Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. This guided meditation with Thubten Chodron cultivates loving-kindness by first clarifying what happiness truly means. She distinguishes two kinds: the temporary satisfaction of food, friends, and reputation, and the deeper happiness that comes through spiritual realizations and freeing the mind from disturbing attitudes. The meditation begins with generating love for yourself without guilt, wishing yourself both worldly wellbeing and spiritual accomplishment. You then extend that warm feeling progressively outward — to close friends and family, to strangers you’ve encountered in past lives, and finally to those who have harmed you, recognizing their actions stem from their own unhappiness. The practice closes by resting the mind in that pervasive loving-kindness embracing all sentient beings.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 36 GM.mp3
UUID: e7a02b57-35a4-42f7-8a7d-57f14e91d729
Teacher: Thubten Chodron Guided Med
Collection: Guided Meditation (Thubten Chodron Guided Med)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~662
When we think about the kindness of others and the benefits that derive from cherishing them, then our heart really begins to open up and generate a sense of loving kindness for other living beings. So love here simply means the wish for others to be happy and to have the causes of happiness. There’s no connotation of clinging. There’s no connotation of expectation, and there’s no connotation of a permanent everlasting relationship. But simply from our side, towards everybody impartially having a sense of goodwill and wanting them to have happiness in its causes.
Before we begin generating love for ourself and others, it’s helpful first to think of what is happiness. If we’re going to wish happiness for ourselves and others, we have to have an idea of what happiness is first. So just think a minute or two on your own about what you consider happiness, what it is you want to wish for yourself and others. The Buddha spoke about two kinds of happiness. One is temporal happiness, the happiness we have in this life from having food and clothing and friends, reputation.
And the second kind of happiness is the happiness that comes through having spiritual realizations. Realizations. In other words, through freeing the mind from the disturbing attitudes and generating all the good qualities. So as we do this meditation, wishing happiness for self and others, think of these two kinds of happiness and wish for them. So begin by generating love for yourself, wishing yourself to be well and happy, to have not only the good things in life, but also all the spiritual realizations.
And so think a little bit about that, what that means, what it would take, and let yourself wish yourself well. Sometimes people have difficulty doing that. They feel like they don’t deserve it or that they’re being selfish, but that’s not really the case. We’re one of all sentient beings, so it’s perfectly alright to wish ourselves to be well and happy. So you may think of the things in this life that you wish for yourself, but don’t stop there.
Really wish for yourself to gain all the realizations of the path and imagine how happy you’d be if you did. And then spread that feeling of love towards the people you’re already fond of, various family members and friends, and wish them to be well and happy. So you can think of specific people, what they lack, and wanting them to have that. And remember to wish them not only the good things in this life, but to wish them the happiness that comes to Dharma practice, the happiness that comes through freeing the mind from the disturbing attitudes. So as you’re thinking about this, you can also visualize them having all of this happiness.
And then spread that feeling of love towards people who you don’t know, at least not in this life. But remember that in previous lives, they’ve been your mother. They’ve been kind, and that you do have a connection with them. And then wish them well. Wish them to have happiness within cyclic existence and the happiness that comes through transcending cyclic existence.
So really imagine them having that happiness and then feeling happy about it yourself. And then extend that feeling of love also to the people who have harmed you or the people who you don’t get along with. And remember that they do the things that we find objectionable precisely because they’re unhappy. If they were happy, they would be completely different. So especially towards the people that you’ve held bad feelings for in the past, try and really wish them to be happy and also to have the happiness that’s beyond cyclic existence, the happiness of liberation and enlightenment.
And so just let your mind rest in that feeling of love for all the sentient beings. Let that feeling permeate you as it extends out and encompasses everybody.