Last Sunday, I had the pleasure of leading a guided meditation on Loving Kindness. Before starting to draw the outline of the talk and meditation, I thought to myself: if I could sum it up in a couple of words, what is the most important thing that I can convey about Loving Kindness?
And the same word that regularly comes to me came up: connection.
It’s a practice that powers up a sense of connection to ourselves and to the world around us.
Bookworm that I am, I also looked for a story or book passage that could help illustrate this point to my class. I was delighted to find one in an early work by world-renowned teacher Sharon Salzberg called ‘The Force of Kindness’. In the last two pages, she comes to this same conclusion and explains it so:
‘The writer Wendell Berry says that “the smallest unit of health is a community.” Community is another way of saying “connection.” And connection is life itself. The practices of kindness inspire and deepen our connection to ourselves and to one another. They provide a path for health, for healing, for wholeness.[…] In doing these practices, in turn our lives toward the force of kindness, in nurturing the potential for love and compassion within, may we all find the ultimate healing truth of connection.’
I hope this will inspire you to try Loving Kindness if this meditation isn’t yet part of your personal practice and I am grateful that we are linked here, online, somehow connected.
Talking about guided practices, I have uploaded a new recording from one of the recent classes I gave online.
Called ‘Relaxing with the sensations of the breath’, it has an introductory talk which is particularly well suited for beginners.
I will leave you with a poem from Persian mystic Rumi:
‘God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell.
As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish, now a cliff covered with vines,
Now a horse being saddled.It hides within these,
Til one day it cracks them open.’
