Feeling Your Loving-Kindness

Doug Powers: Loving-kindness is emanating your own open heartedness that is warm and attentive towards others. Loving-kindness is a state of being. You don’t project more kindness when people respond to it or less if they don’t. 

If you feel a tightness in your heart towards others, start with loving-kindness. There is no accident that in the Buddha’s teaching, kindness comes first. It is a state of the heart.

Now, let’s try to experience what loving-kindness means in your body. Go down and feel your heart. Ask yourself, can I have an open hearted, loving-kindness towards everybody and everything? Can I not become instantly irritated or judgemental when people don’t act in the way I think they should? 

If you can do loving-kindness more frequently in your life, you will find your relationship with everything changes. You will find yourself more relaxed in your exchanges with others, and you may even start to feel a sense of care about people you don’t like. 

A lot of people think that practicing loving-kindness means they need to help and get involved with the messiness of others. You don’t. Loving-kindness is purely a state of the heart. Getting involved with others is compassion.

You can practice emanating kindness from your heart in your room looking out the window. You can do loving-kindness with your dog and cat and they will respond. That can be a good place to start practicing loving-kindness, a noble quality of the heart.

[Edited from talks given on December 29, 2022]