A BOZEMAN COUNSELOR’S EXPERIENCE OF THE LOVING KINDNESS MEDICATION
Loving kindness meditation uses words, images, and feelings to evoke a loving kindness and friendliness toward oneself and others. With each recitation of the phrases, we are expressing an intention, planting the seeds of loving wishes over and over in our heart. With a loving heart as the background, all that we attempt, all that we encounter will open and flow easily.
Begin with yourself. Breathe gently, and recite inwardly the following traditional phrases directed to your own well-being. You begin with yourself because without loving yourself it is almost impossible to love others. When you feel you have established some stronger sense of lovingkindness for yourself, you can then expand your meditation to include others.
May I be filled with lovingkindness.
May I be safe from inner and outer dangers. May I be well in body and mind.
May I be at ease and happy.
-Jack Kornfield
My experience with lovingkindness meditation thus far has been a complicated one. My initial perspective was that I was offering others love and care byway of my own internal reserves. In my mind this had the implication that by offering goodness to others, the goodwill would automatically be reciprocated towards myself. I struggled to come up with good intentions in which to offer myself. It’s as if my mind would go blank when asked to direct the intention inward. It was when I was sitting across from a partner that the words came most easily to me: “may you be loved as your whole self in your truest form”. It dawned on me that this was exactly what I longed for so desperately. It never occurred to me before then that I had the capacity to offer this to myself. A reading that gave me great clarity around this is in The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion, where Germer describes personality styles and how these differences effect how we interpret lovingkindness practice. I identified with the survivor, especially with the first question being: do you feel as though you don’t deserve love and attention? In reading that felt validated in my struggle to extend kindness towards myself when my prior conditioning taught me that I wasn’t worthy of it (Germer, pg. 201). Germer also speaks to the idea that as a survivor, opening your heart often leads to “backdraft” which can bring up profoundly painful repressed memories (Germer, pg. 150-151). This is an intense experience I had as I first began my lovingkindness practice by picturing my child self.
A misconception that I initially held about lovingkindness work was that it was only a practice in comforting the self with compassion. Lately, my self-compassion has taken on a fiery quality. I can feel this anger beginning to stir inside me. It’s as though in my process of opening, I am finding justified anger under the sadness that I never felt entitled to expressing.
This softening towards myself is revealing power I believed to have been taken from me forever. I have found that the way I offer myself love doesn’t only have to be kind and sweet. I can show up for myself with scorching fury over mistreatment I never allowed myself to be angry about. I am filled with both love and rage simultaneously. With self-compassion I can foster acceptance towards both experiences. It is with this understanding that I now realize the two don’t cancel each other out.
Reference:
Germer, C. (2009). The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion. New York: The Guilford Press