If it were my birthday today, would you wish me, "Happy Birthday"? Most of you, if not all of you would say, "Yes." What are you doing it for? What is the purpose of wishing me "Happy Birthday"? Is it just to make me feel good? That I get a bit of fame? Or somebody knows that it's my birthday and says "Happy Birthday, Steve" just for the sake of it. Or are you doing it for a different intention? Do you actually wish, "Today, Steve, we hope you have no pain, today we hope it's a happy day for you", because you understand for yourself that you would like to have a happy day on your birthday. I think, almost every person on the planet would like to have a happy day on their birthday. It's that one day of the year we say, "It's my day."
For good or for bad, people would like to have a happy day. When you wish it, if you wished it to me, would you actually mean it? Now doing it is one thing. Meaning it is a whole other thing. If a person means it, it's easy for them to do, if a person doesn't mean it, they might still do it but they don't really mean it.
Now if you mean it, what's the deeper part behind it, if you actually mean it? What does that mean for you? It means that your heart is open for another living being. It means your heart is open for me. When you wish me Happy Birthday and you mean it, it means you have a Compassion/Lovingkindness wish inside yourself, that's very open and thinking of Steve. It's not thinking of you. You are not thinking of yourself when you wish me Happy Birthday, you are thinking of me. That's a selfless wish for Steve to have a nice day on that day without pain, without Dukkha.
And when you are sitting on the pillow doing a Compassion/Lovingkindness wish, what is the use of that wishing? It's to open your heart. It's to develop yourself so that you are more compassionate and loving right there on the pillow. If you train your thoughts to be compassionate and loving on the pillow, then those thoughts will come up more often throughout your day. If you don't train with the wish, how can you expect it to come up?
Whatever you train with is going to come up very easy. You train to eat, you know how to eat. You train to walk as a baby, you learn how to walk. You train to ride a bicycle, you learn how to ride a bicycle. You train to write the alphabet, you learn how to write. When you train with something, you will become better at it, you are able to do it.
So by wishing Compassion/Lovingkindness on the pillow, you are training your mind to always have these compassionate lovingkind thoughts. And if those are your thoughts on a regular basis, what wonderful person you are going to turn out to be. Because you are not just going to have those thoughts in isolation, the thoughts will move into your speech, the thoughts will move into your actions. All of your training on the pillow with the wish is going to affect your thoughts, your speech and your actions. You are going to be a more lovingkind person throughout the day, if you train your mind to have loving kind thoughts. It's that simple.
Specifically, the compassionate wish to end Dukkha, that's the big motivation for the whole practice. If we just wished happiness to everybody, fine, it's a nice wish. But if we don't understand Dukkha, then we don't actually know how to help these people get their happiness. We don't know how to alleviate the Dukkha. So once again: just wishing for happiness isn't enough. But using the Compassion and Lovingkindness together as well as having an understanding of Dukkha. Actually truly wishing there was no Dukkha. That will be a motivation for your whole practice and push you to learn more and to end your Dukkha in the process.