May you be well

This is the oldest practice in the chamber and one of the simplest. It's also the one with the most research behind it.

Loving-kindness, metta in the Buddhist tradition, is the practice of wishing wellbeing, deliberately and in order, to yourself, then to someone you love, then to a neutral person, then to someone you find difficult, and finally to all beings. The phrases are plain: may you be safe, may you be well, may you be at ease. You sit, you bring each person to mind, and you wish it for them, over and over, until something in you softens.

It's two and a half thousand years old. In 2008 a researcher named Barbara Fredrickson ran a careful trial of a seven-week loving-kindness course on working adults and found measurable increases in daily positive emotion, purpose, social support, and physical health. The finding has been repeated many times since. The practice works, and it works on the person doing the wishing.

Why it's in Awareness: because the practice is really about where your attention goes when it meets another person. Most of us meet people with a quick, unconscious judgment, and then we attend to the judgment instead of the person. Metta retrains that. You practice, in the quiet, meeting a difficult person with a wish for their wellbeing, and then one day you meet them in the hallway and the wish gets there first.

I'll tell you the hardest person to wish well for, in my experience and in the research. It isn't the enemy. It's yourself. Most people have to be coached through the first phrase. Start there anyway.