Lovingkindness Meditation

Learning to Love Through Insight Meditation

A Traditional Meditation for Applying Love As a Healing Force

The Insight Meditation Society is one of North America’s oldest institutions dedicated to bringing the life-changing gifts of mindfulness training to the West. On Lovingkindness Meditation, IMS cofounder and senior instructor Sharon Salzberg guides you through a six-step meditation designed to access the human heart’s own limitless source of supreme energy—the energy of love. Known traditionally as metta (an ancient Buddhist term meaning “lovingkindness”), this timeless practice is an easy-to-learn method for unlocking your greatest internal resource for healing others and yourself. Here is a universal meditation to help you:

• Melt away feelings of isolation
• Awaken true compassion, even for those who have hurt you
• Find freedom from needless, self-created suffering
• Learn to trust your own loving, intelligent heart

Among the world’s contemplative traditions, the meditation on how to love is perhaps the most basic—and most powerful. Lovingkindness Meditation is the perfect introduction to this enriching practice.

Steps of learned behavior

I'm in the beginning steps of learning... This book gives good examples of living choices. I've lived with anger for many years, I also have been blessed with loving kindness from many friends. I can see loving kindness in humans, I desire to learn to get better at the practice. So this book gives good guidance on this practice.

Thank you

I learned a lot!

Highly recommend! Sharon's narration is so calming! I'm not Buddhist but this explained Metta wonderfully and in a way I could understand.

Not the first recommendation

a deep look into Metta practice and different nuanced avenues and ways of perceiving the practice. more of a deep cut and not introductory. short.

Short but powerful. Very well narrated. Inspiring

This is a great treatment of a common Buddhist topic. Most meditation retreats take some time for Metta (translated as Lovingkindness), and it's a good practice as one of many. What was inspiring about Sharon's story is that she went on a retreat for something like six weeks and only practiced Metta. This is the stuff of deep transformation especially in one's attitude toward the self. When you start meditating and, I guess, for a long time thereafter, who you're hearing is your self, after all, so it's good if you can cultivate some gentleness and friendliness towards your self, because otherwise you'll just be annoyed all the time. Sharon Salzberg's voice is perfect for her own work. Some Buddhist authors/narrators sound a little spacey and slow, but not so for this author. I really liked that I could listen to the whole book on one drive. Satisfying and not schmaltzy.

Metta, One of The Four Brahma Viharas

Cultivate the Four Brahma viharas: loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. Use them to walk amongst and through the eight worldly dharmas. Create merit, a moral force, and distribute it to all beings. Due to it they may find peace and happiness. Ms. Salzberg provides this and metta, merit, and walking meditation phrases. Realize your interconnectedness with everything. This is a short and concise book about Metta Meditation. Yes, good things do come in short small concise packages.