The Buddha taught that we can develop loving-kindness by visualizing how a caring mother holds her beloved child. Love is our true nature, but it is often covered over by a protective layer of fear. The Buddhist path uses systematic trainings to cultivate love. These trainings are found throughout the Buddhist world. They strengthen our capacity for love, compassion, joy and peace. The practices that develop these qualities combine repeated thoughts, visualization and feelings. These trainings have been employed by millions of practitioners to transform their own hearts.
Loving-kindness is the first of these trainings. In loving-kindness practice, students visualize themselves and repeat four or five traditional phrases of well wishing, such as “May I be safe and healthy. May I be happy.” Along with the recitation, a bodily sense of love is established and the feelings of loving-kindness are invited.
Loving-kindness develops as we repeat these phrases thousands of times, over days and months…. I often recommend a year of developing loving-kindness for oneself. Because of the shame and unworthiness we carry, loving ourselves becomes a particularly powerful practice. It doesn’t create love. It opens the pathway to the gold of our natural love. Then it can spill over to bless all we touch.
Love, Jack
Spend NEXT SATURDAY, November 3rd, with JACK KORNFIELD, for a day of practice at InsightLA’s 2018 benefit, AWAKENED HEART.
Join us for a joyful day of transformative teachings, wonderful stories, heart practices, and awakening together. In these turbulent and divisive times, more than ever we need ways to steady our hearts, calm our minds, clear our vision and inspire our action. We will cultivate the qualities of courage and love, how to dwell in kind awareness, and how to enhance our natural capacity for care and connection, towards ourselves, our society and all beings. Metta and goodwill–combined with compassion, forgiveness, sympathetic joy and equanimity–are the revolutionary and necessary powers that can transform our lives and mend our world.
10 am – 4 pm
Saturday November 3rd
First Presbyterian Church
Santa Monica CA