Loving Kindness

PART TWO: Boot Camp (cont’d). Read Chapter 1 here.

Loving-kindness is the experience of having a friendly and loving relationship toward ourselves as well as others. The experience of loving-kindness toward ourselves is perhaps as simple as bringing a friendly attitude to our minds and bodies. Typically, we tend to judge ourselves and be quite critical and harsh in our self-assessments, identifying with the negative thoughts and feelings that arise in our minds. Being loving and kind isn’t our normal habit, so training the heart-mind to be kind is another task of the inner rebellion, and another tool of the outer revolution. Mindfulness brings the mind’s negative habits into awareness.

Loving-kindness meditation is a way of creating new, more positive, habits

As we see how much difficulty we create for ourselves and begin to respond with compassion, we come to understand that ultimately we want nothing more than to be free from the causes of suffering and confusion. As we gain insight into the impersonal nature of the thinking mind and feeling body, we come to understand that all beings would like this same freedom—an unfetteredness that we might call happiness.

Loving-kindness is the heart-mind’s response of wishing that freedom and happiness for ourselves and all others. The process begins with a simple practice of setting intentions— that is, by wishing that we might be happy and free from harm. Rather than asking for happiness and peace from an external source of spiritual power, we uncover the heart’s innate loving and kind tendencies. Through this practice of training the heart-mind to respond with love, and with the understanding that all beings are ultimately the same,  we begin spreading love out and wishing happiness for all others. Traditionally this is done by having categories of people toward whom we send loving-kindness in our meditations. We begin with our self, then move to sending love to the people who have been kind and beneficent to us. Then we expand to people we’re neutral toward and friends and family about whom we have mixed feelings. Finally, we include the difficult people in our lives, and even our enemies, before expanding the field of loving intentions out to all beings every- where—all of the countless beings we don’t know or care about.

The outcome of long-term loving-kindness meditation is the experience of friendliness toward all beings.

Noah Levine Dharma Talk: Loving-Kindness

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