Meditation: Calm, Loving-Kindness Length: 10 minutes Where: Living Room Couch, Los Angeles How It Felt: Challenging
My guest arrived today! It’s been a fabulous day spending time with my childhood best friend (and other best friend- my husband!), playing games, talking non-stop, watching the Grammys, laughing and catching up. We even watched the last two films I made before COVID shut everything down, which was so sweet and made me feel so supported.
I’m lucky. I have people in my life who truly know and love me and support all my crazy hopes, dreams, and ambitions. That’s a blessing. SO, I decided to do a loving-kindness meditation tonight, since I was feeling so much love coming in and rushing out!
If you haven’t done this type of meditation before, it usually includes sending some love to yourself first (or at least taking time to breathe and get centered), then choosing someone who makes you super happy and sending them a ton of love, often involving mantras like “May you feel safe. May you feel happy.” Etc. Then, typically, you choose someone you struggle with in life and try sending them some love as well, and usually you end by sending love to a larger group, like your community, or the whole world.
I thought this would be easy since I was floating in all the loving feelings, but actually I found it challenging to sit and meditate at all! Since both my guest and Steve typically operate on east coast time, they turned in a bit earlier than me, and I’m just all kinds of jazzed up. It’s hard to sit still and concentrate!
But, I tried! I breathed, I sent love, I repeated mantras (until I got distracted), and I did my best to follow along.
Ah, well. If I sent even a little love out, that’s better than none, right?
One thing of note- this was the first loving-kindness meditation I’ve done where the guide made a point during the “send love to someone difficult” portion that I really liked. She said to only open you heart to that person as much as you are comfortable and safely able to right in this moment. I liked that. I think it can be really toxic to tell people that no matter how much someone has a negative effect on their life, they should just “forgive” them or “love them anyway” or “be the bigger person.” It’s okay to keep harmful people away. It’s okay to forgive bit by bit, on your own schedule. It’s okay to feel it out before seeing if this is a person you can open your heart to without fear.
It’s okay to protect yourself and to not be okay with someone’s behavior!
Let me end by taking a deep breath and sending love out to anyone who is reading this post while they are reading. YOU. Sending you love and kindness.
May you be happy.
May you be safe.
May you be healthy.
May you be at peace.
My Year of Meditation 