Welcome to the last of our meditations together and this is Love and Kindness Meditation.
I thought it fitting to end with the meditation that is inspired by the same person that inspired our first meditation together.
Those of you who are paying attention will know that that person is Siddhartha Gautama,
Also known as.
.
.
That's right,
The Buddha.
Now he called it Medha-Bhavana which just meant love cultivation.
Even back then they realized that these skills are skills that we need to harness,
That we need to cultivate,
That we need to work at to get better at,
Just as we've described focus,
Gratitude and mindfulness as all things that we need to practice to get better at.
As we do it more,
We get better at it,
It becomes a habit hopefully at a later stage.
Probably not,
But we can endeavor for that to happen.
Now I think this type of meditation is so important post-COVID.
At the moment we can't be with the people we love as much as we want,
If at all.
We are separated so much physically from those that are a big part of our lives.
As a result we may feel lonely.
So this type of meditation can really reconnect us with them.
It can elicit that feeling of being part of something.
As human beings we are social creatures and as a result we want to be part of a group.
And this COVID has made it very hard for that to be the case.
Love and kindness is a great way to feel those people and to extend love and kindness to those people and form that emotional attachment that sometimes we lack when we can't see people physically.
Now it comes with a host of benefits and it's very powerful stuff.
It increases our joy,
Our level of self-contentment,
It increases the vagal nerve or vagal tone,
Which is a big part of the parasympathetic nervous system which we've spoken about before.
In general there's a lot of positive emotions that come with love and kindness meditation.
It also reduces chronic pain and things like backache and migraines and also for people with PTSD.
It also reduces the self-critical thought that so many of us go through and even those that self-harm are found to do it less when they practice love and kindness meditation.
Lastly it lasts ages and I literally mean that.
It's the longest lasting of the meditations.
Positive results show up 15 months after a seven week trial of doing love and kindness meditation.
So it's really worth your while to give it a go and to practice it.
Now compassion isn't always valued in the Western society and as a result we need to practice it as much as we can.
It's something that can generate a beautiful feeling within us and to further that research and study a group in Switzerland want to see what happened when we were generous.
When we gave instead of taking and what they did is they gave two groups a sum of money.
One group was told that they could only spend it on themselves.
The other group was told they could only spend it on other people.
What they found is those that spent the money on other people were much happier than those that spend money on themselves.
Generosity really does make us feel good.
Now this love and kindness meditation is great because if you don't have the resources to give someone money or things then you can give them your time and your thoughts and your energy through this love and kindness meditation.
It allows you to get that feeling that warm glow of generosity but without the cost of having to give something.
Well something material at least.
Now how do we do it?
Well very simply what we do is we extend love and kindness first to ourselves.
We generate this feeling through imagery,
Sensation or phrases and then we pass that feeling on to others.
We bring them to our mind and we pass them on to as many people as we would like.
Now this is an important part to extend to ourselves first and then others because from the horse's mouth Buddha himself said,
Unless we treat ourselves with love and kindness we cannot reflect this in others.
He went on to say that hatred cannot coexist with love and kindness.
It dissipates when supplemented with love and compassion.
So keep that in mind as we go through the last few meditations together.
Love and kindness.
Enjoy.
