Loving-Kindness Meditation

This meditation helps to cultivate a feeling of warmth and care towards yourself and others. In five stages it allows you to focus on yourself, a friend, a neutral person and someone you find more difficult, before expanding out to all of life in the final stage.

Transcript

This will be a period of the loving-kindness meditation.

To begin with,

Let's,

To begin with,

Let's settle into the body.

So allowing the body to rest down into stillness,

Feeling the bottom on the chair,

The feet on the floor,

And having a quality of release,

Of yielding,

And allowing the body to be held and supported.

If you want to,

You could take a deeper in-breath,

Then on the out-breath,

Release and let go a little bit,

Let the next in-breath flow in at its own time.

Do that a few times if you'd like to,

And then when we're ready,

Allowing the breathing to settle.

So with each out-breath,

We're letting go of the past,

Letting go of the future,

And arriving in the here and now.

Let the whole body be breathed by the natural breath,

An opening phase on the in-breath and subsiding phase on the out-breath.

Checking in on posture,

Have the hands supported so the shoulders can release,

Having the head poised on the top of the spine,

Face soft,

Hands soft,

Jaw soft,

Belly soft,

Buttocks soft.

In the first stage of the practice,

We connect with a sense of loving-kindness towards ourselves.

So as we sit here,

We rest here,

Allowing awareness to fill the body,

Seeing if we can bring a quality of kindliness to the body.

If we've got discomfort,

Meeting it with care,

We've got feelings of ease and relaxation,

Enjoying these,

Seeing if we can wake up to our physical experience,

Including it in our awareness,

Caring for the body,

Tuning into our emotional life,

What we're feeling,

Inviting it into awareness without judgment,

And seeing if we can meet our emotional experience with kindliness,

With care,

Letting thoughts flow through the mind,

And seeing if we can let go of identifying with it content,

Just like clouds passing across the blue sky of awareness,

And being aware of everything together,

The body,

The heart,

The mind,

Resting here,

Breathing,

Resting in breathing,

And feeling into our power,

Our strength.

Here I am,

Alive,

Present,

Vital,

And how might that power manifest?

It might be an image,

Might be a feeling,

It might be a color,

Were to focus on your strength right now,

What would it be?

And then really feeling into that more and more deeply,

I'm imagining right now some kind of bright,

Intense light all the way up through my spine,

Up to the midline of the body,

It's powerful and brilliant,

And it's spilling out into the whole body,

Heart,

Mind,

So see what shows up for you,

And then rest there,

And staying in touch with this,

Let's transition to the next stage of the practice,

We bring to mind a friend,

Or we invite a friend into our field of awareness,

You can do this imaginatively,

It might be an image,

Might be a feeling,

Maybe they're joining in in this symbol of strength,

However it's shown up for you,

Letting them into awareness,

Here they are a human being,

Just like oneself,

Breathing,

Living,

Thinking,

Feeling,

Disliking pain,

Wanting to be happy,

Just like us,

They also will have their own strength and power,

And seeing if we can feel into that as we welcome them into awareness,

If you're drifting off,

That's completely normal,

But in the noticing that we've drifted,

We can invite awareness back inside the body,

Inside the present,

Inside our strength,

And connected with our friend,

And we can wish them well,

In whatever way works for us,

It might be just a sense of their strength,

May they be in touch with that,

Maybe kindness flowing towards them,

Connection flowing towards them,

Whatever's most vividly alive for you at this time,

Now allowing the image or the feeling of the friend to very gently fade,

And checking in on the body,

The heart,

The mind,

And if there's tension building and you might want to move a little bit,

Just to release the tension,

Check that the body is still resting down into gravity,

The buttocks are soft,

Belly soft,

Hands soft,

Face soft,

Breathing soft,

Feeling into our own power,

Our own strength,

The image or the symbol,

The feelings that we cultivated earlier,

And now when we're ready,

We can bring to mind or invite into awareness a neutral person,

So this is somebody for whom we don't have strong feelings of either liking or disliking,

Somebody we know by sight,

In many ways they're a representative of the vast mass of humanity,

Seven billion humans on the planet,

And most of these people we don't know,

We don't really care about if we're honest,

But we can recognize with our imagination that every single one of those beings is just like ourselves,

Center of a whole web of relationships,

Of hopes and fears,

Of love,

Difficulty,

Dreams,

Regrets,

So let's bring one person to mind as vividly as we can,

We can do this as an image of feeling,

Inviting them into awareness,

And reflecting that this person is as vivid and real to themselves as we are to ourselves,

This person will have a longing to be in touch with their strength and power,

And of course many times they won't be,

They'll be in touch with fear and difficulty and complex emotions,

Feeling empathy with their humanity and wishing them contact with their power and their strength,

In whatever way works for you,

What's it like to care about and for this person,

They're not an object,

They're a human,

Just like oneself,

And by practicing with this person in this way,

We're practicing connecting with all the other beings,

All the other people that we encounter in our lives,

Very powerful training,

Now allowing the feeling or the image for this person to fade,

Let's just check back in on ourselves,

How's the body,

How's the heart,

How's the mind,

Do we need to relax,

Do we need to focus,

Do we need to move a little bit,

How's the breathing,

Just checking that we're still in touch with our own symbol of power and strength within us,

Whatever we connected with in the first stage,

And now let's invite in somebody with whom we have difficulty or we find difficult,

Again inviting them in as an image or a feeling into our awareness,

It might be that with this person,

Part of the complexity is getting kind of tangled up with each other,

You become a bit mutually destructive in one way or another,

So let's rest in our own strength and power and let this other person be present and yet also separate,

And seeing their humanity,

They're complex to themselves,

Just like we're complex to ourselves,

They have hopes and fears,

Dreams and regrets,

Just as we do,

A longing to connect and yet sometimes tendencies to destroy the very thing that we want,

Just as we have those tendencies,

We're seeing if we can rest in something simpler in relation to this person,

Here we are in touch with our own strength and power,

In our imagination,

Here they are in touch with their strength and power,

And we can wish them well,

So we're deeply connected and yet also maintaining our own agency in relation to one another,

And if you're still in touch with the symbol from the first stage,

In terms of power and strength within oneself,

Be seeing if we can wish that for the other person in their own way,

And now we transition to the fifth and final stage of this practice,

Developing love and kindness,

But first of all let's just check back in on ourselves,

That we're not getting rigid,

If we are getting a bit tight,

Then we can soften,

Relax the buttocks,

Relax the belly,

The hands,

The face,

Rest into the chair,

And then we imaginatively have all four people together,

Oneself and a friend,

The neutral person,

The person we find difficult,

I always imagine us sitting in a circle together,

But you might have some other way,

Here we all are resting inside our power and our strength,

And seeing if we can let go of preference,

So we have a sense of common humanity,

We can care as much about the difficult person as the friend and the neutral person and ourselves,

And all the time we have this quality of agency within us,

Of strength and power within us,

So we don't need to get so tangled up with other people,

And now allowing all of humanity into our field of awareness,

As if the circumference of our awareness becomes infinite and boundless,

And here's everybody,

All the humans,

All and all the creatures,

Breathing in and out,

We can be deeply connected without losing our own sense of power and agency,

May all beings be in touch with their strength and power,

Now very gently beginning to bring the practice to a close,

Allowing this awareness of all the other beings to fade a little bit into the background,

And bringing the whole body to the foreground of awareness,

The weight of the body,

Breathing in the body,

Our emotional life,

Our thinking life,

Feeling the effect of the practice,

Feeling our own strength and power within us,

And maybe forming an intention to take it with us into whatever comes next,

From when we're ready,

Bringing a little bit of movement into the body,

Opening the eyes,

We've had them closed,

Looking around,

Stretching if we want to,

And coming out of the meditation.

Reviews

Amazing. A very powerful uplifting version of Metta. Thank you Vidyamala 🙏

Different, interesting, I shall repeat. Thank you.

Led with wisdom and tenderness thank you 🙏

Wonderful; thankyou

Thank you Vidyamala- you always offer such peace and insight as you guide and teach through meditation.

This was so soothing. Your voice is always so warm and gentle. I feel very grounded.

Beautiful guidance, so gentle and powerful, many thanks!🙏❤️