In the spirit of the season, ESI found it fitting to offer up a practice in honor of compassion and love. This practice can also benefit you the entire year round.
1. To begin find a comfortable position - seated, standing, or laying down.
2. Bring your awareness and attention to someone you love. This should be someone who instantly makes you feel happy (i.e. friend, relative, pet). Someone whom you do not share too complicated of a relationship with.
3. If you can, have a sense of this person or animal being in front of you, in the same room as you, and facing you with a loving gaze. Begin to notice how you are feeling as you bring this being into your minds eye (i.e. warmth, tingling, a smile, expansiveness). This is what loving-kindness feels like for you.
4. Continue to imagine your loved one in front of you, and begin to send them well-wishes, prayers, blessings or anything else you might want to send their way.
Example: May you be safe and protected from danger; May you be happy and peaceful; May you be healthy and strong; May you have ease and well-being; May you be free of stress and anxiety; May you be full of joy. (Fully Present, Diana Winston & Susan Smalley PhD) Say what is MEANINGFUL to you!
5. As you say your well-wishes or blessings, imagine that the loving-kindness you feel is emanating from you and moving into your loved one. This feeling might represent itself as a color, an image, or it may remain as a feeling.
6. As you continue this practice, check in with yourself to see how you are feeling. Notice what is happening in your body.
7. Next, imagine that your loved one standing in front of you is beginning to send loving-kindness back to you. Notice if it presents itself as a color, image or a feeling. Imagine your loved one is sending the same well-wishes and blessings back to you. Allow yourself to take it in an absorb it.
8. If you did not feel anything in this meditation the first round or two, know that this meditation is planting seeds. If you begin to feel something other than loving-kindness, notice that feeling. Where do you feel in your body? Can you identify the feeling? Is it a sensation and/or emotion? There is always something to be learned. Offer whatever comes up with "May I hold this too with loving-kindness".
9. Eventually you can practice sending loving-kindness out to all people. Imagine it is expanding from inside of you like an orb of light, pulsing well-wishes and blessings. Let it expand in all directions, sending it out to those you know and those you do not know.
10. This practice is best begun by imagining someone who has a positive effect in your life. You can then begin to practice this meditation by sending it to others who have a neutral impact in your life (i.e. a passing stranger on the sidewalk). Eventually, this practice can be used for people who you share a challenging relationship with - a relationship that may have a negative influence in your life. You can also apply this same practice to yourself, daily. Instead of imagining a loved one in front of you, imagine yourself.
We, at Empower Shakti International, wish all beings everywhere peace, joy, freedom and love. Well-wishes and blessings to all.
