Meditation For Dummies by Stephan Bodian

Author:Stephan Bodian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

Feeling out the four dimensions of love

Like water, love comes in many shapes and sizes. Just as a crystal-clear mountain lake, a still forest pool, a trickling creek, and a roaring river are all composed of water, so tender emotions like kindness, compassion, joy, gratitude, forgiveness, devotion, generosity, and peace or equanimity arise in the heart and ultimately consist of love. Remember: These aren’t abstractions — they’re natural human qualities that you can learn how to cultivate and communicate to others.

Among all these tender emotions, the Buddhists emphasize the following four as the cornerstones of a happy and fulfilling life (for more on love and happiness, see Chapter 16):

Lovingkindness: Arises spontaneously in response to the kindness of others and consists of warm, loving, caring feelings that can be deliberately increased and extended. In its fully realized form, lovingkindness is a feeling of goodwill toward all beings without exception.

Compassion: Takes love a step further. In addition to caring about others, you feel their suffering and naturally feel motivated to help relieve it. (The word compassion means “to suffer with.”)

Sympathetic joy: Is the flip side of compassion. It consists of happy feelings that arise in response to the happiness and good fortune of others.

Equanimity: Can be cultivated through the basic meditation practices taught in this book; also known as steadiness of heart. No matter what happens, you expand to include it without allowing it to upset or disturb you.

In the following sections, I focus on love and compassion and techniques for cultivating them.

Generating Love for Yourself and Others

As I mentioned earlier, you have a love factory right here in your chest. Now you’re going to discover how to use it! As a child, you probably received plenty of advice on how to use your mind. Your teachers taught you how to solve math problems and memorize facts; your parents may have helped you with your homework; perhaps you even read some books on speed-reading or improving your study habits. But did anyone ever sit you down and explain how to love? Sure, you had role models — but did they teach you how to do what they did? In this section, you’re going to pick up some skills you never studied at home or in school.

Opening the gates

The following steps are a meditation for connecting with your soft spot and initiating the flow of unconditional love, also known as lovingkindness. (To distinguish this kind of love from conditional love, imagine the love of a good mother for her baby. She gives her love freely and unconditionally, without expecting anything in return except her baby’s happiness and well-being.) As with all the meditations presented in this chapter, you may want to begin with five or ten minutes of a mindfulness practice like counting or following your breaths (see Chapter 7, or listen to the mindfulness track on the CD) in order to deepen and stabilize your concentration. After you get the knack, though, the cultivation of lovingkindness itself can be an excellent way to develop concentration.

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