Metta Meditation for Mindful Mental Health is something that the medical fraternity is only just starting to understand. Unless you’re chronically ill or showing physical or mental signs of sickness or stress you are unlikely to be able to get any help with your physical, psychological and emotional health. The current medical model waits for symptoms to present themselves which is not working. Prevention really is better than cure. Meditation for Mindful Mental Health can be used as a preventative tool that the research shows is arguably as powerful as many therapies and medications. There is no denying that. What we need now is for the word to get out and for things to start changing as rapidly as possible.

In this blog article we’ll show you an example of Metta Meditation as well as provide 10 benefits of doing metta meditation to you.

A Metta Meditation for Meditation for Mindful Mental Health

Today we practice meta meditation to liberate the body, heart, and mind from anger, resentment, frustration, and unkindness. Although we have a propensity to be impulsive and reactive, we can manage ourselves through the art of self-regulation to be kind, loving, and compassionate with ourselves, with others, and with the universe.

Love is our theme today, the most powerful force in the universe. Our meta meditation will bring harmony, peace, and love to our being.

What is metta meditation

Metta Meditation is also know as “Loving-Kindness” meditation originated as a Buddhist meditation practice 2700 years ago that involves sending loving kindness first to yourself and then to others as you build up enough loving energy to radiate it outwards. The Heart and our emotional intelligence have powerful healing resources that we can use to heal mentally, physically and emotionally. Many of Mark L Lockwoods Metta meditations are designed to make us aware that we are not our personalities or masks. We are also not just our thoughts, feelings, emotions and actions but we are in fact the observer, witness or the consciousness that is aware of these personality traits we have accumulated since childhood. Metta Meditation for Mindful Mental Health is used to get people out of depression, burnout, states of chronic anxiety and even helps people with Borderline personality disorder, addictions and mood disorders. For most it helps us create something new and wonderful, something beyond the limit’s of our personalities that are addicted to staying the same in their need for certainty.

In Metta Meditation we direct our affirmations, thoughts and feelings of loving kindness toward ourselves first opening the heart and decreasing the volume of our defence mechanisms. We then manifest enough loving energy and kindness to radiate it outwards into our room, home, neigbourhoods and then eventually the cities and continents we live in. Then in a sequence of outward expansion we keep radiating the loving kindness we have to all of nature until it eventually surrounds the globe and cosmos. Love is the most powerful, primary and most enduring emotion there is so it makes sense to focus mindfully and contemplatively on this inner resource and connect to it outwardly as well; in that order.

Metta meditation as we teach it at our burnout centre and our depression clinic in South Africa, allows us to get into the space under neath our ego defences and persona and peel away the masks that act as mental barriers that separate you ourselves from connection with other people, places and things.

10 Benefits of Metta meditation

1. Connection. Metta Meditation helps us to connect to other people, nature, animals and elements in our God created environment.
2. In turn Metta meditation dissolves deep and oftentimes subconscious feelings of isolation that are not really our reality.
3. It helps us to connect to our authentic self which is based in loving kindness. At the core and without our ego defences we are kind, loving and gentle by nature.
4. Develops and nurtures self compassion that heals, restores and renews the programs of the personality we have created since childhood.
5. Metta meditation fosters forgiveness and frees us from past hurts that harden the heart.
6. Metta meditation practice teaches us that most of our suffering is needless and unnecessary. We grasp, cling, judge and hold grudges that don’t even really matter. When we let go in meditation practice we experience a new freedom.
7. It cultivates a high energy, culture of kindness that brings family, friends, foes and foreigners into your mindful awareness. We are all so similar and we need to realise that to err is human.
8. Science has shown us the evidence that Metta meditation or loving kindness meditation can help minimize negative emotions toward Self, others, God and the world. The mind is geared for survival so we can ‘hate’ other cultures, personalities, religions and people who don’t think like us. We are all one, there is a Universal Loving kindness and a non-duality that we need to learn about. Metta helps with that process of contemplative understanding.
9. Research also has shown us through accumulated evidence that metta meditation can also significantly reduce stress and physical pain.
10. The Buddah suggested Metta meditation defeats hatred; compassion defeats cruelty; appreciative joy defeats envy; and all of these lead to equanimity, or serenity. Christian contemplatives beleive the same thing and also practice metta meditation today for that reason.

Metta starts with the power of Self Love

Love has to start with the self. After you’ve connected to self-compassion, turn your attention to someone you love, care about or are mindful of. You need it inside before you can start giving it away. Your tasks with all forms of growth, healing, contribution and transformation is to fill yourself up with what you want to become and what you want others to get from you.

Love is so powerful we should not underestimate it. When we can begin to observe ourselves from the aspect of sacred self, our deeper authentic self where there is no judgment, where there is no need to control, then love and compassion start to show up. This is redeeming quality of love and there appears to be no shortage of it within or without. We just need to know how to access it.

With Metta Meditation for Mindful Mental Health we would unlock a Mantra such as: May I live in peace, happily, well, peaceful and at ease, safe, and at ease in my body, feeling the Earth and environment around me. May I have compassion with myself. May I be attentive and gentle towards my own discomfort and suffering, move towards love and drift away from fear.

Once we build up the energy of love and kindness and compassion within us we can let that loving energy flow out of us into our neighbourhoods and eventually let it surround the globe. After all, this tiny blue and green planet is so special, unique, and beautiful, created for the purpose of love.

In the end our intention is that every living thing be happy, safe, peaceful, and at ease, and be free from mental and physical suffering. They live in peace and live happily with ease.

Perfect love casts out every single fear. We never give up love, it never stops, it never ends, love endures forever. Love is the water of life, it guides us. Love is the universe in motion, the fire that drives us, that keeps us going, that keeps us growing. Love is so powerful that when you start developing and growing love and all its core aspects and values there is nothing it cannot do. Regular Metta Meditation helps you do just that.

So today as we learn about Metta Meditation for Mindful Mental Health, pretty much as we teach it in our luxury mental health retreat in South Africa on the white sandy beaches of the Western Cape, let us remember to put love first. Then practice that love because love is a verb! It will be the only thing left of you and me and everything else at the end of time. Love endures, never fails and lasts forever and you can take that to the bank!

Namaste