An Overview of Loving-kindness Meditation
Loving-kindness meditation can be brought in to support the practice of 'bare attention' to help keep the mind open and sweet. It provides the essential balance to support your insight meditation practice.
It is a fact of life that many people are troubled by difficult emotional states in the pressured societies we live in, but do little in terms of developing skills to deal with them. Yet even when the mind goes sour it is within most people's capacity to arouse positive feelings to sweeten it. Loving-kindness is a meditation practice taught by the Buddha to develop the mental habit of selfless or altruistic love. In the Dhammapada can be found the saying: "Hatred cannot coexist with loving-kindness, and dissipates if supplanted with thoughts based on loving-kindness."
Loving-kindness is a meditation practice, which brings about positive attitudinal changes as it systematically develops the quality of 'loving-acceptance'. It acts, as it were, as a form of self-psychotherapy, a way of healing the troubled mind to free it from its pain and confusion. Of all Buddhist meditations, loving-kindness has the immediate benefit of sweetening and changing old habituated negative patterns of mind.
To put it into its context, Loving-kindness is the first of a series of meditations that produce four qualities of love: Friendliness (metta), Compassion (karuna), Appreciative Joy (mudita) and Equanimity (upekkha). The quality of 'friendliness' is expressed as warmth that reaches out and embraces others. When loving-kindness practice matures it naturally overflows into compassion, as one empathises with other people's difficulties; on the other hand one needs to be wary of pity, as its near enemy, as it merely mimics the quality of concern without empathy.
The positive expression of empathy is an appreciation of other people's good qualities or good fortune, or appreciative joy, rather than feelings of jealousy towards them. This series of meditations comes to maturity as 'on-looking equanimity'. This 'engaged equanimity' must be cultivated within the context of this series of meditations, or there is a risk of it manifesting as its near enemy, indifference or aloofness. So, ultimately you remain kindly disposed and caring toward everybody with an equal spread of loving feelings and acceptance in all situations and relationships.
The loving kindness meditation is a positive way to deprogram to reprogam. It's beneficial when using guided meditaion to help you achieve and develop positive health thoughts for yourself and toward others. I am always recommending positve alternative practices to enhance one's lifestyle.
A Mental Workout is your right to exercise your brain power! I think we spend a lot of time thinking. Positive thinking is beneficial to to the health and well being of a person. If all thoughts begin in the mind that means the brain is always working. How do we clear our thoughts? How do we improve the performance and functionality of our brain? Your mind like anything else needs to be maintained.
Sharen,
ReplyDeleteI love your use of sweet and sour when talking about the one's outlook and mood. When someone is in a sour mood, it can spoil their whole day. By using this practice to "sweeten" the mind, it helps to change their outlook on things.
Buffy
Sharen,
ReplyDeleteI LOVE IT!! The way you write is almost hypnotic, I can see that you truly feel what you are saying. I agree with you about a mental workout. I am only 21 but I have noticed that in the last two years as I have fallen into a rut, I work about 80 hours a week 40 to a non profit, 40 toward keeping my husbands business intrests on track and then I spend at least 14 hours a week just working on school, not including study and reading, and then I am managing websites, coaching youth league soccer, making sure my little brother gets where he needs to go and then being a wife and mom on top of it and my brain is pretty much jello.
I have always had trouble sleeping and in the last two years my insomnia has got so terribly out of control I actually had to be chemically sedated. Since then I have dedicated at least ten minutes a day to mediataion. I really do not like guided imagery, but I do enjoy aroma therapy and listening to soothing music. Just those ten minutes have greatly improved my ability to remember things, to not run like a chicken with my head cut off.
I think the hardest thing to grasp was that YOU have to make time for YOU because if you dont noone else will or can for that matter. It all comes down to loving yourself enough to know your limit.