As the pace of our lives continues to accelerate, driven by a host of forces seemingly beyond our control, more and more of us are finding ourselves drawn to engage in meditation, in this radical act of being. We are moving in the direction of meditative awareness for many reasons, not the least of which may be to maintain our individual and collective sanity, or recover our perspective and sense of meaning, or simply to deal with the outrageous stress and insecurity of this age.

In resting here in this field of loving-kindness, this embrace of loving kindness, you may find it useful to whisper to yourself inwardly the following phrases, or hear them being whispered to you by the wind, by the air, by that breath, by the world, or even asserted more strongly with great feeling.

With the cultivation of mindfulness, where we can rest with one object of attention or expand the field to include varying levels of objects of attention, so in this loving-kindness practice we can linger for days, weeks, months, or years at differing levels of the practice, all of which are equally valid and equally healing, and all of which ultimately include each other.