A warm thank you to those of you who joined us for the second Journey You Own Meditation Gathering. If you missed it this time, we hope to see you in the future. Below we have included some highlights of the practice.
This session’s practice: Loving-Kindness Meditation
Our first session set the groundwork for exploring different meditation techniques monthly through a shamatha practice. For this month’s session, we chose a metta or loving-kindness practice.
Loving-kindness meditations cultivate generosity and altruistic love towards ourselves and others by using a series of phrases as an anchor. We offer these phrases to ourselves, a neutral being, a challenging being, and the larger community or all beings. Over time, this practice leads to self-healing, wholeness, and kind feelings towards others.
Support for Continuing Practice
We have recorded a metta practice introduction that can be heard below (33:50) for anyone to practice.
The practice involves repeating a series of phrases to the loved one, a neutral being, a challenging being, and oneself (there are variations on this). Phrases you may choose include:
May you be happy
May you live a life of ease
May you be safe and secure
May your heart know peace
May you always have enough
May you be healthy in mind and body
May you be kind to yourself and others
The phrases that were chosen for this session were the simplest of these forms and ones that have been used for centuries, but consider choosing three to four phrases that resonate with you. Keep the phrases short so you can remember them and limit them to a manageable number. The practice is to repeat the phrases and return to them as thoughts arise.
Here is an article which presents the metta technique.
This article discusses some common struggles with traditional metta meditation that I touched on in our session, and offers alternative views and approaches which may help a person move past these obstacles.
This scientific paper supports loving-kindness meditation as a practice that produces an increase in positive emotions along with other benefits, increased mindfulness, purpose in life, social support, and decreased illness symptoms.
About JYO Meditation Gathering
The Journey You Own Meditation Gathering is a free sitting meditation session to create a shared, supportive space to explore grounding practices. This one-hour session happens every last Thursday of the month, held online via Zoom.
Free registration can be found here.
We look forward to sitting with many of you next month in the community.
Featured Image by Rob Yelland.