Today, conjure up a difficult person. This is sometimes called "the enemy" but it can be any difficult person. It could even be your self if you find that you are working against yourself in some way.
May [this person] be safe and protected.
May [this person] be peaceful.
May [this person] live with kindness and with ease.
You do not have to forgive the difficult person. You do not have to like or love the difficult person. You open your heart to the person and then, with as much truth as you can muster, you wish these good things for that person. And you only do it if it feels safe and you feel somewhat at ease with the task. If the person is too difficult, choose a less difficult difficult person, or go back to one of the other categories we have practiced. Over time, I have found that my heart unclenches around the difficult people, and they have less power over me. Some of my difficult people have become more like neutral people, and some of them have remained quite difficult, but my heart no longer hurts when I think about them.
From Sharon Salzberg's Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness:
"The Buddha first taught the metta meditation as an antidote to fear, as a way of surmounting terrible fear when it arises. The legend is that he sent a group of monks off to meditate in a forest that was inhabited by tree spirits. These spirits resented the presence of the monks and tried to drive them away by appearing as ghoulish visions, with awful smells and terrible shrieking noises. The tradition says that the monks became terrified and ran back to the Buddha, begging him to send them to a different forest for their practice. Instead, the Buddha replied, 'I am going to send you back to the same forest, but I will provide you with the only protection you will need.' This was the first teaching of metta meditation. The Buddha encouraged the monks not only to recite the metta phrases but to actually practice them. As these stories all seem to end so happily, so did this one - it is said that the monks went back and practiced metta, so that the tree spirits became quite moved by the beauty of the loving energy filling the forest and resolved to care for and serve the monks in all ways. The inner meaning of this story is that a mind filled with fear can still be penetrated by the quality of lovingkindness. Moreover, a mind that is saturated by lovingkindness cannot be overcome by fear; even if fear should arise, it will not overpower such a mind. When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life. Metta - the sense of love that is not bound to desire, that does not have to pretend that things are other than the way they are - overcomes the illusion of separateness, of not being part of a whole. Thereby metta overcomes all of the states that accompany this fundamental error of separateness - fear, alienation, loneliness, and despair - all of the feelings of fragmentation. In place of these, the genuine realization of connectedness brings unification, confidence, and safety."
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