A loving kindness meditation script – and 7 reasons to use it!
Loving Kindness Meditation or Metta meditation is a centuries old practice that originally comes from the Buddhist tradition. It involves repeating a set of phrases sending out your wish that you, and all beings, be happy, peaceful, and healthy.
What is Loving Kindness Meditation?
Loving Kindness Meditation or Metta meditation is a centuries old practice that originally comes from the Buddhist tradition. It involves repeating a set of phrases sending out your wish that you, and all beings, be happy, peaceful, and healthy.
You begin by saying these phrases to yourself and then to an increasingly wider group: starting with someone you love or feel close to, then someone neutral, someone you have some negative feelings about, and finally expanding this out to all beings.
For those of us who tend to err on the side of cynical it might sound a little simple and sugary on paper. But as Sharon Salzberg, leading meditation teacher and author of Lovingkindness, puts it:
… in reality, the practice of loving-kindness is about cultivating love as a strength, a muscle, a tool that challenges our tendency to see people (including ourselves) as disconnected, statically and rigidly isolated from one another. Loving-kindness is about opening ourselves up to others with compassion and equanimity, which is a challenging exercise, requiring us to push back against assumptions, prejudices, and labels that most of us have internalized.
And as I’ve found with a lot of aspects of yoga, It’s only when you actually get on your mat and practice with intention and attention to really experience what it’s really about!
In this article I’ll cover some of the evidence-based benefits of Loving Kindness Meditation (LKM), a script to follow and make your own, plus some advice from meditation teachers on EkhartYoga to make this practice more meaningful.
7 Benefits of Loving Kindness Meditation
Modern science increasingly backs LKM up as a powerful practice which brings a host of emotional, social, neurological and physical health benefits. Some of the studies into LKM have shown it is associated with:
1. Increased positive emotions such as love, joy, awe and hope which led to improvements in purpose in life, social support and life satisfaction (Fredrickson, and colleagues, 2008)
2. Reduced self-criticism and depressive symptoms in self-critical individuals (Shahar et al (2014)
3. Increased empathy (Klimecki et al (2013)
4. Improved vagal tone – the vagus nerve is connected with our rest and digest system – (Kok et al (2013)
5. Reduced symptoms of chronic lower back pain – including pain, anger, and psychological distress (Carson et al., 2005).
6. Slower biological ageing – telomeres are genetic materials which shorten due to stress and ageing. Women with experience of LKM had longer telomere length compared to a matched control group. Hoge et al (2013)
7. Immediate relaxation benefits – while most of these studies looked into 6 to 7 week programs, just 10 minutes of loving-kindness meditation has an immediate measurable relaxing effect as shown by activity in the parasympathetic nervous system and slower respiration (Law, 2011)