The Heart Practices for the Relinquished
A guide to metta or lovingkindness for your younger self
Being relinquished by one’s biological family brings a unique blend of experiences, informed by grief and a lifelong quest to belong.
This once-a-month series aims to foster a sense of self-worth, interdependence, and dignity. Therefore, while written by an adoptee and for relinquished people, I hope the material serves anyone going through any emotionally challenging transition.
Content Warning: While providing tools and self-care frameworks, this post also includes references to relinquishment-related trauma and statistics on suicide among adoptees.
Key points:
Empowering Through The Heart Practices: the heart practices have been scientifically proven to enhance self-esteem and enrich relationships by fostering a compassionate connection with oneself and others.
Navigating the Emotional Landscape of Relinquishment: Profound, complex, and often disenfranchised grief can complicate belonging for those who have been relinquished.
Healing with Guided Metta Meditation: Metta meditation that focuses on sending love to a younger version of yourself, designed to cultivate self-love, is included.
If you’re skeptical about an article called “the heart practices,” the following may yet land on you, despite the side-eye.
In this regard, consider this story with Judaic roots: A great and respected Rabbi was known to instruct his students to put his teachings “on” their hearts. A student asked, “why not ‘in’ our hearts?”
The Rabbi responded: “As we are now, our hearts are closed. We cannot place the words inside, so we place them upon. When the heart inevitably breaks, these words may naturally fall in.”
Thank you for your curiosity. I invite you to continue into…
The Heart of Practice
The Heart Practices (also known as the Brahma-Viharas) nurture emotional resilience.
LovingKindness (Mettā): Cultivates self-love and extends it outward. This practice affirms our innate worthiness of respect.
Compassion (Karuṇā): Enables us to be present with suffering, both our own and that of others, without overwhelm.
Empathetic Joy (Mudita): Celebrates happiness wherever it's found, countering feelings of isolation and disconnection.
Equanimity (Upekkhā): Helps maintain a balanced heart, even in the face of life's ups and downs.
These four key practices help us remember what meditation teacher Tara Brach calls the “gold” within each of us. While there are four, there is no rigid order or priority.
I begin this series with lovingkindness, henceforth metta, because of all Buddhist teachings, because it set a foundation for my own practice and continues to motivate it.
As Mushim Patricia Ikeda writes, in “How to Practice Metta for a Troubled Time”
Metta meditation is not a magical spell you can cast on the population of the U.S. in order to produce a state of utopian bliss. It is not a cure-all for oppression and the unequal distribution of power and privilege.
Metta meditation doesn’t work like that. It’s about being determined, courageous, and patient in purifying your own heart and mind.
For relinquished people, and really anyone, metta affirms our inherent worthiness of love and respect.
Relinquishment 101
Being surrendered by one’s birth parent, separated, moved, relocated, rehomed, all while still being newly-born can have significant neurological impacts and cause socioemotional delays.
Meanwhile, grief haunts many throughout their life. Adoptees often experience disenfranchised grief, a sense of loss that isn’t socially condoned.
For example, denying a child the opportunity to grieve a birth mother because they must only express gratitude to have an adoptive one, has had statistically significant, life-threatening outcomes.
Consider how adoptees are four times more likely to attempt to relinquish themselves through suicide, versus people raised in their birth families.1
Consider many of us are transracial, queer, differently-abled, or late-discovery adoptees (LDAs) for whom the compounded effects of marginalization leave few refuges than the ones one consciously builds.
Consider the following responses to Pamela A. Karanova’s question, “Adoptees, Why are you so angry?”
I’m angry because I’ve had issues with self-esteem issues, clinical depression, anxiety, and trust issues all my life […] I’m angry because when I go out with family, I know I don’t look like my parents, and it’s evident to everyone that I got ABANDONED […] and sold to a different family
It’s as though we were just thrown away to be bought & sold to fulfill someone else’s needs rather than ours.
I’m angry because my adoptive parents didn’t have enough decency to try to integrate my culture into my life once they adopted me from China. They always said, “love sees no color” […] The damage can’t be undone, and I will be spending the rest of my life trying to unravel the layers of pain.
As Amanda Woolston, MSS, LCSW, CT aka The Declassified Adoptee, writes:
All adoptions involve loss. Almost always, all core parties to adoption have a complex grief process of some kind - even if no one acknowledges it. It doesn't matter if adoption helped improve life for an adoptee or even their parents. Being relinquished and adopted are tremendous life transitions for a human to go through.
Woolston here references “humans,” but it’s important to keep in mind that to be relinquished and adopted, one must be under the age of 18. The vast majority of these life transitions happen at a time when the person literally cannot cognize what is happening, because their brain is not yet developed.
These early “tremendous life transitions” can leave one struggling to know who they are, how they feel, and what to do about it.
Metta Supports Emotional Well-being for Relinquished People
Metta cultivates self-love and extends love to others, bridging the gap between one’s own experiences and those of the people around them.
Sharon Salzberg calls metta “a sneaky wisdom practice” wherein the practitioner continues to uncover and discover themselves while fostering better relationships.
Without an active metta practice, I would not be writing this post asking you to consider it. Compassion teaches me how to forgive, metta reminds me I am worthy of my own forgiveness.
But more: I would not be alive if it were not for metta practice.
As a transracial adoptee growing up in Arizona, my nickname was literally “Asian” or “The [singular] Asian,” since there were so few others in my school.
At the time, like most teenagers, I just wanted to fit in. Having my “Asianness” called out as a name, as a joke, felt like the most natural way to deal with it.
Race is socially constructed anyway, so why am I not white like my colorblind family says? So as a transracial adoptee and academic trained to ruminate, I know a special flavor of the loneliness and confusion.
Metta has taught me the importance of curiosity and community. And yet, in some weird ways, metta has made me more of a “perfectionist.” I agree with Pema Chödrön: “The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.”
My perfectionism insists that underneath our learned shame and social guilts, we are all already perfect and whole. The challenge is remembering it, helping others remember it, and rebuilding the systems that encourage forgetfulness.
Quantitative research, such as the studies below, support Salzberg’s work on lovingkindness and compassion:
Metta meditation has been found particularly useful for treating low positive affect and negative self-image. It promotes emotional resilience, social connectedness, and cultivates confidence.2
The development of mindfulness and metta-based trauma therapy (MMTT) showed that participants improved self-regulation and wellbeing while reducing anxiety, depression, and dissociation symptoms.3
Regular metta practioners reflect lowered stress and higher immune responses (focused practiced multiple times a week). The authors write that lovingkindness represents “useful strategies for targeting a variety of different psychological problems that involve interpersonal processes, such as depression, social anxiety, marital conflict, anger, and coping with the strains of long-term caregiving.”4
Formal metta practice is focusing your attention on your breath, body, and experience of living while focusing on 4-6 sayings, such as “May you be safe. May you be happy. May you live with ease.”
The focus is on feeling love, sending love, and through receiving and sending, becoming a vessel of care for yourself and others.
Guided Metta for Self
This 9-minute practice asks you to send metta to a younger version of yourself.
If at any point in this meditation you feel intense distress, stop immediately. Prioritize your present moment well-being.
The transcript is linked to give you a sense of where the meditation is headed.
Takeaway Practice
Beginners
Do you have a pet? Have you ever had a pet?
Pause to reflect: what did that pet need to do to earn your love and affection?
If “nothing,” confirm for yourself if it is possible, after all, to be worthy of love just for being.
You are equally worthy of just as much love.
Everyone else
If this makes you uncomfortable, stop immediately.
The next time you feel a wave of shame, a wall of fatigue, a sense of grey bleakness, see if you can sit with it.
The shame is arising to protect something. The shame is serving a purpose.
What is it protecting?
If it protects you, can you tap into that inner goodness that is worthy of protection?
Adoptee Resources
Adapted Podcast
Adoptees On Podcast (the episode “Is Adoption Trauma?” Lesli A. Johnson, MFT provides several resources)
Adoptee Voices, founded by the great Sara Easterly (here is a short piece called “Anthem” I wrote on the community and safety she builds)
Adoptee and attachment literate therapists — there is no shame in seeking out qualified, competent support!
How to be Adopted, mostly UK-based but excellent folks such as…
Lara Leon’s Adoptee Wellness YouTube Channel
…And that’s what I think today. Thanks for reading.
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Bio and Coaching Info
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a mindfulness and integration coach at Light Hive Integration and continuing lecturer in Writing Programs at the University of California, Los Angeles. They help people communicate, connect, and belong.
If you found this post helpful and would like to discuss practical tips for applying this to your own life, please sign up for a free 30-minute consultation at Light Hive Integration.
M. Keyes et al. "Risk of Suicide Attempt in Adopted and Nonadopted Offspring." Pediatrics, 132 (2013): 639 - 646. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2012-3251
Stefan, S., & Hofmann, S. (2019). Integrating Metta Into CBT: How Loving Kindness and Compassion Meditation Can Enhance CBT for Treating Anxiety and Depression. Clinical Psychology in Europe. https://doi.org/10.32872/cpe.v1i3.32941
Frewen, P., Rogers, N., Flodrowski, L., & Lanius, R. (2015). Mindfulness and Metta-based Trauma Therapy (MMTT): Initial Development and Proof-of-Concept of an Internet Resource. Mindfulness, 6, 1322 - 1334. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-015-0402-y
Hofmann, S., Grossman, P., & Hinton, D. (2011). Loving-kindness and compassion meditation: potential for psychological interventions. Clinical psychology review, 31 7, 1126-32 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2011.07.003