Zen priest Liên Shutt teaches a short meditation to foster compassion for beings in search of refuge. Many people think Buddhism is about getting rid of desire. Really, our main focus is on promoting non-harming in the world. We look at how we can alleviate suffering. Given the social climate of the world today, people often ask, “How do I know when to meditate and when [...]
Start With What’s Easy to Love
Buddhist monk Ajahn Brahm shares his personal approach to loving-kindness meditation, also known as metta. Stage One A Warm Fire in Your Heart Metta can accurately be compared with a warm and radiant fire burning in your heart. You cannot expect to light the fire of loving-kindness by starting with a difficult object, no more than you can expect to light a campfire by [...]
The Four Highest Emotions
Ayya Khema on cultivating loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity — "the only emotions worth having." When we think of love, we have ideas that are purely personal and, on the whole, quite fanciful. They are based in general on our desire to be loved, from which we expect fulfillment. In reality love fulfills only the one who loves. If we understand [...]
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. Illustrations by Tomi Um. Metta meditation is not a magical spell you can cast on the population of the U.S. in order to produce a state of utopian bliss. It is not a cure-all for oppression and the unequal distribution of power and privilege. Metta meditation [...]
Inner Cities
With noisy neighbors and the homeless camped on street corners, city life offers many opportunities to practice kindness. Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche on how urban living can open our hearts. Spiritual practitioners often aspire to live alone in the mountains among wildlife, yet a city can be an equally or an even more supportive environment for practice. Unlike the [...]
Toward a Worldwide Culture of Love
The practice of love, says bell hooks, is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination. She traces her thirty-year meditation on love, power, and Buddhism, and concludes it is only love that transforms our personal relationships and heals the wounds of oppression. At a conference on women and Buddhism that took place in spring last year, I was upset because [...]
Open Your Heart Further
Pema Khandro Rinpoche on cultivating the boundless love of a bodhisattva. Don’t give up on love. When love is hard or painful, open your heart even further. That’s the advice given by the great nineteenth-century Buddhist master Patrul Rinpoche. He tells the story of a golden bee who lived happily with his lover in a lotus garden. From the moment these two bees met, [...]
The Five Buddha Families
Of the many methods for understanding and working with the energies that pervade our existence, one of the most profound is the “five buddha families." “I always seem to be fending him off,” Joan blurts out. She’s hosting a dinner party while her husband out of town and she’s aware of how little affection she shows him, while he is affectionate to a fault. Two of her guests, [...]
A Practice for Developing Kindness Toward Yourself
Valerie Mason-John, author of Detox Your Heart: Meditations for Emotional Healing, shares a meditation for cultivating a positive relationship with yourself, and, by extension, the world. When we take positive action and respond creatively to our anger, we are taking good care of ourselves. Taking care of our hearts, minds, and bodies is taking positive action. Learning to [...]
How to Practice Metta with Children
You’re never too young to practice loving-kindness. Gail Silver on how to teach metta to your kids. When I returned home after attending my first silent retreat, I was overflowing with loving-kindness and found myself spontaneously reciting certain phrases of the metta prayer aloud: May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be strong. May you live with ease. “Did you [...]
