Loving-kindness is so much more than “just” a feel-good practice. It is a force that can connect, inspire, and motivate us to transform the world. Here world-renowned mindfulness teacher Sharon Salzberg, one of the foremost teachers of loving-kindness, helps to pave the way.
Who is Sharon Salzberg?
Sharon Salzberg is a world-renowned meditation teacher and a New York Times best-selling author. As one of the foremost teachers of loving-kindness, she emphasizes the ability of loving-kindness to connect, inspire, and motivate people to transform the world.
Sharon Salzberg first encountered meditation in 1969, in an Asian Philosophy course at the State University of New York, Buffalo. The course sparked an interest and motivated her to travel to India in 1970 with the simple intuition that the methods of meditation would bring some clarity and peace. It was in 1971, in Bodh Gaya, that she attended her first meditative course and spent the next few years engaged in intensive study with highly respected meditation teachers. Her intuition paid off when she returned to the US in 1974 and established the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) with Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield in Barre, Massachusetts, which now ranks as one of the most prominent and active meditation centers in the Western world.
Today, she is the author of eleven books, including Real Happiness and Real Change. She is also the host of her own podcast, The Metta Hour, which features more than 100 interviews with some of the top leaders and voices in the meditation and mindfulness movement.
Sharon Salzberg on Why Loving-Kindness Takes Time
Sharon Salzberg reflects on the first time she tried loving-kindness meditation and the important lesson on patience she learned along the way.
The first time that I ever did loving-kindness practice was without a teacher. We first opened up the center; a group of us decided to do a self retreat here for a month and I had never done loving-kindness before although I had heard about it. I thought it was a perfect opportunity to do it.
I sat up in my room and I knew that it was done in successive stages and I began by dedicating a week of sending myself loving-kindness. All day long, I would go around the building—sitting in my room, sitting in the hall—saying the whole thing: May I be happy. May I be peaceful. May I be liberated. And I felt absolutely nothing.
At the end of the week, something happened to someone in the community and a number of us, quite unexpectedly, had to leave the retreat. Then I felt doubly bad—not only did nothing happen but I never even got beyond myself, which was really selfish.
I was running around upstairs in the flurry of having to leave. I was standing in one of the bathrooms and I dropped a jar of something, which shattered into a thousand pieces. The very first thought that came up in my mind was: “You are really a klutz, but I love you.” And I thought, “Oh wow! Look at that.” All those hours, all those phrases where I was just dry and mechanical and I felt like nothing was happening. It was happening. It just took a while for me to sense the flowering of that and it was so spontaneous that it was quite wonderful. So: Not to struggle, to try to make something happen. Let it happen. It will happen.
What is Loving-Kindness Meditation?
Loving-kindness is a practice and technique in which the central object we rest our attention on is the silent repetition of certain phrases. The phrases are a way of offering, gift-giving, and switching our attention. So for example, if we normally think about the mistakes we’ve made, what we did wrong, and when we failed, we’re going to switch our attention and just wish ourselves well.
You may use the phrases: May I be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live my life with ease.
Many people ask, “Well, who am I asking?” We’re not asking anybody, we’re offering. We’re gift-giving. And then we wish others well. It may be people who’ve helped us, who we take for granted, tend to overlook, or people we don’t really know. There are many phases and stages of the practice, but we begin with the offering of loving-kindness to ourselves. Next we offer loving-kindness to a neutral party, and we end with the offering of loving-kindness to all people everywhere.
How to Find Your Loving-Kindness Phrases
Loving-kindness is meant to be done in the easiest way possible so that the experience springs forth naturally. To do it in the easiest way possible means finding phrases that are personally meaningful. The traditional phrases as are taught, begin with oneself:
May I be free from danger. May I know safety. Danger in that sense is both inner danger from the force of certain mind states, and outer danger. So, May I be free from danger. May I have mental happiness. May I have physical happiness. May I have ease of well-being—which means may I not have to struggle terribly, day by day, with livelihood or with family issues.
May I be free from danger, may I have mental happiness, but really, you should use any phrases that are powerful for you. They need to be meaningful not just in a very temporary way—May I get to this course OK—but something profound that you would wish for yourself and wish for others. Thoughts are very important in doing loving-kindness—not to struggle to get a certain kind of feeling. Let your mind rest in the phrases. You can be aware of the phrases either with the breath or just in themselves—the focus of the attention is on the phrases. Let your mind rest within them. The feelings will come and go.
Sometimes, practicing loving-kindness will feel very ordinary, very dry, or very mechanical—but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean that nothing is happening or that it’s not working. What’s important is to do it, is to form that intention in the mind because we’re uniting the power of loving-kindness and the power of intention.
How to Practice Loving-Kindness Meditation
Meditation practice is like a skills-training in stepping back, getting a broader perspective, and gaining a deeper understanding of what’s happening. Mindfulness, one of the tools at the core of meditation, helps us not be lost in habitual biases that distort how we interpret our feelings. Without mindfulness, our perception is easily shaped by barely conscious thoughts, such as, “I’m shaking and my stomach is roiling with what seems to be fear, but I can never allow myself to admit that. I’ll pretend it never came up.” If we do that, it is a great struggle to be kind. There is no ready access to kindness without awareness.
Mindfulness also helps us to see through our prejudices about another person by showing us that a conclusion is simply a thought in our own mind. Mindfulness enables us to cultivate a different quality of attention, one where we relate to what we see before us not just as an echo of the past or a foreshadowing of the future, but more as it is right now. Here, we find the power of kindness because we can connect to things as they