On Christmas Day last year, I started a loving-kindness meditation practice. My sister’s birthday is the day after Christmas, and I took her to Kripalu retreat in the Berkshires for a sister Christmas/birthday mindfulness getaway. Our days were spent finally relaxing and feeling our own tiredness and attending sessions on yoga, meditation, and life reflection sessions.
The loving-kindness meditation was the focus of one of these sessions. The idea behind this type of meditation is that it helps you foster feelings of compassion, acceptance, and love towards all beings. For me personally, this form of meditation helped me become more open, less cold, less judgmental – and generally happier and more hopeful. Even when it came to the most horrific people in my life, I found a space within myself to wish them the best because as much as they were torturing me, they were certainly torturing themselves 10x over (er, probably even more!). I had escape from them, but they had no escape from themselves. Shudder! I hoped they could find peace (and leave the rest of us the hell alone!).
It’s really quite easy to practice. You sit comfortable and close your eyes and start by focusing on yourself. Breathe deeply. There are a number of variations of the script, but you repeat in your mind:
May I be safe
May I be happy
May I be healthy
May I live with ease
That’s the simple dumb version I can remember. Then you repeat this process and go through other types of people, substituting “you” for “I” obviously and genuinely feeling goodwill towards them:
- Someone you love
- Someone you have neutral feelings towards
- Someone you find difficult or dislike
- All living beings
I don’t quite follow these rules. I tend to focus on those who hurt me and just about anyone that comes up in my consciousness, whether they are in my life or just a random person on the street.
It’s super easy, and it makes me feel much better about the world. It helps me practice what Pema Chodron refers to as “matri” (loving-kindness to oneself) in the book that I’m currently crawling through, “When Things Fall Apart.” Isn’t matri the root of all things? I like the idea she puts out there that once you have made good friends with yourself, your situation will be more friendly too. I’ve found myself often asking myself what I would tell myself or do for myself if i were my own best friend. It’s a pretty useful and revealing exercise. No one is often as bad to us as we are to ourselves. As as horrible as we are to ourselves, others are often to us with similar degrees of magnitude. My loving-kindness practice also gives me hope that the horrible people can become better. When I think about the recent attacks all over the world – most recently, Germany, but they just seem to be getting closer and closer together – and all the other hardships of everyday life for so many people, it’s obvious that we cannot avoid suffering. Even in Bali, it follows you. Hello, can I please leave my mind somewhere else while I go on vacation please???
How can we stand apart in observance and non-judgment when we’re blowing each other up and hurting each other and ourselves?
“Just as the Buddha taught, it’s important to see suffering as suffering. We are not talking about ignoring or keeping quiet. When we don’t buy into our opinions and solidify the sense of enemy, we will accomplish something. If we don’t get swept away by our outrage, then we will see the cause of suffering more clearly. That is how the cessation of suffering evolves….Although we are going in a direction, and the direction is to help diminish suffering, we have to realize that part of helping is keeping our clarity of mind, keeping our hearts and our minds open. When circumstances make us feel like closing our eyes and shutting our ears and making other people into the enemy, social action can be the most advanced practice. How to continue to speak and act without aggression is an enormous challenge. The way to start is to begin to notice our opinions.” OOOOMMMM! Yo, Pema Chodron, thank you zenmistress.