About the Loving-Kindness Path

Meditation comes in many forms, but from a scientific perspective, meditation is a process of training the mind and brain to attain or hold various conditions. Given the incredible breadth of possible conditions that the brain and mind could hold, that means that there are undoubtedly a vast number of different ways to meditate. 

Loving-kindness meditation is specifically aimed at training the mind and brain to turn readily towards love and care. The goal, as we practice loving and being loved, is that they should increasingly become our default postures. Neuroscientists sometimes say that “neurons that fire together wire together”, meaning that the more we do something – like love or be loved – the more likely it becomes that the brain can and will do that same thing again. So our brains become used to loving the more we love.

When Jesus was asked the greatest commandment, he pointed to the command to love God and your neighbor, noting that all of the scriptures of his time could be boiled down to just those things, so when we practice loving-kindness meditation, we are hopefully training ourselves towards fulfilling “all the Law and the Prophets” and taking on Jesus’s way of being in the world. God loved the world; to be like God, we should become ready, able, and perhaps even eager to do the same.