Loving Kindness Meditation 1. (Sending Metta to Self) with Gemma Gladstone
- Gemma Gladstone
- September 26, 2020
The loving kindness (or metta) meditation – is a type of Buddhist meditation which focuses on sending love, care and good will to yourself as well as others. The old name for this meditation is the metta bhavana. In this adaptation of the metta bhavana, I focus on the first stage – sending metta (or love) to ourselves.
These types of meditations are particularly good for helping you cultivate a deep sense of compassion for yourself and others and can help with calming down negative self-talk and negative emotional states.
The loving kindness meditation can also help with developing greater acceptance around situations over which you have no control and helping you accept reality, including other people for who they are.
These kinds of compassions focused meditations also have neurological underpinning and help us change the way we view ourselves, other people and the world in which we live. With a regular practice we can learn to better handle the ups and downs of everyday life and to develop more positive emotional states and more prosocial or compassion based behaviours. Research teaches us that a regular mediation practice whether that be mindfulness-based, insight-based or compassion-based, can actually change our brains for the better and can contribute to a healthier life.
Dr Gemma Gladstone
www.goodmood.com.au