Ten Days To A More Successful Lovingkindness Practice

You can expect to unlearn some common misconceptions about what lovingkindness is and how it's developed. You'll learn to connect with an innate, natural, and easy sense of kindness. You'll discover how to regard yourself with kind eyes so that you can show yourself the support and warmth you deserve. You'll explore the art of sitting with uncomfortable feelings, and you'll learn to be more empathetic toward and understanding of yourself. You'll learn new, effective approaches to cultivating kindness for friends, strangers, and people you have difficulty with so that you can begin to permeate your life with an attitude of greater kindness and compassion.

Leçon 1: Looking With Loving Eyes

This session, like all the others in the course, begins with a short talk, and then transitions into a guided meditation. The emphasis today is on bringing kindness into the practice through recalling experiences of looking with love. Although I refer to this as a "ten day" course you can take as much or as little time as you need.

Leçon 2: Accepting Feelings

Today's session begins with a brief talk, and then continues with a guided meditation. Today we'll be practicing letting go of any expectations of what we "should" find, so that we can accept whatever happens to be arising.

Leçon 3: Not Trying To Make Anything Happen

This lesson starts with a short talk, and continues with a guided meditation. Both the talk and the practice encourage us not to "try" to make anything happen (doing that isn't very kind), and instead encourage us to simply set up the conditions for kindness to arise, and then allow it to unfold naturally.

Leçon 4: Practicing Self-Empathy

Today's brief talk and guided meditation emphasize the importance of cultivating empathy toward ourselves as well as others. In particular we empathize with ourselves as beings who wish to be happy, or be at peace, or have a sense of meaning or purpose. And we also empathize with ourselves as beings who are doing a difficult thing in being human.

Leçon 5: Using Natural Language To Cultivate Kindness

In the brief talk and meditation, we'll be exploring a different way of communicating with ourselves in lovingkindness meditation. In the previous session we used phrases such as "May I be well, May I be happy." Today we'll play around with using natural language, as if we're having a conversation with ourselves or someone else.

Leçon 6: Regarding A Friend With Kindness

Having practiced various skills and perspectives, such as seeing metta as "kindness," seeing with loving eyes, developing self-empathy, and communicating with ourselves in natural language, we're going to expand the scope of our kindness toward another person — in this case a friend.

Leçon 7: Empathizing With And Supporting A Friend

In the short talk and following guided meditation, we apply what we've been learning about empathy as a support from kindness, and consider that our friend, just like us, is a feeling being who desires happiness and well-being, and who, like us, is also doing a difficult thing in being human. Knowing this, we can empathize with and offer them support.

Leçon 8: Cultivating Empathy And Kindness For Strangers

Once we recognize that others' feelings of joy and suffering are just as real to them as our own are to us, then we want to support their well-being. In this way, having empathy for ourselves leads for empathy and kindness for others, even if they're complete strangers.

Leçon 9: Cultivating Empathy And Kindness For Someone We Have Difficulties With

If we take on board the principle that we are all feeling beings who are struggling to do this difficult thing of being human, we'll find that we can learn to set aside blame and animosity and instead feel supportive and encouraging even to people we find challenging.

Leçon 10: With Empathy And Kindness For All

Rather than focusing our empathy and kindness toward individuals, we can permeate the mind with empathy and kindness, so that whoever we happen to meet or think of, we encounter them with a mind that's warm and supportive.

Reviews

Wonderful course. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and light to the world. May we be well. May we be happy. May we be kind to ourselves and others.

Soothing voice, and imminently practical perspective on establishing a loving kindness practice. In gratitude

What a wonderful course to deepen my relationship with kindness through metta.

The suggestion of kindness as love in the beginning allowed my preconceptions about the word “loving” to be eased and therefore I received a lot of benefit and am able to embody living with soft eyes to a greater degree. Highly recommend 🙏🏻

Wonderful course. It really helped me expand my practice of metta especially seeing it more as kindness and realizing everyone has the same aspirations was very freeing.

Thank you for this wonderful course. It has benefited me immensely.

Excellent course. Thank you so much Bodhipaksa.
🙏💖🕊

Rating this course with five stars doesn’t do justice to the values of wisdom, self-love, compassion, empathy, and equanimity that radiate through this course. I’m so grateful… and I simply rest in the consciousness of being kind to myself and to others, and especially to those I disagree with.
Karyn Dunphy, RScP, Life Coach

Exploring loving practise meditation with this short course has helped me to become more at ease with my own metta bhavana practise.

Looking with loving eyes has especially been useful in becoming embodied during practise. Thank you for creating this course and sharing it with us all here 🙏🌸

Good introduction to the various loving kindness practices

This course is absolutely wonderful. Bodhipaksa has such a gentle and reassuring voice, and the instructions were clear and concise enough to be not too much talking, but at the same time gave a lot of depth of learning. This one will be on my bookmarked list for repeat listening.

a beautiful course, spoken with love and kindness which was heartfelt along with the information conveyed. Worthy of consideration and put into practice for a lifetime!

A beautiful, profound course, although clear, simple and very accessible. It has helped me find a deeper level in my metta practice. Highly recommended.