Loving Kindness Meditation

click below to listen —

When we are willing to turn our attention to the heart’s natural desire to be loving, we can more easily know our own self-worth and tune into our heart’s truth.  Loving-kindness, or metta, as it in called in the Pali language, is unconditional, pure, inclusive love. Loving kindness for all beings begins with loving and trusting ourselves, for unless we have unconditional love, acceptance, and trust in and for ourselves, it is difficult to extend it to others.

Loving-Kindness meditation (LKM) focuses on developing feelings of goodwill, kindness, and warmth towards others (Salzberg, 1995), which in turn allows us to invoke those same feelings and qualities toward ourselves. LKM, rooted in the Buddhist tradition, works with mantra and visualization, sending kind regards to all living beings.

In a groundbreaking study, Barbara Frederickson and her colleagues (Fredrickson, Cohn, Coffey, Pek, & Finkel, 2008) found that practicing 7 weeks of Loving-kindness meditation increased love, joy, contentment, gratitude, pride, hope, interest, amusement, and awe. These positive emotions then produced increases in a number of personal resources—increased mindfulness, purpose in life, social support, decreased illness symptoms—which, in turn, predicted increased life satisfaction and reduced depressive symptoms.

Sharon Salzberg, a world-renowned Buddhist meditation teacher says of LKM: “The path begins with cultivating appreciation of our oneness with others through generosity, non-harming, right speech, and right action.  Then, on the foundation of these qualities, we purify our minds through the concentration practices of meditation.  As we do, we come to experience wisdom through recognizing the truth, and we become deeply aware of the suffering caused by separation and of the happiness of knowing our connection with all beings” (Salzberg, 1995, p. 6).

Perhaps Sutra 1.33 of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras sums up the many benefits and captures the essence of loving kindness best. In Sanskrit it reads: maitri karuna muditopeksanam sukha duhkha punyapunya visayanam bhavanatas citta prasadanam, which translates into English as: By cultivating attitudes of friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and disregard toward the wicked, the mind-stuff retains its undisturbed calmness.

Here’s a 10-minute version of a Loving Kindness Meditation. Let me know how it goes!

Sources:

Fredrickson, B.L., Coohn, M.A., Coffey, K.A., Pek J., & Finkel, S.M. (2008). Open Hearts Build Lives: Positive Emotions, Induced Through Loving-Kindness Meditation, Build Consequential Personal Resources. Journal of Personality and Social Pyschology, 95(5), 1045-1062. DOI: 10.1037/10013262

Patañjali. (1975). The Yoga sutras of Patanjali : the book of the spiritual man : an  interpretation. London :Watkins

Salzberg, S. (1997). Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness. Los Angeles, CA: Shambhala.