We begin with about 10 minutes of settling with our mindfulness (or another) practice. This is followed by about 5 minutes of practicing metta where it flows as easily as possible, and then by a guided practice in radiating metta, extended to radiating in a boundless way. We then return to a brief way of practicing radiating metta without visualization, followed by returning to mindfulness, infused with metta.
We introduce sending metta for all beings and the guided meditation leads us to offer metta to self, a dear friend or benefactor, neutral person, difficult person and then in the 2nd half of the meditation much guidance is offered for the ways we can include all beings in our metta.
We cover what compassion is and how it can help soothe our pain much better than avoiding or denying it. We distinguish between compassion and pity and then offer a variety of compassion phrases we can use. In the guided meditation, we begin with a dear friend who is undergoing some kind of suffering and then move on to ourselves, offering self-compassion for our own physical or mental suffering.
