Call Up One of Your Greatest Powers and Have It Move You
one of mindfulness meditation’s most beautiful practices for learning to radiate love to all living beings: this is a meditation staple!
This guided meditation easily allows you to taste this, and takes you through several layers of wishing well for ourselves and others. This is the traditional method of cultivating “metta” or compassion and loving kindness, and is a bit of genius. Using an inner voice, you put voice to a strategically chosen series of well-wishing that both taps into established wells of love and spreads the good intentions liberally and indiscriminately, starting from one’s own sense of self and eventually extending to all beings everywhere.
Don’t worry if you don’t mean it every time (remember it’s all part of it!). Enjoy it!
Some of the genius behind this traditional prescription is that every moment in the guidance is different, and we may have more or less ease in different parts. What is great is that we are touching all the bases in ourselves, and blending the easy with the challenging.
Some people may have trouble with extending loving kindness to their very own selves. Some may have trouble with people everywhere in general. Some people may struggle with the whole idea of wishing kindness on other people as a “soft,” mushy, or irrational thing to do. Some people may struggle with kind thoughts for family, or any number of things could be different at different times and for different people. That is all fine, and to be expected. As we practice more and more we will notice a couple things:
- Our emotional flexibility improves.
- We will find ourselves surprised by our own behavior at some point in the future, as unusually kind, and will recognize it as a product of this practice.
There are many more benefits, including better sleep and an easier time with any and all other meditations.
It is also worth considerable note that this meditation makes use of thoughts, and works great both for active, thinky times because it harnesses that energy, but what’s more, this meditation also serves as a reminder that meditation is a matter of awakening your heart and not a self-control practice of banning thoughts.
For all these reasons and more, compassion meditation is an important staple in the meditator’s diet!
