Street Lovingkindness. A short, thought-provoking video from Sharon Salzberg on bringing lovingkindness to the stress of standing in line.
Does anyone like to wait in line? It’s annoying getting stuck at the post office or waiting endlessly in line at the store. Sharon meets these moments of stress with lovingkindness in her video “Standing in Line”. Who knows… next time you might even choose to stand in the long line!
About Street Lovingkindness
Metta meditation, also known as loving-kindness meditation, is the simple practice of cultivating friendliness and good will towards other people – helping us see that they are not ultimately different from us.
We all react to events in life differently, based on our psychological make up. Similarly, when we interact with other people, we do so by default from our own perspective.
Have you noticed that, even though we think we have an unbiased view of the people we know, we can’t help but react to them based on how compatible their psychological make up is to ours?
This is the same for everybody. We all have people we like and dislike in our lives, but we don’t fully choose whom we like and dislike, because that is shaped by our temperament and conditioning – that is, by the way we happen to be. The same is true for them.
Metta meditation helps us connect with what’s the same in all of us beyond our conditioning; but it also encourages us to recognize and cherish everyone’s uniqueness. It teaches us to let everyone be as they are.
We all struggle with challenges in life, but despite our differences, we can recognize what’s the same in all of us and wish it well in everyone we meet. This Street Lovingkindness meditation can be a simple way to bring the classic Metta meditation practice into our daily life.
About Sharon Salzberg
Sharon Salzberg is a New York Times bestselling author and meditation teacher, and a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. Her own site describes her as among the first to bring mindfulness and lovingkindness meditation to mainstream American culture.
The practices of mindfulness and loving kindness skills training are the foundations of her work.
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