Ikigai Thought for Today: Kindness Meditation
Audio narration by David Marlow
Transcript:
David Marlow: [00:00:00] Here's your Ikigai thought for today. Kindness meditation.
I want to introduce you to a concept called kindness meditation or kindness prayer. The idea is simply to speak thoughts and expressions of kindness to yourself, to those around you, and to the world.
It's this very simple process, and something that can be done in minutes. You can say it to yourself quietly in your head, or you can say it out loud. You can literally say it to others, or you can, again, pray or pray it to them. So I'm just going to introduce a couple of phrases for you today to get you started. The first one is…
May you be loved.
May you be happy.
May you be strong.
May you use your gifts to make the world better.
May you be free from suffering.
Now, you can use that as a prayer for those around you. For example, I've been praying that, or meditating on it, whatever your preferred [00:01:00] designation is, over my grandchildren. A simple prayer of…may you be loved. I just that for them, that they would be loved in their life.
They'd be happy in their life. They'd be strong and be able to use their gifts. And they'd be free from suffering.
You can say that to yourself.
May I be loved.
May I be happy.
May I be strong.
May I use my gifts to make the world better, and may it be free from suffering.
One last one to experiment with.
May you be safe. May you feel content. May you feel strong. May you live with ease. And most of all, may you quest well.
Focusing our thoughts on this way can really reframe how we experience the things that happen to us (or that we get to do) in daily life. I've made it part of my practice to extend that into what things that day are examples of what and who I am grateful for. I wake up the next morning already in a better state of mind than I would have been.