19 Oct Loving-Kindness meditation
Loving-Kindness meditation, as it’s name suggests, is a form of meditation designed to cultivate love, compassion and kindness in whoever practices it.
It usually involves meditating on three or four sentences.
Here are the four lines I am currently using;
May I be well and happy
May I be confident and Joyful
May I be healthy and functional
May I live calmly and peacefully
Usually you start by cultivating compassion towards yourself. Later you extend it towards family, then friends, then acquaintances. When you want to get more advanced you move on to people you find difficult or who you outright dislike.
This is done by altering the beginning of the sentence as below;
May my parents be well and happy
May my brother be well and happy
May Tony Blair be well and happy
Obviously, do this for each of the four sentences
Finally you can make it universal by placing the following in front of each sentence;
May all living beings, everywhere and without exception………
Although it looks like a wish list or prayer it is not.
Unless you have magic powers, meditating on may I win the lottery and marry a hot film star wont make it any more likely to happen.
With prayer you are calling on an external being to answer your prayer. Otherwise it is in some ways similar to prayer.
Loving-kindness is different from wishing and praying in that you are purely doing it to practice being compassionate. The more you practice and focus, the more compassion for yourself and others you develop.
Some people place both hands on their heart when doing this meditation as they feel and helps them feel compassion. I find it helps me as well.
There is more and more research being conducted on Loving-Kindness meditation. It has been found to increase feelings of belonging and social contentedness, build positive emotions such as happiness and confidence. It has been found to actually change the brain in ways that correlate with developing compassion and empathy. It counters harmful self-talk and constantly looking for other peoples faults. It has even been shown to reduce pain.
Loving-Kindness is an extremely powerful and effective form of meditation, but like most men the whole idea of it put me off. I now wish I had started a lot earlier.
Dean.
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