Mindful Mondays With Ashley Bentley: Where Love Begins | Loving Kindness Meditation & Coming Home to Yourself

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Neurodivergent Experience

Episode: Mindful Mondays With Ashley Bentley: Where Love Begins | Loving Kindness Meditation & Coming Home to Yourself
Date: December 1, 2025
Host: Ashley Bentley (Mindful Mondays), with mentions of Jordan James and Simon Scott

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Episode Overview

This special Mindful Monday episode, hosted by Ashley Bentley, centers on the transformative practice of Loving Kindness Meditation (Metta). Ashley offers a deeply personal narrative—how Metta found her during a period of health and emotional crisis—and introduces listeners to its roots, neuroscience, and steps. She guides a full Loving Kindness meditation, inviting particularly neurodivergent listeners to cultivate a sense of warmth, safety, and belonging within themselves. This episode is both an education in heartful meditation and an experiential, guided practice.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ashley’s Personal Story & Why Metta Matters

• Desperation as a Starting Point (03:34):
  Ashley shares how her meditation practice began not from a place of insight but from “desperation”—her health was failing, and she was undiagnosed regarding her neurodivergent conditions.
• Meditation’s False Start (05:38):
  Breath-focused meditations overwhelmed her dysregulated nervous system; silent sitting didn’t help immediately, instead shifting to the background of her life.
• The Pivotal December (07:18):
  In December 2020, just after quitting a demanding corporate job due to illness, Ashley found herself intentionally alone and open to new things. She discovered an online mindfulness group running daily meditations, which shifted her isolation into openness:
  “Openness, the kind that only comes when everything familiar has fallen away.” (09:44)
• First Encounter with Loving Kindness (Metta) (11:22):
  Ashley admits skepticism: “Loving kindness, okay, how powerful could that really be?”—but it proved deeply transformative.

2. What Is Loving Kindness Meditation?

• The Essence (12:12):
  Not romantic or performative but “the warm, steady, unconditional love that sits quietly in the very center of your chest.”
• A Universal Resource (13:05):
  Love is internally available:
  “You can access it simply by turning towards it, by remembering its texture, by holding it in awareness, by breathing it into your heart.”
• Sending Love to Difficult People (16:14):
  Ashley offers practical trauma-sensitive advice:
  “Loving kindness is not exposure therapy. It’s not ripping the band aid off. It’s not forcing forgiveness. Choose someone mildly difficult if you’re just beginning…”

3. Healing & Forgiveness through Metta

• Softening and Boundaries (18:16):
  She introduces visualizing a difficult person as a newborn, to “soften without betraying my own boundaries.”
• Reframing Forgiveness (18:36):
  “Forgiveness didn’t feel like surrendering power. It felt like reclaiming it.”

4. Universality & Neurodivergence

• Cross-Cultural Appeal (19:20):
  Ashley notes “tears” are common with Metta—“something ancient inside us recognizes what it’s been starving for.”
• A Shared Human Need (19:46):
  “Beneath all of our armor, we are wired for love. And when that love is awakened, the whole system reorganizes itself.”

5. The Science of Loving Kindness

• Biological Effects (20:03):
  Metta releases oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins, shifting the nervous system “from protection to connection.”
• Heart Coherence (22:37):
  • Heart’s rhythm synchronizes with breath/emotions/thoughts during this practice.
  • “The heart has its own little brain of 40,000 neurons and sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.”
  • “The heart isn’t just a pump. It’s an intelligent, communicative organ deeply involved in emotional healing.”

6. Roots in Buddhist Tradition

• Metta as the First Brahma Vihara (27:11):
  Metta—Loving Kindness—is the foundational virtue, preceding compassion, joy, and equanimity.

7. Guided Loving Kindness Meditation

(Begins around 29:30)

• Setup: Find a comfortable position, allow yourself to relax and bring awareness to your heart space.
• Steps:
  1. Repeat phrases for yourself:
     “May I be happy. May I be well. May I be safe and protected. May my heart and mind awaken and be free.”
  2. Send the same wishes to:
     • Someone easy to love
     • Someone neutral (the “stranger” or acquaintance)
     • Someone mildly difficult (trauma-safe approach)
     • All beings everywhere
  • Visualizations involve golden, sunset-hued light radiating from the chest/heart.
  • Listeners are reminded to adjust and use alternate phrasings if desired, and that form matters less than sincerity.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On discovering Metta’s power:
  “I had no idea I was about to encounter one of the most transformative practices of my life.” ([11:27])
• On the universal human longing:
  “Something ancient inside us recognizes what it’s been starving for.” ([19:24])
• On forgiveness and self-liberation:
  “Forgiveness didn’t feel like surrendering power. It felt like reclaiming it.” ([18:36])
• On the physiological shift:
  “When loving kindness is active, your heart sends signals to the brain saying, you’re safe, you can soften.” ([24:04])
• On how to approach difficult people in practice:
  “If you have trauma, please do not jump straight to the most painful person in your life.” ([16:17])
• Closing blessing:
  “May you move gently, may you meet yourself with kindness, and may the love you cultivated today continue to ripple quietly through the rest of your week.” ([36:18])

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Guided Meditation Structure (Timestamps)

• Preparation & Explanation [29:30]
• Doing Metta for Self [32:11]
• For Someone Easy to Love [33:37]
• For Someone Neutral [34:47]
• For Someone Difficult (Mild) [35:57]
• For All Beings [36:33]
• Closing Reflections & Invitation for Continued Practice [36:57]

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Tone & Language

The episode is gentle, nurturing, and deliberately paced—inviting permission, softness, and self-acceptance. Ashley’s tone is warm, validating, and practical, especially attuned to the extra challenges and hopes of neurodivergent listeners.

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Takeaways for Listeners

• Loving Kindness is both ancient and evidence-based: It’s rooted in Buddhist tradition and validated by neuroscience.
• You don’t have to force forgiveness or leap into discomfort. Metta can be trauma-sensitive and adaptive.
• This practice is for everyone, regardless of neurotype, and may be especially soothing for neurodivergent nervous systems.
• Listeners are encouraged to revisit the guided meditation regularly (Ashley recommends nightly practice, as she did during her most difficult winter).
• For further support, listeners can find additional guided meditations by Ashley on Insight Timer.

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Next Episode Preview

Next week’s Mindful Monday will focus on coping with loneliness and overwhelm during December—a common struggle for neurodivergent people.

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End of Summary

Transcript

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Welcome, dear friends, to Mindful Mondays. I'm your host, Ashley Bentley, and this is your weekly moment of grounding, meaning and gentle reconnection right here on the neurodivergent Experience podcast. And this week marks the beginning of December and this episode is all about something very special I've really been looking forward to sharing with you because from the moment I knew I was creating this podcast, I knew that one day there would be an episode dedicated entirely to Loving Kindness meditation, also known as Metta. And I knew I wanted to share my personal story with it. Because loving kindness didn't just teach me how to meditate, it opened a doorway in me that ended up changing everything. It was the practice that first showed me that meditation is not simply a technique, but a relationship. A deeply spiritual, deeply healing relationship. So today I want to tell you the story of how I found this practice. Or more like, how it found me and why. I believe loving kindness holds the power to shift the nervous system, soften old wounds, and reconnect us with the deepest truth of of who we are so if we go back a whole decade, to the very beginning of my meditation journey, it didn't begin with anything profound. It began with desperation. My health was beginning to fail. And because I didn't yet know about autism or Ellis Danlos or fibromyalgia or the whole constellation of conditions and behaviors that were shaping my life, I thought meditation might help. And as many people do, I started with just a simple 15 minutes a day, a silent meditation where my goal was to just focus on the space between my thoughts. Back then, I wasn't able to focus on my breath as a meditation technique, as so many people do, because my system was so dysregulated that breath awareness actually increased my anxiety. And if this resonates with you, you are not alone. And we will cover techniques on how to overcome this in a future episode. So I sat there day after day, trying to help myself in a new way. And for months, nothing really changed. Not because I was doing anything wrong, but because I now understand I was only beginning to scratch the surface of a much deeper journey that my nervous system wasn't ready for yet. Meditation didn't disappear from my life entirely after that, but it did drift into the background. Became more an occasional thing and not a transformative one. And then we fast forward to December of 2020, and this was one of the hardest and heaviest and most disorienting chapters of my life. And it's interesting, Jordan and Simon on the neurodivergent Experience podcast were just last week talking about COVID lockdowns and how that affected them. And here on the Isle of Man, we didn't experience many local COVID lockdowns, but our borders were closed and so travel on and off the island was not an option. Not that I could have traveled anyway due to my poor health. And because of my failing health, I had just resigned from a high pressure corporate job in the finance sector. A position I had worked unbelievably hard to obtain, but at a cost to my health. Emotionally, psychologically, physically, I was absolutely spent. And to heal, I had to strip my life down to the very basics that meant no social life, no partner thousands of miles from my family. And I kept one thing secret, that I would be spending Christmas Day alone. And it wasn't a self pitying aloneness. I actually love my own company. It was intentional. It was necessary, a deliberate step toward healing without the noise, expectations, or cheerfulness that I simply couldn't inhabit at that time. And I share this because it created something very unexpected. Openness, the kind of openness that only comes when everything familiar has fallen away. It was during this time that I found a social media group all about mindfulness. And it quickly became an online oasis, a rare place of genuine meaning in a crowded, noisy online world. And the man who ran the group, an experienced Buddhist practitioner, decided he would guide a live meditation every night for the entire month of December. And I thought, why not? I had nowhere to be. I had nowhere I needed to go, and healing had become my sole job. So I committed fully, wholeheartedly to meditating every single night with him and a number of other online souls from around the world, all of us meditating at the same time. And some nights were 10 minutes long and some were half an hour. Some were longer. And then about a week in, he announced that he would devote an entire week to a practice called Metta Loving Kindness Meditation. And he remarked on what a powerful meditation it was. And I remember laughing softly to myself at the time when I heard that. Loving kindness, okay, how powerful could that really be? I had no idea I was about to encounter one of the most transformative practices of my life. So the heart of this meditation is simple love. Not romantic love or performative love or conditional love, but the warm, steady, unconditional love that sits quietly in the very center of your chest. The love that lives beneath the noise of your life. Many people think that love requires another person, but this meditation shows you something extraordinary. The feeling of love is available to you at any time. You can access it simply by turning towards it, by remembering its texture, by holding it in awareness, by breathing it into your heart. We carry a hidden treasure chest full of love inside us, and yet so many of us walk around starving for it. So this is the first miracle of this practice. It shows you that you already hold the key to this treasure chest in your chest. And once that warmth of love is alive in your chest, the meditation takes you on a journey. Now, I won't give the full description of what happens, just in case you're new to this. I'd love for you to experience it as I did, without knowing what to expect. But in this journey, you imagine sending love to various different people. And eventually, only when you're ready, you send love to someone difficult, someone whose presence makes it difficult to feel love for. And I want to pause here because this is important. If you have trauma, please do not jump straight to the most painful person in your life. Loving kindness is not exposure therapy. It is not ripping the band aid off. It's not forcing forgiveness. Choose someone mildly difficult if you're just beginning this process, someone who feels safe enough to hold in your mind without overwhelming you. And over time, as I worked with this practice, I came up with a technique to help picture difficult people to send love to. If I found it too difficult to picture a particular person, I began imagining that difficult person as a newborn infant, before life shaped them, before pain hardened them, before protective patterns formed. Seeing them that way allowed something in me to soften without betraying my own boundaries. The moment I could send love to difficult people, I felt something release in me, something unclench, something free itself. It was one of the first moments in my adult life where forgiveness didn't feel like surrendering power. It felt like reclaiming it. And my experience was not an isolated one. Since those early days, I have guided loving kindness meditation many times. In workshops and group circles, online sessions, private gatherings. And almost every single time, there are tears. Not because the meditation is sad, but because something ancient inside us recognizes what it's been starving for. And it happens across cultures, ages, identities, neurotypes, which tells us something so important, this practice touches something universal. It's not just my story of healing, and it's not just your story of healing. It is one of the deepest human experiences we share, that beneath all of our armor, we are wired for love. And when that love is awakened, the whole system reorganizes itself. So loving kindness isn't just spiritually meaningful, it's biologically profound. When you generate feelings of love, warmth, and compassion, your body releases the four happiness chemicals of oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins. And this shifts your nervous system from protection to connection, from fight or flight, into the most nourishing healing states you can access. And research shows that loving kindness increases resilience. It reduces stress, it calms the amygdala, it improves vagal tone and enhances feelings of belonging. So it's not just a meditation, it is a physiological intervention. And one of the most fascinating pieces of science here is called heart coherence. A state where your heartbeat becomes rhythmic and harmonious, syncing with your breath, emotions, and thoughts. In heart coherence, vagal tone increases, stress hormones drop, and the prefrontal cortex lights up. Intuition and emotional regulation improve. And what reliably creates heart coherence? The felt experience of love. And not just thinking about love, but feeling it. And when loving kindness is active, your heart sends signals to the brain saying, you're safe, you can soften. And the Heart Math Institute has shown that the heart has its own little brain of 40,000 neurons and sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. And this coherence improves clarity, stability and well being. So the heart isn't just a pump. It's an intelligent, communicative organ deeply involved in emotional healing. So when we practice loving kindness, we're not just imagining something pleasant. We are activating a real, measurable biological state that affects how we think, feel and behave. This is why metta feels so powerful. It engages the body, mind, heart and spirit all at once, aligning them into coherence. So loving kindness meditation is over 2,500 years old, and it comes from the Buddhist tradition. And Metta is one of the four Brahma vihras, or the four divine abodes. These are the qualities of the heart that Buddhism teaches as the highest expressions of human potential. Metta is the first one, which is loving kindness, followed by karuna, which is compassion. Then you have mudita, sympathetic joy, and finally upika, equanimity. And metta is always taught first because it softens the heart, stabilizes the mind, and opens the nervous system to the deepest forms of healing. It is the foundation upon which all of the others rest. And this practice changed me. It softened how I relate to myself and to others. It shifted the tone of my thoughts and reshaped how my nervous system moves through the world. And as we begin this first day and this first week of December, I wanted to share the practice that carried me through one of the hardest winters of my life, and the one that taught me that love isn't something we wait for, it's something we cultivate and become. Love is an abstract. It's a regulation tool, a healing tool. And the treasure chest has been inside you all along. And so now, my friends, after exploring the science, the history and the heart of this practice, I'd love to invite you into it. And if this is your first time, remember there's no right way to feel and nothing you need to achieve. This practice meets you exactly where you are as we begin. Be gentle with yourself. And when I invite you to send love to a difficult person, choose someone only mildly difficult, someone safe enough to imagine. Your nervous system deserves that care. You can use the newborn infant imagery if it helps or skip it completely. This practice is yours. Loving kindness isn't about forcing forgiveness. It's about giving yourself the gift of inner freedom. So let's begin. If you are driving or operating heavy machinery, please ensure to pause the recording until you can safely come back into stillness and just Take a moment to get completely comfortable, letting your body settle into whatever posture feels most supportive for you right now. Let your shoulders drop, let your jaw soften, and allow a gentle breath to move in and out as you arrive fully into this moment. Whenever you're ready, feel free to gently close your eyes. And as you are now noticing the softened relaxation in your body, mind and spirit, I'm going to take you on a journey of love and bringing your awareness now to the center of your chest, your heart space. Those of you who practice yoga will know this as the heart chakra. The heart space is directly in the center of your chest. And I want you to bring your awareness to this space, the very center of your chest. This is considered a very sacred place, your heart space. You will see the heart space glowing in many different religious paintings and sculptures from all types of religions all around the world. And as you are breathing lightly in and out of your nose, or however is most comfortable to you, I want you to now just imagine, only imagine now that you are actually breathing in and out of your heart space, your heart center. Good. That's right. It's a very sacred space. Your own heart. So imagine breathing directly in and out of your heart space, drawing the air in and out of your heart center. And now imagine a golden light entering, breathing in warm, calming, soothing golden light. You can think of the beautiful golden light which happens at sunset. That magical golden light streaming into your heart center, warming it up, opening you up emotionally. When we place our attention here, we are in direct connection with our emotional center. So you might start feeling some emotions here as we do this. Just lean into those feelings and let them continue to warm your heart. And then, as if speaking from our heart center, we say phrases. I will say them aloud and you will say them silently inside, speaking directly from your heart space. The first phrase is may I be happy. Speaking it silently from inside, as if you are saying it from your heart center. And really let that feeling get drawn into your heart space. May I be happy. Really let those words resonate a wish for your own happiness. May I be well, May I be safe and protected. May my heart and mind awaken and be free. May I be happy. May I be well. May I. May I be safe and protected. May my heart and mind awaken and be free. And just continue repeating these phrases to yourself. And remember, it's not really the phrasing that's important, but rather it is the intent and the sincerity of love towards oneself that matters. So whatever phrasing arouses that Feeling of self love is fine to use. I'm going to go quiet for a moment to allow you to continue these phrases and when the mind wanders, just allow your awareness to drop back down into the heart center and continue on. Now I want you to bring to mind someone in your life who is easy to love, a pure love. Someone who when you bring them to mind, your heart instantly lights up and radiates and I want you to imagine them sitting in front of you now. Bring their presence here. And imagine looking into their eyes and we're going to speak these phrases to them from our heart center silently inside, beaming this golden light that you've cultivated, feeling this love. May you be happy, may you be well, may you be safe and protected. May your heart and mind awaken and be free and really feel that love connecting with them, wishing them all of these beautiful blessings. May you be happy, may you be well, may you be safe and protected. May your heart and mind awaken and be free. I'm going to be silent again for a few moments while you continue. And now I'd like you to bring to mind someone that you feel neither love for nor bad feeling towards. Someone you may notice regularly passing on walks or maybe someone who works at one of your local shops, just someone you don't really know or have any feelings either way about. And I want you to sit them in front of you now. Bring their presence here. And as you are feeling this love radiating from your heart center, this golden light that you have been cultivating is beaming out of your heart space. I want you to imagine looking that person in their eyes and you're going to send this beaming golden love to them now looking into their eyes, speaking silently from your heart space. May you be happy, may you be well, may you be safe and protected. May your heart and mind awaken and be free. May you be happy, may you be well, may you be safe and protected. May your heart and mind awaken and be free. I'm going to leave you again for a few moments to continue speaking these words to this person in front of you with this golden light beaming from your heart space, giving this love yet again. And now I want you to bring to mind someone in your life who is difficult to send love to and only choose someone who you feel safe picturing in your mind's eye. It doesn't have to be the most difficult person in your life and I want you to imagine them sitting in front of you now. Bring their presence here and as you are feeling this love radiating from Your heart center. This golden light that you have been cultivating is beaming out of your heart space. I want you to imagine looking that person in their eyes and you're going to send this beaming golden love to them now, looking into their eyes, speaking silently from your heart space. May you be happy, may you be well. May you be safe and protected. May your heart and mind awaken and be free. May you be happy, may you be well, May you be safe and protected. May your heart and mind awaken and be free. I'll leave you for a few moments to continue speaking these words to this person in front of you. Now, with this golden light beaming from your heart space, giving this love yet again. And finally, we are going to use this powerful golden love that we've been cultivating out to the entirety of humanity. By now, your heart space should be feeling very warm and overflowing with golden warmth and love beaming out of your heart space. We now send this love to all beings, speaking silently from our heart space. May all beings be happy, May all beings be well. May all beings be safe and protected. May all beings, hearts and minds awaken and be free. Really feeling that love for all of humanity, the sacred, powerful love that you've cultivated. May all beings be happy, may all beings be well. May all beings be safe and protected. May all beings hearts and minds awaken and be free. And now that we've had this special time to cultivate love and open our heart center, sending love to ourselves, to a loved one, to someone we know very little, and someone who makes it difficult. And then to all of humanity. I trust that you are feeling a warmth within yourself. Just take a moment to notice how you feel. Perhaps something softened, perhaps something opened, and perhaps something shifted. Maybe even as little as 2%. What matters is that you showed up and you chose to turn toward love. You practice something profoundly brave. Being gentle with yourself. And just like I committed to loving kindness every night back in December of 2020, you might enjoy doing the same. Imagine what might shift for you if you practice this meditation every evening this month. Imagine the softness that could enter your life. The forgiveness, the ease, the surprising moments of tenderness that sneak up on you when you least expect it. So feel free to listen to this episode as many times as you need. Let it become a companion in the quiet and the overwhelm and the places where you're learning to open your heart again. And there's so much more waiting for you. Over on my Insight Timer channel, you'll find a shorter loving kindness meditation. If you want a quick dose of softness during the day, and there's a much deeper and longer Loving Kindness practice woven together with a yoga nidra if you're ready to sink fully into rest, regulation and healing. And there are also other courses and meditations and bedtime stories, all created to support your beautiful neurodivergent nervous system with gentleness, science and soul. So as we move forward into the rest of December, I want to share something exciting. We are going to return to this practice again, but in a very special way. Later this month, on the final Monday of December, I'll be guiding a unique, reimagined version of Loving Kindness that I created several years ago, dedicated entirely to you. But before that, next week's episode will focus on something so many neurodivergent people feel at this time of year. Whether you're surrounded by people or or spending these weeks more quietly the ache of loneliness, the overwhelm of rushing, and the emotional weight December often brings. So next week we'll explore how to find safety, grounding and softness in a season that can feel like too much in all sorts of directions. Until then, may you move gently, may you meet yourself with kindness, and may the love you cultivated today continue to ripple quietly through the rest of your week. Thank you for practicing with me, and remember, we're all just walking each other home.

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