, bravery, workability, unconditionalness
  • We usually start a spiritual path thinking that we’ll improve - subtle form of aggression
  • Maitri - we don’t get rid of anything. We can still be crazy after all these years
  • Make friends with what we are
  • curiosity
  • open to what is
  • gentleness,precision,openess
  • when we make friends with ourselves, we make friends with the world
  • fruition is playfulness
  • What we are right now is exactly what we need. It is our biggest treasure
  • Wisdom and confusion are inseparably linked together. When we try to get rid of our negativity we also lose our wisdom
  • Satisfied with what we have
  • We work with everything, not just the parts of us (and the world) that we like