Welcome to this opportunity to explore extending loving-kindness and compassion to yourself and other living beings.
You are invited to welcome and accept whatever has brought you to this lesson and practice,
Allowing all that's here to be here.
Loving-kindness is a natural opening of a compassionate heart toward a living person by wishing that person well,
Often in the face of challenges.
Loving-kindness is more than sympathy,
Which is to feel sorrow for someone's pain without necessarily understanding it,
And it's more than empathy,
Which is to relate to someone's pain with feeling or understanding.
Compassion is empathy with an intention to act on that empathy.
Acting on empathy can be,
And often is,
As simple as authentically extending good wishes.
Loving-kindness can,
Of course,
Include acts of charity and support,
But it begins with wishing someone well,
Beginning with yourself.
We can apply compassion to ourselves and to others.
It's a wish that everyone be happy,
Not to be mindlessly or disconnectedly happy,
But to be fully aware and connected and happy.
We begin with developing loving-kindness by connecting with ourselves,
Allowing our hearts to open,
First with compassion for ourselves.
This practice can be done anytime,
Anywhere,
For any reasons,
And for anyone.
It can be done in a moment,
Or repeated over several minutes.
It can be sitting in a quiet room,
Or sitting at work,
Or sitting in traffic,
Or standing in a retail checkout line.
We'll begin wherever you're sitting right now.
To begin,
Become comfortable in your chair or on your cushion,
Sitting with a relaxed but as erect as available posture,
With your shoulders relaxed,
A posture that allows you to be still,
Allowing your hands to rest comfortably in your lap,
If comfortable to do so,
Perhaps closing your eyes or holding an unfocused gaze,
Settling into awareness of the body and the breath.
In this practice,
You may experience emotions.
Consider being open to experiencing whatever arises and allowing it as it happens,
Feeling into your body right now,
Noticing what's here,
Being open to whatever is to be experienced in the body in this moment,
Connecting to the breath,
Noticing sensations in the body of breathing,
Or if the breath is activating,
Perhaps of the sit bones seated in the chair.
In this practice,
You'll be cultivating unconditional friendliness,
Also known as loving-kindness.
We all have this within us,
This natural capacity for loving-kindness,
A sense of friendship that is open,
Gentle,
Supportive,
Now allowing yourself to remember and open up to your own basic goodness.
You might remember times where you have been kind or generous.
You might recall your natural desire to be happy and not to suffer.
If acknowledging your own goodness is difficult in this moment,
Consider looking at yourself through the eyes of someone who loves you.
What does that person love about you?
Or you may recall the unconditional love you felt from a beloved pet.
It may help to use the imagination,
Perhaps picturing yourself as a young child standing right in front of you,
Perhaps when you were four or five years old,
If that allows tender feelings of kindness to flow more easily.
And as you experience this love,
Notice how you feel in your body.
Perhaps you feel some warmth or warmth in the face.
Perhaps you sense a smile beginning,
A sense of expansiveness.
These are some of the sensations of loving-kindness,
A natural feeling that is accessible to all of us,
Always.
Resting with this feeling of open,
Unconditional love for a few moments,
Allowing yourself to bask in the energy of loving-kindness,
Breathing it in and breathing it out,
Inviting feelings of peace and acceptance.
In the loving-kindness practice,
We begin with ourselves for many reasons,
Not least because many people,
And you may or may not be one,
Find themselves focusing first and sometimes only on the needs of others before their own needs.
There is an old saying,
You cannot pour from an empty pitcher.
So we begin loving-kindness with ourself.
We begin by filling the pitcher.
So beginning now to wish yourself well by extending words of loving-kindness to yourself.
I'll be offering as guidance the phrases that I use in my own practice.
You're invited to use those or change them and choose whatever words express your wishes of loving-kindness towards yourself and others.
So this is when the participation begins.
I will invite you to say aloud or to yourself each phrase in the pause after I say it aloud.
And we'll begin now.
May I be safe,
Free from inner and outer harm.
May I be healthy,
Free from pain and suffering.
May I be happy,
Filling with joy and gratitude.
May I live with ease.
For this first round we will repeat.
Please speak aloud or to yourself after I speak.
May I be safe,
Free from inner and outer harm.
May I be healthy,
Free from pain and suffering.
May I be happy,
Filling with joy and gratitude.
May I live with ease.
The words and phrases offered here are a standard in loving-kindness practice,
But you can always choose different ones.
To be safe,
Healthy,
And happy are phrases that are typically pretty quickly understood and recognized.
To live with ease is also a standard loving-kindness phrase,
But in my teaching experience,
One that doesn't always resonate.
For some,
That phrase can mean to not work hard,
Or to not earn,
Or to live at others' expense.
For me,
To live with ease is not those things.
To live with ease is to have the ability to recognize and understand the difference between pain,
Which comes to all of us with some of life's events and is inevitable,
And suffering,
Which comes when we are obsessed with what we don't have,
Don't like what we do have,
Or are confused about which is which.
Another,
Perhaps more widely known,
Notion is what you may have heard as the serenity prayer,
Which involves asking your higher being to grant you the serenity to accept the things you cannot change,
The courage to change the things you can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
For loving-kindness,
To live with ease holds whatever positive meaning it holds for you.
Now you can open the circle of loving-kindness by bringing to mind someone who is dear to you,
Someone whom you care about and who has always been supportive.
Bring that person to mind now.
With that person in mind,
Reflect on their basic goodness,
Sensing what it is in particular that you love about him or her.
In your heart,
Feel your appreciation for this dear person.
And with that person in mind,
Begin your simple offering,
Repeating after me.
May you be safe,
Free from inner and outer harm.
May you be healthy,
Free from pain and suffering.
May you be happy,
Filling with joy and gratitude.
May you live with ease.
Now you can widen the circle of loving-kindness even further by bringing to mind someone you're familiar with,
Someone you might see periodically but don't know well.
This person might be a neighbor,
A grocery store clerk,
Someone sitting in a car in traffic next to you.
Bring this person to mind now and now repeat the words of loving-kindness after me.
May you be safe,
Free from inner and outer harm.
May you be healthy,
Free from pain and suffering.
May you be happy,
Filling with joy and gratitude.
May you live with ease.
Now allowing your awareness to open out in all directions to yourself,
A dear one,
An acquaintance or stranger,
Out to any and all beings,
Humans and all living things everywhere,
Those living in richness or poverty,
In war or peace,
In hunger or abundance,
With awareness of all the joys and sorrows that all beings experience,
Repeating after me.
May all beings be safe,
Free from inner and outer harm.
May all beings be healthy,
Free from pain and suffering.
May all beings be happy,
Filling with joy and gratitude.
May all beings live with ease.
By extending loving-kindness to all living things,
You increase your connection to the world around you in a positive and surprisingly productive way.
By extending it to all living things,
You extend it also to yourself,
Which brings us right back to where we started.
And now,
Bringing this practice to a close by coming back to extend kindness to yourself,
Sitting for a few moments and basking in the energy of loving-kindness that may have been generated here.
You may repeat this lesson and practice to experiment with your own words or phrases or mental images.
Or you may simply jump into the practice without the lesson,
Which you will find in the loving-kindness just practice.
At the sounds of the bells,
May you find the energy remains even as the rings fade.
