Popular self-care method loving kindness meditation (LKM) can help to improve well-being and lower stress. Regular lovers of loving kindness meditation find their ability for forgiveness, connection to others, self-acceptance, and more enhanced.
This method is not simple as you are asking yourself to treat others or yourself kindly. It takes work to let yourself accept your own love or transmit it.
Benefits of Loving Kindness Meditation
You concentrate loving and compassionate energy on yourself and others during loving kindness meditation. Although traditional meditation has many well-documented advantages, like with other methods this one requires practice. The normal individual is not used to this degree of love and hence it can be challenging and occasionally results in opposition.
Though most study writers acknowledge that additional research is needed, emerging studies especially on LKM are assisting social scientists to grasp the special advantages it offers.
For instance, an overview of empirical data on loving-kindness meditation and other compassion-based therapies was given in a 2018 July/August edition of the Harvard Review of Psychology.
Although additional research is required to validate these encouraging results, the authors concluded that LKM may help cure borderline personality disorder and persistent discomfort.
According to several published research, this meditation approach might help with social anxiety, marital conflict, anger control, and stress of long-term caring. Furthermore, loving kindness meditation has been found to improve the activation of brain regions engaged in emotional processing and empathy, therefore enhancing the positivity and lowering the negative.
Read also: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO YOGA MEDITATION FOR BEGINNERS
40-Minute Loving-Kindness Meditation
Whatever your preferred position dignified sitting or lying down bring your awareness to the breath and the body as a whole. Breathe and rest here, riding on the waves of the breath, thereby building a rather steady foundation of moment-to- moment awareness.
Imagine someone in your life who loves you, or who loved you unreservedly, when you feel at ease relaxing with the flow of your breathing. Right here right now breathing with these emotions, bathing in them, resting in the warmth and radiance of their heartfelt embracing of you just as you are, so evoking and giving yourself over to feeling the qualities of the selfless love and kindness they accord you, or accorded you, and the whole aura or field of their love for you. Drinking in the sensation you are clearly and absolutely loved and welcomed as you arewithout having to be different, without having to be worthy of their love, without having to be especially deserving.
You might not really feel very entitled or worthy, in reality. That has no bearing on anything. Actually, it has nothing to do. The crucial reality is that you were or are loved. Their loves are for you exactly as you are. For who you are currently, already, and maybe always. Let your own heart relax in these emotions, cradle them, entrained into them. To be rocked minute by minute in the swinging rhythmic pounding of another loving heart. And in the cadences of your own breathing, let the warmth of this brilliant throbbing field of loving-kindness meditation hold and soak your heart.
Rest in Loving-Kindness Meditation
May I be safe and protected and free from inner and outer harm. This embrace of loving-kindness will help you whisper to yourself the following phrases, or hear them being whispered to you by the wind, by the air, by your breath, by the world, or even asserted more forcefully with great feeling. I hope to be pleased and satisfied. May I be entire and healthy to whatever degree to which it is practical. I want to feel easily well.
May I be secure and protected and free from inner and outside damage. Slowly at your own speed, again and over, internally whispering, inwardly listening, feeling, knowing, confirming. I want to be pleased and satisfied. May I be entire and healthy to whatever degree to which it is practical. I want to feel easily well.
May I be free from both within and outside damage and safe and guarded. May I be pleased and satisfied. May I be entire and healthy to whatever degree to which it is practical. May I find simplicity of well-being.
Saying such ideas to oneself or even considering such things at first might seem synthetic. Who is this “I” desiring this? After all. And whose “I” is getting these wishes? Since you already are entire in this now, ultimately both disappear into the sensation of being secure and free from harm in this moment, into the sense of contentment and happiness in this moment, the experience of being whole in this time. Resting in comfort of well-being is considerably different from the dis-ease and fragmentation we experience much of the time. Loving-kindness is really this feeling, this particular sensation.
Read also: How to Practice Transcendental Meditation
How to Practice Loving Kindness Meditation
Though each variety of this kind of meditation makes use of the same fundamental psychological process, there are several ways to practice it depending on different Buddhist traditions. You create nice intentions toward certain goals involving yourself and others throughout your meditation.
Try this basic and successful love kindness meditation method here.
- Set aside some quiet time for yourself even a few minutes can help then settle comfortably. Close your eyes, let your muscles relax, then inhale deeply.
- Imagine yourself at total bodily and mental wellbeing as well as inner tranquility. Imagine having perfect love for yourself and appreciating yourself for all you are — just as you are — knowing you are just correct. Emphasize this inner calmness and picture yourself releasing stress and inhaling in the direction of love.
- Tell yourself three or four soothing, positive repetitions.These are samples; you may also write your own:
You might decide to start focusing on loved ones in your life or keep this concentration throughout the whole meditation.Start with someone you are quite close to — a spouse, a kid, a parent, or a closest friend.Thank you and adore them. Maintaining that emotion is great.You might wish to go over the comforting words again.
Once you have developed these emotions for that individual, one by one bring additional significant persons from your life into your mind and see them with perfect wellness and inner serenity. Then spread it to neighbors, friends, relatives, and acquaintances. You can even choose to feature worldwide groupings of people.
Tips for a More Effective LKM Practice
Use yourself as the only person meditating when you initially start your loving kindness practice. Start include visualizing people into your exercise as you get more at ease with the images and loving language.
At last, apply loving compassion toward challenging persons in your life. This last arm of LKM allows you to let go of thoughts for a better inner peace and stimulates forgiveness.1: If you’re worried about spending too much time in focus, you might choose to set a timer with a soft alarm as you get regular in your meditation practice.
Remember too that there are other methods to practice this meditation. The above described approach is a sample of how you may decide to start. You could develop your own love kindness meditation method that suits you more closely. You should anticipate to get advantages from the exercise as long as you concentrate in a way that encourages loving compassion.
