>>Loving Kindness Meditation with Johanna - Soundcloud <<
Did you know that by thinking negatively about someone or something is only increasing your own stress and your own negativity? Your formerly positive energy will begin to be replaced by negative flow, and it will consume you faster than positivity ever would. So why would you ever want to be the reason you are feeling negative things? You wouldn’t.
For some reason, it's negativity that resonates fast, and focusing on positivity seems like hard work sometimes.
In the past two years I've leaned in to a more mindful and respectful way of facing others. I also changed the way I think about people. That includes the people I don’t personally know, but might recognize from, for example, the media. I have practiced this by placing a real thought behind it. To practice living loving kind, is to make it happen. That’s it.
Especially for me, year 2015 was a tremendous shake and a wake up for this method again, because I really at times struggled with connections with the people I care about, to the point of total break-offs, without getting too specific. And only because I hadn’t practiced “loving kindness” in my day to day, but more like pushing through my own way and sitting too much on my ego. Only by returning back to kinder ways of thinking, doing this meditation for example, I started to make these connections work again. I again released the thought of always being right and doing things just my way. Last year was a teaching one for me, and thankfully I did learn.
Everyone can relate to this. There isn’t a person on this planet who hasn’t thought negatively about someone or placed some sort of opinions about celebrities which they seem to know from the gossip news. You know, on that mark, the media does make a person look a certain way by discarding other aspects of their personalities. And there is nothing to add to that. When someone is in the eye of the gossipy lens and people feel or say negative things for it, I feel bad. At the end of the day, we’re all the same, and we’re all vulnerable at times.
The same goes for the people in our lives. I know people who get easily upset or who don't ever step in another person’s shoes so to say, and start lashing out, which always underlines the same thing: ‘I am right. What they are saying or doing is wrong, and because I’m currently sitting on my ego, everyone should live and think just like I do.’ I've been like this so many times in my life that I can’t keep count. But nowadays, it's hard for me to listen to people’s loud egos. Sometimes I feel like I should have a sticker on my forehead that says: Live and let live.
And then there are the people who have it amazingly together. The ones who are so patient with themselves and everyone else, and who won’t say one bad thing about anyone, including themselves. I'm in awe of them. I just recently met one person who is like this. The energy they have around them is welcoming, lacking any negativity.
If someone is thinking that they don't need to ever change, fantastic, and good for them. Something like living kind has to be a full-on mental shift and it takes many fall outs. However, the results are remarkable: more patience, deeper relationships and more mindfulness.
Even if it’s tuning your thoughts back every day to ‘how am I feeling about this and that?’ and ‘how should I really react to this person, and not add more negativity in this situation?’, I assure you guys, you will start to gain these great mindful tools once you start this practice.
I wish that you are going to try this Loving-kindness meditation with me. And I have to say, I don't usually like to meditate, because I think I'm too "on the go" of a person to focus through all the thoughts that pile up and clutter the mind with the basic practice of silent meditation. But I will try to implement that in my life this year. However, I do like Loving-kindness, because it gives your mind these tasks to do through the meditation, so I think it's both fun and heart-opening as well as helpful for focusing.
Namaste!
By: Johanna
