How to Personalize Your Loving-kindness Practice

This is a follow-up to yesterday's post:

Would You Like to Learn More about Loving-kindness Meditation?

I've written a new article explaining how I have "personalized" my metta practice to better address the issues of my own heart

Here's a short excerpt of the new post:

"To help you understand how you can “personalize” your metta practice, I thought I’d share some of the approaches I use in my own metta practice.  One thing I’ve found to be very helpful in doing self-metta is to use “customized” phrases—that is, phrases of that speak directly to areas where I need to express and feel more compassion and understanding toward myself.

As you probably know if you’ve done metta practice, traditionally one starts out with loving-kindness directed toward oneself.  But as many Western dharma teachers have pointed out, because many of us here in the West have deep issues of self-hatred and guilt that we are working out, sometimes self-loving is not the best place to begin metta.

We may need to begin where we can generate and feel some genuine good-will and affection—maybe toward a friend, or even a pet.  Then, when we can actually sense what unconditional good will feels like, we can go from that good place to more difficult objects of affection—which may mean, ourselves!"

You can read the entire article here:

Metta Phrases for Dealing with Self-Hatred and Self-judgment

May this sharing help and heal you!