Have you tried meditating but you can’t seem to “get into it?”  Don’t know where to start?

Maybe you have heard of the benefits of meditation and you’ve wanted to sit and get focused, but you just don’t know how or you can’t get into it.

Lovingkindness can be such a beautiful and even enjoyable type of meditation to start with!

People come to me and want to know how to heal their broken hearts, relationships, bodies, and pasts.  They want to exhale! And they want to both enjoy life more fully and connect more meaningfully with others.

What heals?

Love heals.  We tend to over-complicate it and look for solutions to our heart aches, worries, and problems  “outside ourselves.”  We busy ourselves (and exhaust ourselves) in this endless search for happiness and for feeling like we belong. We try to change our bodies, thoughts, and everyone around us. We get demanding, try to control our lives and others.  We get full of rage when it all doesn’t work out the way we are planning.

Many of us are tired.  And we’re tired of being tired!  We might feel uninspired, disconnected, and overwhelmed.  When that happens, we often try to “get more control” and we often go looking for happiness outside ourselves.  Ugh.  But then we find that gripping tighter for control and searching for relief outside of ourselves didn’t bring us the relief, ease, and sweetness we were looking for.  So we end up back in our habits of closing off our hearts, playing small, turning away instead of “turning toward.”

Yet to really shift our suffering, we have to start by turning inward to our own hearts and bodies.  Love dispels our suffering – loving attention and spaciousness to “be” and “allow.”

This isn’t some new-age mumbo-jumbo. Neuroscience now supports that practices, such as lovingkindness, do in fact alter how our brains fire and our responses to life’s events, and create a sense of spaciousness and happiness.

Lovingkindness meditation is about returning to a deep sense of happiness – one that isn’t based on the weather systems of our emotions or the ever-changing circumstances in our lives.  It’s about reconditioning ourselves from believing that happiness is “out there.” It’s about gathering all that energy spent looking for happiness  and returning it to us.

Loving kindness calms the nervous system, connects us, softens us, empowers us and strengthens us.  It dispels anger and resentment.  It is the basis for waking up and being in healthy relationships.

What will you notice after just a few minutes of lovingkindness meditation?  That exhale we long for!  Sweetness returning to your heart.  Expansiveness.

Loving kindness is a concentration practice.  We bring our attention back again and again to the phrases that we repeat.  We practice non-judgment and gentleness.

There are many versions and different phrases that have been used over time.  Here are the ones my teacher taught me.  Use phrases that resonate with you.

Typically, the six different “types” of people we send loving kindness to are:

Self
Benefactor
Friend/ a dear one
Neutral person
Difficult person
All living beings

Here are the phrases (again, use phrases that resonate with you). These are easy to memorize and practice anywhere, anytime:

May I be safe.
May I be happy.
May I be healthy.
May I live with ease.

Briefly, here is a practice you can do any time during the day:

Sit in a comfortable position.

Close your eyes or soften the eyes.

Take a few mindful breaths – in and out.

You may want imagine the in-breath as renewing and the out-breath as letting go/releasing.

Breathe into and from your heart for a few breaths.

Begin with your own self.

Repeat the phrases slowly, imagining yourself as safe, happy, healthy and living with ease.

Take breaths between each phrase.

Notice the sensations in your body as you slowly repeat each phrase.

When you start to judge yourself, tighten up, and engage in old patterns of thinking, that’s fine! Acknowledge all that.  Give all that loving kindness, too. This posture of “allowing all that is” creates a lot of spaciousness.

Then move on to each person:

a benefactor (someone who has loved you, supported you.  Even a pet!)
a friend (someone you know well)
a neutral person (like the clerk at the grocery store),
a difficult person (choose someone who mildly triggers you at first!)
all living beings.

Take your time.

If you start to think about what you are having for dinner tonight?  Just return to your breath as an anchor.  If you start to get bored?  Bring your attention back to your heart space.

Acknowledge whatever arises: boredom, excitement, loving feeling, muscles tensing, muscles relaxing, anger, clinging, desire to push away.  Welcome it all with kindness.

At the end, take a few mindful breaths, notice the sensations in your body, bow to your own self for having the courage to do this, and slowly return to your daily life.

Two questions I often get:

Why a neutral person?  We often don’t “see the other.”  This meditation wakes us up to see that all beings want the same things as we do – to feel safe, happy, healthy and living with ease.

Why a difficult person?  In doing this meditation, we learn that love is not contingent upon the actions or attitude of others.  We recognize that any resentment (anger, rage) we hold is causing us suffering.  We recognize that we can send well wishes to others and still decide to have healthy boundaries in our relationships.  We can choose to never see this difficult person again and we can still wish them safety, happiness, health, and living with ease.

This is big-time healing stuff, friends.  Be gentle. Go slow.  Practice often. 

Sometimes it’s helpful to have a guided meditation.  You can find a beautiful version of this Lovingkindness Meditation in my shop.  It guides you through a full lovingkindness meditation – creating space for your soul, body and spirit to breathe…and let your love radiate out into the world.  This is a version that I’ve shared with so many audiences in workshops that I have facilitated…and I also share it with my personal coaching and psychotherapy clients.