Metta; Loving Kindness with Noah Levine

August 31, 2020 Often our core meditation practice here tends to be a mindfulness based present time awareness, development of wisdom is 80 or 90% of the meditation instructions that I give.

But I do believe – and practice in my own life – a lot of loving kindness and forgiveness and compassion (we did forgiveness a couple weeks ago). We call these the heart practices. I believe these are perhaps equally as important.

My sense is that, and I get this sense from looking at the eightfold path, when the Buddha says, “here's the path to awakening”, he doesn't teach lovingkindness he teaches mindfulness. The meditation instructions that he gives are the four foundations of mindfulness and then the concentration practice of entering jhana: gathering the attention so deeply and precisely and then opening to mindfulness in order to see clearly.

And, it's part of mindfulness to develop compassion. We bring mindfulness; present time awareness to our pain, and then we develop more tolerance for pain and more friendliness and more compassion towards pain.