Loving Kindness Meditation

The Preliminaries to Metta

Metta, or loving-kindness meditation, is often taught as a standalone practice—but for many, jumping right into metta practice can feel forced, disconnected, or difficult to sustain. Thus these preliminary practices form a foundation to help eliminate those challenges before they have a chance to arise. 

These preliminary practices designed to clear the path for a heartfelt and transformative metta practice. Please practice them to form a base and foundation for your loving kindness practice. 

• Mindfulness - Intention, Attention, and Non-judgement: We begin by cultivating mindfulness to ground ourselves in our intention and aspiration, steady our attention and reduce distraction, and to develop non-judgmental awareness to soften self-criticism and open the heart. 

We may sit down to do metta for our mother, and then we start ruminating over the last interaction with our mother last holiday, then holiday plans, and we are off to the races of rumination. So we need a base of mindfulness energized by our intention and aspiration so that we can stay on our object of metta without getting pulled into the story around it.

Also if we still are judging people (especially ourselves), this will affect our ability to hold ourselves and others in loving kindness.

• Field of Care: We grow a field of gratitude and care, drawing strength from our own experiences of compassion that we have received in our lives. 

We may need a base of gratitude like a field of care that can hold us. A place where we are loved unconditionally, without judgement. So as a preliminary practice we need to develop this field of care through meditating on the compassion we have received, benefactors in our lives, etc. This becomes a refuge we can return to whenever emotionalities arise in our metta practice.

• Equalization Meditation: And we build meaningful bridges of connection through practices of equalization—recognizing our shared interbeing with others.

And finally, we may find metta practice feeling a bit fake, or forced -- simply going through the motions. We do it, but it's not alive, vibrant, and real to us. It lacks what my teachers call a "feelization" which is a full embodied experience. This can arise because we have not laid the connections -- like roads and bridges -- for our metta to travel upon. So we first need to establish these bridges of connections through Equalization practice. ie. "Just Like Me." We have different variations on this theme of equalization such as impartiality meditations, interconnection meditations, and empathy meditations all in service of connecting and laying down pathways for our loving kindness practice.

Only then do we enter into the core practice of loving-kindness meditation. Supported by these preliminaries a foundation is laid that allows loving-kindness to become vibrant, alive and a fully embodied experience that leads to healing and transformation.

For a more detailed commentary on loving kindness check out the Full Moon Metta Practice below