New Year’s Eve Tips to Reduce Stress and Improve Sleep

A popular New Year’s resolution is meditation – Specifically, Mindfulness meditation. This is a healthy choice.

Regular mindfulness practice and Many positive health benefitsincluding reduced pressure and anxietybetter sleep and faster recovery from injury and illness. Mindfulness can help us stay awake in a distracted world and make us feel more at home in our bodies and lives.

There are many different types of meditation. Some mindfulness practices require the meditator to simply sit and accept any thoughts, feelings, or emotions that arise without immediately reacting. Such meditation develops focus while allowing us to respond more freely to whatever events life throws at us.

Other meditations require practitioners to deliberately focus on an emotion—such as gratitude or love—in order to deepen the experience of that emotion. The purpose behind this meditation is to bring more gratitude or more love into one’s life. The more people meditate on love, the easier it is to experience the emotion without meditating.

One type of meditation is called metta, or loving-kindness. As a communication and mindfulness scholar, and a long-time meditation teacher, I both study and practice lovingkindness. Here’s what loving kindness means and how to try it yourself:

Love has no boundaries, love has no boundaries

Metta, or loving-kindness, is a kind of love, Buddhists all over the world practice. Like many forms of meditation today, meditation comes in both secular and religious forms. You don’t need to be a Buddhist to practice lovingkindness. It’s for anyone who wants to live more lovingly.

Loving-kindness, the feeling developed in loving-kindness meditation, is very different from romantic love. In Gubali, the word “metta” has two root meanings: the first is “gentle”, which means that the gentle spring rain falls on the seedlings and nourishes them indiscriminately. The second one is “Friends”.

Metta is boundless love; it is gentle presence and universal kindness. The purpose of loving-kindness practice is to increase people’s ability to be present for themselves and others.

Loving kindness is not mutual or conditional. It does not discriminate between us and them, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, popular and unpopular, worthy and unworthy. To practice loving-kindness is to give what I describe in my research as “the rarest and most precious gift”—a gift of love, without expecting anything in return.

How to practice lovingkindness meditation

In the fifth century AD, a Sri Lankan monk, Buddhaghosa, wrote an influential meditation work called Visuddhimagga, or “The Path of Purification.” In this article, Buddha Sound provides guidance on how to practice lovingkindness meditation. The contemporary teacher tends to adapt and modify his instructions.

The practice of loving-kindness often involves quietly reciting to oneself some traditional phrases designed to evoke loving-kindness and visualizing beings who will receive loving-kindness.

Traditionally, the practice begins with sending loving-kindness to yourself. During meditation, it is common to say:

After saying these phrases and feeling the emotions they evoke, they are usually followed by an expression of loving-kindness toward someone or something else: it could be a loved one, a dear friend, a pet, an animal, a favorite tree. These phrases become:

Next, this loving kindness is directed to the wider circle of friends and relatives: “May they…”

The final step is to gradually expand the circle of good wishes: to include people in our communities and towns, people around the world, animals and all living things, and the entire planet. The final round of recitation begins: “May we…”

In this way, lovingkindness meditation can begin with the meditator himself, allowing the mind to move deeper and deeper into life.

Lovingkindness and Mindful Democracy

Clinical studies show that loving-kindness meditation has positive effects on mental health, including reducing anxiety and depression, increasing life satisfaction, increasing self-acceptance, and reducing self-criticism. There is also evidence that loving-kindness meditation can enhance feelings of connection with others.

The benefits of loving-kindness meditation are not just personal. In my research, I show that this also has huge benefits for society as a whole. Indeed, the practice of democracy requires us to cooperate with friends, strangers, and even so-called “adversaries.” This is difficult to do if our hearts are filled with hatred and resentment.

Whenever meditators open their hearts in lovingkindness meditation, they are prepared to live a more loving life: for themselves and for all sentient beings.