The questions "How do I experience kindness-without-bounds towards myself/this experience?" are inducing an intense grief reaction, which suggests that holding those questions will be a useful way into this.
Great sorrow. This causes great engagement, causes a great tension, "wants" to be understood, becomes a great provocation to search out causes of freedom. The story of Patacara speaks to mindfulness showing arising and passing, impermanence, mindfulness clearing great sorrow.
This tension - and the strong intention to shed it - can provoke a consistent and concentrated 'mindfulness' practice, a concentration practice of watching exactly the doing/thinking/feeling, turning attention to smell, taste, sound, and touch as the senses contact their objects.
One exercise: when getting up to get a glass of water, a moment can be taken to visualize what actions are expected to be done in the course of rising from the chair to actually drinking the water. Visualization complete, the actual rising from chair and going for water may begin: in the actual actions one can note any and all actual activities that occur en route to drinking water and how they differ from what the mind had anticipated and foreseen. (I enjoy this almost like a game sometimes, "What don't I know I am going to do in this simple activity?) There's no right or wrong way to do this (and this most certainly is not something to perfect and think, "oh, next time I'll do exactly what I think I'll do." It's just a way to discover the many events that may occur when one thinks they are simply rising to get a drink of water).
This is mindfulness; the practice that exposes impermanence. Here is Patacara's life after understanding impermanence from Gotama:Having washed my feet,
Then I watched that water,
Noticing the foot-water
Flowing from high to low.
With that the mind was calmed
Just as a noble, thoroughbred horse.
Gentle.
Approaching the question through historical causal relationships is interesting. How does that work in meditation? Do you cultivate metta for the people involved in production/care of the object?
This is a way. Seeing that even the paper clip only exists as a result of human desire at every step of the chain. (This does not make a conclusion against modernity, it just sees how even the paper clip, the steel, the galvanization, the factory, the operators, etc, came into being, each step containing desire and stress). In this way, one can look at anything/one.
*Edit: so in metta meditation: see the paper clip for its causality; when feeling self-aversion, see self and aversion as temporary consequences of a causal chain (which consequences may become useful causes for new, positive consequences) and know those causes with friendliness and gentleness like holding a baby or the hand of a sick person. **Further edit: so take an object for which metta (boundless kindness) is easily generated/up-welling, then simply replace the object with another object, like placing someone/thing new on the stage of your mind's attention. The plain object, such as a paper clip, is already known to be an object that has come into being as a result of human desire and stress. This is why even this plain object may be the focus of metta. Metta meditation is a tremendous practice for curing self-aversion, aversive otherization, ill-will.
How do those of us with only four two arms do the Chenrezig posture?
Ha. I did the lifted (upper) arms. I was careful to keep shoulder blades back and down (relaxed) arms in a comfortably lifted position and I only stayed like that for as long as it felt energetically relaxing. It was an intuitive move that drained chest tension resulting from dukkha-focus. I don't know why; it wasn't taught to me, just a memory of the image and the body intuitively doing it at that moment. A friend in tibetan study told me it was like Chenrezig. The third and fourth paragraph of that previous link explain what the raised right and left hands symbolize. I was not aware of these symbols or the deity at the time.