Loving-Kindness Meditation: A Monthly Offering for Compassion & Community

Loving-Kindness Meditation: A Monthly Offering for Compassion & Community

Evergreen Healing Arts | Guided by Tara Mahady| By Donation All donations benefit the Kearsarge Food Hub’s Food Security Program

Once a month, we gather at Evergreen Healing Arts for a practice known as Metta, or Loving-Kindness Meditation, a form of meditation that dates back over 2,500 years to the time of the historical Buddha in ancient India.

In the earliest Buddhist texts, Metta is one of the qualities of heart cultivated for liberation: loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. Metta Bhavana was taught as a method for dissolving fear, softening aversion, and expanding the field of care beyond the self to include all beings, regardless of kinship, belief, or background.

This is the meditation of friendliness, of offering goodwill... first to oneself, then gradually outward: to a loved one, a neutral person, someone we experience challenges with, and eventually, to all beings everywhere.

This ancient practice is…