Cultivating Loving-Kindness

Many of you have heard the term “loving-kindness” and may be wondering how it relates to self-compassion. Loving-kindness, a translation of the Pali word “metta,” refers to benevolence and friendliness. There’s a saying:

When the sunshine of loving-kindness meets the tears of suffering the rainbow of compassion appears. 

In other words, when we can remain caring even in instances of distress, failure or sorrow, our loving-kindness manifests as compassion.  It’s therefore important that we strengthen our ability to feel loving-kindness toward ourselves in order to become more self-compassionate.

In fact, research shows that practicing loving-kindness increases our self-compassion levels.

One way to cultivate loving-kindness is through a particular form of meditation in which phrases of goodwill are repeated for a variety of people.

Traditionally, loving-kindness meditation begins with a focus on the self, moves to a benefactor, then to a neutral person, a challenging person, and finally to all conscious beings.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to feel loving toward ourselves, and we’re more likely to judge and criticize ourselves instead.

Because so many people have difficulty turning feelings of loving-kindness inward, we teach an altered form of the practice in the Mindful Self-Compassion program in which we first generate feelings of goodwill toward a loved one (which is easier), then slip ourselves in. This variant of the practice appears to facilitate the ability to generate loving-kindness for ourselves.

I’ve recorded a guided version of this meditation that you can download here. I hope you enjoy it.