Compassion - Bridging Practice and Science - page 317

be safe. May all beings live with ease”, while simultaneously nurturing positive loving emotions
towards the target of their meditation and visualizing sending the emotions towards the target.
While metta does not focus exclusively on relieving suffering, it is still a kind of compassion
meditation where the meditator’s intention is that others will feel joy and peace[28].Through the
process of intentionally generating warm and loving feelings for others, practitioners increase their
“daily diet” of positive emotions and social closeness, with consequences for mental and physical
health.
Loving-kindness meditation nurtures mental health by increasing the frequency or intensity of
positive emotional experiences. In one longitudinal study, participants were assigned to meditation
or to a monitoring waitlist control condition and provided daily reports of their positive emotions for
nine weeks. Participants assigned to learn loving-kindness attended weekly hour-long group
meditation workshops led by an experienced loving-kindness teacher. They also received a guided
meditation CD and encouragement to practice independently throughout the week. Participants in
the waitlist condition received no training, but were offered the chance of receiving meditation
training after the study had ended[29].
Meditators increased in positive emotions over the course of the study, while participants in the
control condition did not show any change. Significantly, in addition to the effect of condition,
positive emotions also increased with time spent meditating. In other words, participants who
reported spending more time in meditation over the course of the study showed greater increases
in positive emotions, suggesting that the benefits of loving-kindness were due to the meditation
itself and not contextual factors such as the teacher or spending time learning in a group.
Increases in daily positive emotions in turn predicted growth in a range of resources, including
mindfulness, positive social relations, environmental mastery and self-reported physical health.
These gains in resources were consequential for participants, in that they accounted for improved
life satisfaction and reduced depressive symptoms [29].
Figure 1. Loving-kindness meditation increases positive emotions over seven weeks of training. The effects persisted
at a measurement taken one week after training.
Loving-kindness meditation may also improve physical health through increases in both social
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