There is an old joke about the Vipassana lover—you go on silent retreat and fall in love with someone you can’t be with, or whom you’ve never spoken to. Maybe you’ve only seen the back of their head. You sit for days and days, and because there is nothing else to pay attention to, you choose your new lover. There is also a Vipassana enemy—the way someone coughs or the way someone walks into a room makes you hate them. The best part is if you go on a really long retreat, you begin hating the person you love and you begin to see the person you hated as yourself. Then you begin to love them. Then you can see they are a projection of a dilemma happening in your own mind, which is that the ego is constantly trying to decide what it likes and what it doesn’t like. It has nothing to do with the world out there; it is only to keep creating a sense of self.
There is a teaching called metta where you introduce loving-kindness practices for yourself, for people in your life who are neutral, for people in your life whom you love, and for your enemies. The hardest part is to direct loving energy inward. It is so hard to be vulnerable and forgive ourselves; we are so annoying.