Ten Days To A More Successful Lovingkindness Practice

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.