Guided Lovingkindness Meditation from Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, offers a “Guided Lovingkindness Meditation” — Sending loving-kindess to people we feel neutral towards as well as those we have difficult feelings towards.
The Path to Loving-Kindness: Choose Your Phrases
Loving-kindness is meant to be done in the easiest way possible so that the experience springs forth most gently, most naturally. To do it in the most easiest way possible means first to use phrases that are personally meaningful. The traditional phrases as are taught, at least this one classical translation of them, begins 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, with family issues.
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 the phrases. Let your mind rest within them. The feelings will come and go.
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 okay—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 the phrases. Let your mind rest within them. The feelings will come and go.
Sometimes it will feel quite glorious, it will be extraordinary.
Sometimes, many times, it will be very 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 and that is what will produce the effect of that free flow of loving-kindness.
Loving-Kindness Takes Time
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.
Our job, so to speak, is just to say those phrases, to say them knowing what they mean but without trying to fabricate a feeling, without putting that overlay on top of it, of stress. Let your mind rest in the phrases, and let the phrases be meaningful to you.
I’d like to talk about sending a loving-kindness to the neutral person and a little bit about sending loving-kindness to somebody who we have difficulty with as we send a message to a neutral person.
Sending Loving-Kindness to the Neutral Party
The first task of course is to find one—sometimes that’s very interesting. I find that very often as soon as we either meet somebody or even think about them, if we haven’t met them, we have a judgment about them: I like them I don’t like them.
If you can find a neutral person, sometimes there’s a great refreshment in sending them loving-kindness because there’s no story about them.
See if you can understand that this person wants to be happy just as each one of us wants to be happy and open, extend that force of loving-kindness towards them.