Loving Kindness Meditation for Oneself

In the blog category “Guided Meditations”, I will provide detailed explanations for all the guided meditation tracks that I will place in the Resources section of this website. These blog posts will be hyperlinked from the “Guided Meditations” page under “Resources” menu option where these meditation tracks in mp3 format will be placed for streaming or for downloading.

Loving kindness meditation is a method of developing compassion. It comes from the Buddhist tradition, but it can be adapted and practiced by anyone, regardless of religious affiliation. It is essentially about cultivating love. It focuses on developing feelings of goodwill, kindness and warmth towards ourselves and others that is unconditional. It is a quality of the heart that simply wishes well to all beings without seeking anything back in return.

Loving kindness meditation for oneself is a very effective way to start befriending ourselves and treating ourselves with gentleness, care, kindness and love. It counteracts the voice of the harsh inner critic that we all have within us. From this place of self-compassion, we are likely to become less critical of ourselves when we make mistakes. The more loving and patient we are with our difficulties, the less lost we are in reactivity thereby leading to wiser choices and wiser actions. We are also likely to dissolve our past aversive experiences with other people and to let them go instead of letting them affect us in adverse ways.

It is very easy to perform loving kindness for our loved ones and benefactors but it is more difficult for us to practice it for our own selves. However, as with any other skills set, we can improve by performing this practice on a regular basis.

This guided meditation will help us practice loving kindness towards ourselves. We will focus our attention on ourselves knowing that we too deserve unconditional love, kindness and happiness just like all other living beings. The guided meditation will have some traditional phrases of loving kindness. In the short period of silence that follows each phrase, we will repeat it a few times and breathe in the qualities of warmth, kindness, compassion or love towards ourselves. We will do this with all our heart.

The idea is to start with a small flame of the intent behind each phrase. We will attend to it and nurture it. We will slowly get more fuel for the tender feeling that arises in our heart as we offer loving kindness to ourselves and allow it to expand and to gain momentum. It we notice that our minds have wondered off, we will gently bring it back to this practice.

This meditation track is available in the “Guided Meditation” page that can be accessed from the “References” menu option. Please feel free to either stream these exercises or click on the “Download” button to download the mp3 files to your computers or mobile devices.

May you be happy !!!
May you be peaceful !!!
May you live with ease !!!

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