Jay Michaelson (4:38)
This guided meditation is a variation on the classic meditation practice of loving kindness. If you've done that practice before, you know that it involves bringing someone to mind and repeating a phrase as if you're speaking to them. A phrase like may you be happy, may you be healthy, and so on. This is a great practice and I recommend it. But sometimes I like to take away the verbal element. The words can sometimes bring me into a story of what would make this person happy or compassion for when they're feeling unhappy or unwell. And it can be a little heady. Sometimes I just like the quiet. So I also like this version of loving kindness. Practice with more of a somatic element and fewer words taught by my teacher's teacher, Venerable Ayakima, who was a German born nun in a Sri Lankan Buddhist lineage. She taught this to my teacher, Lee Brazington, and he taught it to me. So first, let's allow your eyes to close and we'll take a moment just to ground in the body, feeling the body in stillness. If you're seated, maybe you're feeling the weight of the body on the chair. And in that stillness, we notice the feelings of the breath coming and going. Here let's direct our attention to the chest in particular, because for this practice, while we won't be focusing on the breath, we will be doing a kind of visualization using the heart center of the body, not necessarily the physical organ of the heart, but we could say the center of our embodied being. So we're resting the attention on the center of the body. The practice is to imagine that in your heart there is a golden, warm glow of light. This light doesn't take any effort to cultivate. It's already there. And best of all, it has no limit. Of course, this is an imaginative exercise. If thoughts come up about visualizing a warm glow of light, I encourage you to just let those go and see if you can have the experience. As the Beatles once told us, the love you take is equal to the love you make. We cultivate this feeling of loving kindness in the form of this warm, nourishing light. And then it's actually possible to feel it. It's the ultimate magic trick, something out of nothing. It's. And don't worry, you can fake it at first. So let's come back to the heart center and this golden, warm glow of light. Now let's imagine this light filling your whole body head to toe with warmth and light and a feeling of contentment. Again, you can fake it till you make it. This light, if you imagine it can fill and surround you with warmth and it can grow. Imagine someone for whom it's easy for you to feel loving kindness. That could be a family member or a friend or a pet. Maybe not someone with whom you have a complicated relationship, but someone for whom it's just easy to feel love. Or meta the Pali and Sanskrit word for loving kindness. Just imagining this person in your presence and now enlarging this golden field of light to include them as well. There's plenty of this light. It doesn't diminish as you do this. In fact, it increases. The more you spread it, the stronger it gets. And this warmth, this warm Light that you're radiating is the light of care and compassion, of well being and contentment. And you can imagine it emanating from your heart to this person or being with you. So again, we're seated and still we imagine that in the heart is this warm golden light. And it's filling your body and spreading out to this person with you. Surround them with this free gift of well being, of loving kindness. You can even smile if you like. No one's watching now. There's plenty of warm light to go around. So you can imagine one or two or three other people or beings joining in this abundant field of warm light. People in your life for whom you can easily extend this warm light of loving kindness. For example, a sibling or a spouse or a friend, whoever comes to mind. It's not a contest. The circle of people grows as you bring more people into it. And yet the light doesn't dilute or get thinner. It just expands. There's just more of it. We can next expand this warm light of loving kindness to people who have been teachers or benefactors in your life. Maybe a mentor or a parent or someone who's helped you in your work life or your personal life. It could be a therapist. All of them are welcome because there's plenty of light around. So with gratitude, we imagine that warm light extending to them as well, including them in this field. We can recenter back on the source of light in the heart center and then expand it outward. And because there's no limit to the amount of warm light that you can radiate out, we can include people for whom we don't have strong feelings, but who we encounter in our day to day lives. Sometimes this is called the neutral person, someone who we see at a store, or a colleague or an acquaintance. You might not feel the same intensity of loving kindness for this person as for the first ones, but that's part of the point. We want to extend this feeling of well wishing to these neutral people as well. And it's the same loving kindness, the same sense of well being and contentment. And it's experienced as the same warm light coming from the heart center now, including people close to us, our benefactors, and those in our lives to whom we may feel neutrally. And in your heart. This warm light continues to glow, perhaps even more as you do this practice. And it has such a warm glow that it can include even people with whom we have difficult relationships. Let's not jump to the hardest ones, or the public figures with whom we disagree. The most just people with whom we have a little friction in our lives. All we're doing is extending this warm light, visualizing the light, including them as well. The light is not about judgment or forgiveness. We're not saying that everything is okay or that every action is okay. It's not an evaluation. We're just extending loving kindness in the form of this warm light, even to people in our lives with whom we have difficult relationships. Ultimately, we want them to be happy and safe as well. Even if we have boundaries that protect us, we can include them in this warm light because there's no limit to the light. And the more we tend it, the greater it grows. It's a light of loving kindness and well wishing and compassion, of wishing that there not be suffering. You can imagine this light radiating out to people who are around you, Whether it's the town or village or city or block or building where you find yourself right now. You can imagine the expansion of the boundaries of this field of light. It can feel almost physical that there's this field of light emanating from you that radiates out, including all of the people and beings whom we've mentioned so far and everyone around you. And finally, expanding this circle in our imagination to include a wider area. Just noticing the feeling of expansion, we turn our attention to that. To the expanding of the boundaries of this field of loving kindness and compassion. Expanding. Expanding to the point where it becomes a general wish of loving kindness for all beings. People we will never meet, animals we may never see. To the point where we are no longer at the center, since we're not really the ones generating this love and kindness. This is the field in which we exist in our experience. It's centered in our heart center, but in fact, it's widely available. We can close this meditation by imagining that we in our bodies, you in your body right now, are within that field of light. Just as you create it, so you receive it and so you float in. Contains. You're welcome to stay here for a while. And when you're ready, you can open your eyes. This is the practice of loving kindness.
