4 Loving Kindness Meditations In 1

In this episode of the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast, Sean Fargo guides a heartfelt exploration of loving-kindness—one of the most transformative mindfulness practices for connecting with ourselves and others.

Sean shares reflections on what it really means to open the heart, even when we feel resistance, numbness, or emotional pain. 

This episode includes a guided meditation that weaves together four powerful styles of loving-kindness practice, offering listeners multiple ways to cultivate genuine care, empathy, and connection.

Whether you’ve practiced Metta before or are new to it, this episode helps you meet yourself and others with more gentleness, compassion, and curiosity.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✔ Why loving-kindness can feel uncomfortable or even triggering at timesand how to work skillfully with that

✔ How to meet resistance, grief, or doubt with gentle awareness

✔ 4 unique ways to guide or practice loving-kindness meditation

✔ Why Metta is more than just repeating phrases, it’s about emotional attunement

✔ How to offer love to friends, difficult people, and yourself without bypassing pain

✔ A complete, guided loving-kindness meditation you can return to anytime 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. My name is Sean Farco, and today's episode is definitely one of my favorite episodes we've ever recorded. We've done about 180, 190 episodes over the years, and this one is one of my favorites, and I hope that you enjoy it. We're gonna be talking about loving kindness for ourselves and for others. We're gonna be talking about what it means to cultivate a sense of care, um, how natural it is to not quite feel it all the time, some of the barriers that we have to opening our hearts, whether it's to ourselves or to others. And we're gonna be doing a guided meditation in which we're going to be combining four different styles of loving kindness that I've learned over the years that are probably the most popular forms of loving-kindness meditation. And I'm really curious which one will resonate with you the most.com. So I'd love to hear from you. And I'm wishing you care and warmth. I know a lot of us are going through tough times right now, and we all need that uh empathy and acceptance and care. So without further ado, let's slide into this episode on loving kindness, how to share loving kindness with others, and how to practice it. I think it may be helpful to talk about loving kindness just a little bit before we practice together. And for those of you who'd like to go into a deep dive on this topic, I encourage you to check out the guest teacher workshop in the members area from Donald Rothbard, who talked about loving kindness and teaching loving kindness or sharing the practice of cultivating care with others, you know, with ourselves. So, some people, when we practice or when we talk about loving kindness, or say that we're gonna be doing a loving kindness practice, some people will resist. And sometimes that depends on the day, the mood, rather than just the general feeling on this type of practice. Because sometimes when we're carrying fear, anger, grief, strong cravings, loving kindness can feel threatening in some way, or that we're trying to discount what we're feeling. Some people may feel that it's sappy, that it's woo-hoo, that it's gonna turn us into a doormat. There's so many reasons why we may not be receptive or open or curious about this type of practice. And I think it's helpful to honor that. Um you have to welcome a sense of skepticism sometimes. That it's okay, that these are natural reactions, and that we all have different coping mechanisms to keep us safe. So if any of you feel resistant to this practice, that's totally fine. The goal of this practice is not to feel loving fully 100% of the time, or at least that's not the explicit goal for everyone, or it's not the invitation from most teachers. The invitation is to invite the heart to connect with our experience, with other, with ourselves, with fill in the blank. Mother Earth, ancestors, you name it God. Everyone's gonna want to connect or feel open to connecting with certain things. But the invitation is to like invite the heart to connect, and if it doesn't want to connect, if it's not open to connecting, that's totally fine. We can meet what's here with hopefully some growing sense of gentleness, allowance more so we can meet resistances, gentle awareness, and I think many mindfulness practice feel that mindfulness practice and loving-kindness practice are the same thing, that mindfulness practice and self-compassion practice is the same thing, that mindfulness and sympathetic joy are the same thing. We're conducting with this unfolding experience with this gentle awareness, that sometimes we feel like our heart is bursting with love, sometimes it's much more subdued to sort of simple awareness and presence for whatever's here, whether it's resistance or joy, fear, or gladness. The invitation is gentle awareness and connecting the heart with each other, our thoughts, our emotions, etc. And oftentimes there's this element of caring curiosity, empathy, investigation, sort of a heart-based investigation. Just kind of like sensing kind of softening into the experience, and sometimes it feels light, joyful, sometimes it feels heavy where we purge. So with every time we practice this, it may feel very different. Love for others, our love for ourselves, our love for wild, mysterious life. And we can run into edges of resentment, grief, judgment, shame. And may we meet these edges with gentleness and continued presence as we breathe. Perhaps today we can do a more general practice, and you can sense in to whoever you want to sense into, including colleagues, but they don't have to be colleagues. And as practitioners and as teachers with this practice, it's really helpful to cultivate a safe of a place as we can to allow ourselves to feel vulnerable. When you think of them.

SPEAKER_01: 30:06

You want to be loved and accepted for who you are. Just like me, looking them in the eye. Conveying some sense of care with boundaries the intention to stay connected with them as human beings doing what's going to ultimately serve both of you.

SPEAKER_00: 33:22

Alive.

SPEAKER_02: 34:15

Maybe it's been forgotten, covered up, beaten up, or maybe it's still here fully. But inviting that sense of ourself to shine through. Again, inviting a sense of love for ourselves, our true essence, this appreciation for this core part of who we are. Feeling our body on the seat, the ground. Slowly opening the eyes whenever you're ready. Partly as a way just to help our hearts open. And with that phase of the practice, we're kind of sensing into how it felt to be with that benefactor. It's kind of a thematic quality connection and also just expression of gratitude. Something that we wish to share with them. And that is a valid form of loving kindness practice. We then segued to calling to mind a friend. Also someone who's generally easy to connect with at the heart level. Not to say we necessarily connected with them at the heart level today, but someone who is on the easier side of things. There's nothing magical about those phrases. We can choose other phrases, we can choose simple words. We just did one rotation of phrases, but you can use them repeatedly by repeating one phrase, one word, one stanza over and over. Inviting the heart to connect. We then, and that's also a very valid form of loving kindness practice. We then segued into someone who's rather difficult or challenging to connect with at this time. Maybe they're not someone who we have the hardest time with, but someone who's difficult or challenging to some degree. And in that phase of practice, we did the practice of just like me. It's a form of empathy practice where we remember that in many ways this person who we're having difficulty with is ultimately like me. I've used it in professional context with lots of resistance in the beginning, but ultimately it's usually one of the most favorite practices that colleagues do when they actually look at each other in the eyes, which can be extremely uncomfortable and healing. That is another valid form of loving kindness practice. We segued to ourselves in which we recalled a moment from our past in which we felt perhaps joy, a joyous form of self in some way, partly to kind of remember our sense of aliveness essence in some way, to help us kind of connect with something deep that is worth remembering. That's also a very valid form of loving kindness practice. So we basically had four different styles wrapped into one quote-unquote meditation. Usually they're compartmentalized into you know different kinds of meditations, but organically I just kind of felt like it may be fun to explore different practices tethered together like that. It was also a little bit on the long side compared to how long our typical Wednesday meditations are. So thank you for sticking with it.