Category: Loving-Kindness
Jack Kornfield’s Instructions for Metta Meditation
Jack Kornfield on beginning the time-honored, heart-opening practice of metta (loving-kindness) meditation.
A Practice to Work Through Difficult Thoughts
Lisa Ernst shares a practice to offer kindness to your difficult thoughts.
A Practice to Meet Bad Habits with Loving-Kindness
Sylvia Boorstein unpacks the foundational Buddhist teaching “Recognize unwholesome states in the mind and replace them with wholesome states.”
A Loving-Kindness Meditation to Heal Your Inner Child
Peggy Rowe Ward and Larry Ward on how to give the wounded child inside you the love and compassion they deserve.
Three Practices That Healed My Heart After A Traumatic Injury
When a car drove over her foot, Carla Beharry felt like her anger would never end. She soon learned that the only way out of suffering is through it.
Ajahn Brahm’s Instructions for Loving-Kindness Meditation
Buddhist monk Ajahn Brahm shares his personal approach to loving-kindness meditation, also known as metta.
How Meditation Transforms Criticism into Compassion
Being our own best friend is a challenging feat. Kate Johnson explains how meditation can help us get to know our inner critics and prevent them from hindering our path to liberation.
Loving-Kindness: May All Beings Be Happy
Melvin Escobar teaches metta, a concentration practice to cultivate unconditional goodwill for all. In precarious times like these, it’s a way to listen to our hearts.
How to Practice Metta for a Troubled Time
Mushim Patricia Ikeda teaches us how to generate loving-kindness and good will as an antidote to hatred and fear.
Loving-Kindness Meditation for All Beings & All Bodies
Metta meditation is healing and heart-opening. Arisika Razak leads us through the practice.
The Four Highest Emotions
Ayya Khema on cultivating loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.
The Power of Tonglen
On the inbreath, says Judy Lief, take in what is bad, freeing others from it. On the outbreath, offer what is good.
A Practice for Developing Kindness Toward Yourself
Valerie Mason-John shares a meditation for cultivating a positive relationship with yourself, and, by extension, the world.
The Practice of Love
For many of us, opening our hearts to ourselves may be the hardest part of the path. Here, the late John Welwood shares how and why meditation helped him do it — unconditionally.
How to Practice Tonglen Meditation
Pema Chödrön teaches us Tonglen, “sending and taking,” an ancient Buddhist practice to awaken compassion.
Sending & Taking: A Guide to Tonglen Meditation
Tonglen, or “sending and taking,” is a meditation practice to kindle sympathy. Breathing in, we take in the pain of others and send them relief while breathing out.
May You Be Safe
As Barbara Gates struggles to protect her adventurous dog Tony from danger, she contemplates the deep aspiration at the heart of loving-kindness practice.
Say Yes to an Open Heart
Diana Winston reflects on the intertwining of mindfulness and compassion, as practiced with an open heart.
‘Tis the Season of Compassion
Author and teacher Janice Lynne Lundy explains how a simple question helps her to keep her heart open – to others, and to herself.