The purpose of loving kindness meditation is to enhance compassion towards ourselves and people around us, giving us the experience of oneness by removing fundamental alienation that we all feel, improve our psychological, emotional and physical wellbeing along with an increased desire to provide service to others around us.
Other than the above mentioned benefits, it helps produce all the outcomes that we get from any other type of meditation. These benefits on a larger scale are concentration, sensory clarity and equanimity. These three are core skills which super charge not only our meditation practice but our life as a whole.
I will first explain the technique in a very objective manner so anyone ready can do it and then I will talk a little about the process, how it works to provide the benefits which I have claimed above.
The techniques of loving kindness meditation:
If we see a bit larger picture, two of the techniques work really well for me, and out of these two, the second one is my favorite. It has produced the results very rapidly.
Traditional Technique:
I want you to try this technique right after reading the instructions. Sit with your back straight but do not use too much effort. For this to be kind of effortless, use a cushion. Now bring attention to your breath. Just notice in and out breath 3 times.
Now when the attention is focused, repeat in your mind space the following.
“May I be happy”, “May I be free of suffering”
Make it a part of your daily routine. Do it for 3 to 4 minutes everyday and results will start showing up. After a week or so, expand the prayer / mantra for people around you. Include them in the circle.
This can change the mantra to “My we be free of suffering”.
After you have attentively done it for some time, include everything. All things you can think of.
Please note that try to maintain your attention to mantra as clearly as possible. If any distraction comes in the form of other random thoughts, notice them and then bring your attention to the mantra.
It is very important to notice the state of our mind and body once the session is complete. Just take a minute to see how your body is feeling. Literally what you feel on your face, cheeks, around lips, near heart etc. This is all. It is not a difficult one to do.
Modern technique:
This is so much easier and fun, and the results are so quick that you will be surprised. So here goes.
Sit with your back straight and bring attention to your breath. Notice three in and out breaths. Now close your eyes and think of some time or someone you really love and clearly create the image of the situation or person in your mind space. See the image for a couple of seconds with complete attention.
Now remove attention from the image and bring it towards your body to check for any kind of sensations, feelings & emotions. See how the cheeks feel. Are they warm and do they have any sensation? Scan your body and detect the feeling created by the image. Really observe it, like in your chest etc. Try to locate it and then gently see if it’s expanding or contracting. Let it do whatever it does. You will notice that it will start thinning out at some point and then just disappear.
Now bring attention once again to image space in the mind and recreate the image. Repeat the process 3 to 4 times. This is enough.
Now open your eyes and start noticing how it changes you and your mood. Go in everyday life and see how long the effects last. Also notice how the mood of other people around you changes when you are in that state. You will be amazed I promise.
Watch this awesome video to understand in depth about it by shinzen young.
Impact & benefits of loving kindness meditation:
So now let’s discuss a little about how it works.
The working process of Loving kindness meditation:
Have you noticed that our mind is like a device which when given any subject, produces relevant thoughts. These are called mind states. Example of this would be to think right now about the word “meditation”. Now observe closely and you will see that it produces images of us sitting cross legged or images & feelings of calmness etc. Just keep this in mind for now while I make another point.
Second point to notice is that our mind works on feedback loops. Let’s say that you do something and get bad results, next time you attempt to do it, the mind will produce fearful, failure related thoughts and body will create relevant emotions in response to those thoughts. These feelings will motivate you to stop doing it. This works in the opposite direction too. So these are internal feedback loops.
Now let’s combine the two. Everytime we sit in a loving kindness meditation session, we produce states of mind that are joyful, calming and beautiful. This in itself creates a positive feedback loop. These positive feelings motivate the mind to engage more in such practices and when it does, the body produces more of these feelings.
Secondly, the mind, by its very nature, starts producing more of these states in everyday life more and more.
Benefits of loving kindness meditation:
Improve 3 core skills:
Loving kindness meditation like any other form of practice is based on 3 core skills and it enhances them. These are concentration, sensory clarity and equanimity. You need concentration to create an image in mindspace, you need to clarify this image to really see it, you detect, track and fully feel the emotions this image creates, that’s sensory clarity and you let go of any distractions and come back to your practice. That’s equanimity. You let emotions expand and contract without any push and pull. That’s equanimity.
So it’s very clear that loving kindness meditation improves all 3 core skills and in a very joyous way. It’s really beautiful once you start practicing.
Create a sense of oneness:
If you notice, we all have this fundamental alienation towards the world around us. Our senses tell us that our identity ends where our body ends and after that, there are others. They are separate from us.
Loving kindness meditation, if done on a long term basis, starts taking care of this illusion. We start feeling close to people and eventually, the alienation goes away. Identity expands and everything starts to get included. This can take us all the way to actual experience of oneness.
This aspect also motivates us to be spontaneously helpful towards people around us. It’s so natural that no prior thought or planning is required. It just happens.
Being a happiness transmitter:
If we keep practicing everyday, we become like transmitters of happiness in a very literal way. This is not something poetic. It’s very real and backed by science and human experience.
As an example, just imagine when we come in contact with a very angry person. What kind of feeling and thoughts start occurring in your own mind body system? Everyone gets directly affected by the aura of that person.
Now just imagine the opposite. Your become so joyful and your glass is so full that it starts to overflow. People around you start to feel more relaxed and joyful without understanding the reason. This is like a super power.
Improve wellbeing:
When we are unhappy, we tend to become bitter towards ourselves and others. It’s not that we are bad people, it’s just the quality of unhappiness. We stop taking care of ourselves and the world around us.
With loving kindness practice, we become more and more joyful and this enables us to take better care of ourselves. We start to eat better, take care of our bodies a lot more. This improves our physical wellbeing.
Secondly, loving kindness meditation practice is all about tuning into our feelings. We become really good at detecting whatever we are feeling at any moment. This helps us with allowing the feeling to occur in a very compassionate space rather than suppressing them. This dramatically improves our psychological wellbeing.
I invite you to notice that when you have something in plenty, what do you do with it? It’s human nature to share. Same is the case with wellbeing. When we are well, we start sharing by taking care of people around us. We can feel their joy and pain. We provide them with a loving, compassionate space so they can express their feelings, release them and feel better.
Conclusion:
Loving kindness meditation can improve the quality of our lives to a great extent. If we see the immediate changes that happen in the personality, we observe that it directly starts cultivating a new, awesome self while replacing the old one and in the long run can lead directly to enlightenment. It will with time remove the gap between inside and outside by removing the alienation that we discussed above. You will come to know that you are everyone and everything by direct realization if you keep going with the practice.
If you have any questions, please send me an email or comment and I will answer them. I wish you best of luck and I wish you to be free of suffering.
