On Practicing and Teaching Loving-Kindness Mediation: A Therapist Reflects

When I tell my friends that I meditate regularly, most of them think that I sit in lotus position and chant “Om” or some such thing for an hour at a time in front of a candle.

Well, I don’t.

It may be a bit ironic that as a therapist, I now find myself not only doing meditation but also recommending it to my clients. For years, in spite of being vaguely aware that it had some benefits for health and wellness, I avoided it as just seemed too exotic. As much as I admired the Beatles, I bought their LPs but not the whole Transcendental Meditation rage. Chalk that as my loss! Now the benefits of various kinds of meditation are just too clear to ignore.

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a different kind of meditation, a centuries-old Buddhist practice called Metta, or Loving-Kindness meditation. I decided to give it a go. At about that time, a preeminent researcher, Barbara Fredrickson, was starting to publish articles that showed the clear benefits for it. Up to this point, I was aware of ongoing mediation research and application centered on Mindfulness Mediation at the U Mass Medical School under the leadership of Jon Kabat-Zinn, and was “meaning to look into it more.”

As I got into Loving-kindness practice, reading, and research, what really grabbed me about it from the get-go is that it is more about opening the heart, about promoting compassion than about getting our busy minds to quiet down, as important as that is. And what astounded me was that Fredrickson’s research was showing a wide range of benefits to those who practiced it for as little as 20 minutes over six weeks.

Here’s what she says in her book, Positivity, about its benefits:

Practicing loving-kindness is not a magic bullet to the heart that unfailingly makes your positivity soar. Still, the positivity generated by this form of meditation practice accounts for a wide weep of benefits in people’s lives—from improved abilities to savor and be mindful, to having an easier time accepting themselves, finding positive meaning, and trusting others. Practitioners even suffer fewer aches, pains, colds, and flues. Practicing loving-kindness helps people move the riverbed for their day-to-day emotions to higher ground. Ultimately, they become les depressed and more satisfied with life as a whole. (p. 197)

It requires no special equipment, although a teacher can be a valuable aid. (For more details, I highly recommend the book Loving-kindness: the Revolutionary Art of Happiness by Sharon Salzberg for her warm, wise presentation in a way that Westerners can appreciate.)

For therapists, counselors, social workers, and other mental health professionals developing your own practice of meditation and learning to teach it to your clients and patients can be one of the best things you can do. Those who work in pastoral care will also find much of value in learning and teaching meditation.

To develop a solid base in the area, there are certification programs to enhance your learning and credibility. But the most important thing is to practice it yourself. Once you do, you will have an experiential understanding that complements any formal education on the subject and be able to communicate the relevance to your patients with much more confidence and compassion.