This is a guided meditation to help you connect with loving kindness for yourself and with a deep sense of wishing yourself well.
And this focus on ourselves isn't selfish.
We're planting seeds of positivity that will grow flower and fruit as actions that make life happier for you and for others who are touched by your life.
You might have pleasurable feelings during the meditation or you might not feel very much at all and that's fine.
This meditation is about setting positive intentions rather than having happy feelings.
We're planting seeds in meditation and there's no telling when they will come into fruit.
I'll ring bells for four stages and I'll make a suggestion in each stage with periods of silence so you can try them out and see what you find helpful.
But first,
Spending a minute or so preparing,
Setting up good conditions for meditation,
Encouraging your body to be as comfortable as it can be,
Relaxed and at ease,
Open,
Receptive,
Letting your eyes close or gently lowering your gaze and taking a few deeper breaths.
Being human can be wonderful,
Lots of opportunities for pleasure and achievement,
But it can also be tough.
Having a human mind is a mixed blessing.
So the meditation starts by acknowledging any difficulties in your life just now,
Any stress or sadness.
So just acknowledging how you feel and that it can be hard sometimes.
Being kind to yourself as you would be to a friend having a tough time,
Having a sense of compassion for this very human experience and just breathing into any feelings that are there,
Any tension or discomfort.
And while it's important not to repress difficult emotions,
It's also good not to dwell on difficulty endlessly.
The human brain has a negativity bias,
A tendency to over focus on possible threats and that can leave us stressed and over-adrenalized.
So now bring to mind something positive,
Perhaps something that's going well in your life,
Something you're glad about.
It could just be a small,
Innocent source of delight from the past few days,
Like the warmth of the sun,
A good book,
A positive connection with another being.
So bringing that to mind,
Using your imagination to have a more vivid sense of the experience.
Negative experiences embed into the emotional memory almost immediately,
But positive ones can take 20 times as long.
So taking the time to allow the positive things to really sink into the emotional memory.
Letting these memories make your brain more inclined to happiness.
Now bringing to mind something you appreciate about yourself.
Valuing your good qualities and kind deeds in a straightforward way is an important practice.
Appreciating what you bring to the world.
And don't worry if you find this challenging to start with.
If it feels hard to think of anything,
Think of what a friend might say.
Perhaps bringing to mind something in the past week or so that you're glad you did,
Now in the fourth stage,
Connecting with a sense of equanimity.
Allowing both the difficulties and the joys to be there and not being blown about by them.
Knowing that this is the human situation.
We all have joys and we all have difficulties.
Having a sense of the spacious container of awareness which can hold anything that arises in it.
Just breathing.
Thanking your body for breathing.
And now dropping in the idea of ending this meditation.
Ending with gratitude for the practice and your own efforts.
And taking the momentum of awareness and positive intention to whatever you do next.
