This month I’ve asked you to stay with a lot of hard things. To hold a breath a little past comfortable. To notice the urge to check your phone mid-practice and stay anyway. To lean into discomfort during breath of fire instead of pulling back. Staying, in nearly every practice, has meant staying with what’s difficult.
So this time I wanted to ask something different. Before we do anything else, find a place in your body that feels pleasant. If that’s a stretch today, neutral is enough. Just notice it. Stay there a moment. That’s the whole instruction, and it’s a kind of staying too — one we practice far less often than staying with what’s hard.
I think we’re so well trained to notice what’s wrong that we let what’s already good pass by unnoticed. This meditation, a simple loving-kindness practice sometimes called metta, asks us to do the opposite: settle into what feels good or neutral before we do anything else, then let a small prayer widen out from there.
It always begins with ourselves. May I be happy. May I be safe. May I be healthy. May I live with ease. I think we’re the hardest people to say this to, and also the most important. If we can learn to meet ourselves this way, we’ll be able to meet everyone else this way too.
From there the circle widens — to someone we love, and then to we, together, before it opens all the way out to all beings, everywhere. Something I’ve noticed teaching this practice over the years: it’s almost always easier to feel warmth toward someone we care about than toward someone we’re in conflict with. That ease is useful. It’s often the door that opens compassion toward harder relationships later, once we’ve practiced enough with the people who make it simple.
I closed this practice with an image I love: letting your own radiant heart share this prayer with all beings everywhere, in all times. Not because you have to feel radiant to begin. Just because somewhere in you, underneath everything else, that’s already what’s there.
This one is short, under twenty minutes, and it can be practiced seated, lying down, even on the couch. However you’re arriving today, tired or scattered or good, you’re welcome exactly as you are.
Radiant Heart is in the portal now. Come stay with what’s good, for a little while, with me.
