Loving Kindness:

Loving Kindness is a quality which goes hand in hand with the practice of mindfulness. In many ways, mindfulness and loving kindness are like the two wings of a bird. Loving Kindness is the “heartfulness” aspect of mindfulness and is the soil out of which our mindfulness can grow. It is in the meeting of ourselves and our experience with kindness - the welcoming and befriending of our experience whatever it is. It is a gentle open-hearted awareness and acceptance - the loving tolerance and the embracing aspect of our practice. We could say that practicing mindfulness in itself is an act of loving kindness. Jon Kabat-Zinn describes it as a “radical act of love”.

Loving Kindness is often described as “universal loving kindness” as it is non-exclusive and non-possessive. It goes beyond ourselves and our chosen loved ones. It includes those we do not know very well and those we have not met. It also includes those people whom we do not like; those we find “difficult” in one way or another, perhaps even our “enemies”. In fact, loving kindness has no bounds and can reach out to all living beings, all life, even the planet itself. It arises from the recognition that all living beings desire happiness and well-being, and wish to be free from suffering and its causes. Through practicing loving kindness we touch the sense of shared humanity in all living beings and we realize that fundamentally we all want the same thing – to be happy.

Loving Kindness is an attitude of well-wishing, an aspiration for others and ourselves to be well and happy and free from suffering. Within it is the recognition that we are all inter-connected in so many ways. We see that when others are suffering, then we too suffer. We see that when others are happy and nourished, then this too benefits us. We can celebrate in the good fortune of others and feel a heart-felt compassion when we know that others are in difficulty. In practicing loving kindness, we lose a sense of our own separateness and exclusive pre-occupation with our own personal concerns.

The practice of loving kindness is a journey of expanding the boundaries of our loving concerns in ever-widening circles to a more inclusive loving tolerance. It is also a deepening of the journey of meeting ourselves more fully, enabling us truly to accept ourselves just as we are with our best interests at heart – not in an egotistical or selfish manner, but through complete and friendly acceptance.

This is the potential of the human heart: a love and kindness which is boundless, tolerant and knowing. That potential is already there in all of us, although often shrouded by the limited concerns and preoccupations of our everyday lives.

Loving Kindness is one of four limitless contemplations, which also include the practice of compassion (where loving kindness meets with suffering), sympathetic joy (a pleasure we feel in the good fortune of others) and equanimity (a balanced responsiveness to all things). All of these qualities will be developed naturally through the deep practice of mindfulness. They are also practices in their own right. They can shift our habitual mind states from selfish, limiting concerns to ways of being which deeply understand our interconnectedness with each other and with all of life.