Category: Brahmaviharas

The Loving Warmth of Awareness

A sound arrives. A car in the street, a bird, someone moving in the next room. Can you hear it through love?

Settle first. Let awareness fill the body part by part until the whole space is bright, then rest with the overall feeling of it — rich and complex, or vague and murky, or beyond words. Whatever is here is fine. Keep the body as your base.

Now imagine the space around you as filled with golden light. Awareness itself, warm and bright, as though you were submerged in something viscous and gold that nourishes every cell. Each sensation arises into that warmth, saturated by it, and falls back.

Whatever appears, welcome it. Each sound. Each visual form. Each sensation in the body. May this be welcomed. May this be held in loving presence.

Include the resistance — the agitation, the boredom, the part of you that doesn’t believe this is possible. Welcome that too.

Then take the view that the warmth is not yours to generate. Awareness is doing the loving. It is all around you, through every cell, and it is holding you.

Let yourself be held.

Come back to the felt sense of the body. Notice what has softened, and what has not.

Caring, Even for This

What if each meditation practice you did was an act of care? What if, no matter what came up, there was a tender, gentle presence? Can you care for aversion just as you care for love?

Practising care, all in your field are touched by this loving presence.

This caring presence itself turns towards experience. It greets the experience warmly and tenderly, like seeing an old friend, or as candlelight gently illuminates.

All is welcome — even bracing or resistance. Trying to control and manage experience is just what we do. Rather than a problem to be rid of, this too wants care and love. Ask “can I be with this?”

In difficult moments bring in the phrase: “may I hold this lightly.” You can also imagine yourself placing the difficulty next to you so you are sitting next to it. When called for, imagine the Buddha or Quan Yin as a figure of loving presence — giving you the capacity to be with and hold this tenderly.