Starting your day with a loving kindness meditation can help you cultivate gratitude for others, feel at peace, and send good intentions to those you love. Here’s how to send love from a distance:
First, begin in a comfortable seated position. Sit down on a cushion, chair, or mat. Ground your sitting bones down, lengthen through the sides of your waist, and extend the crown of your head up to the ceiling.
When you are ready, close your eyes. Take a few cycles of breath, breathing in and out naturally.
Now, be aware of the rhythm of your inhalations and exhalations. Focus on the breath until you feel more centered.
Start to imagine a warm pink glow at the center of your chest. First, let it start out as a small firefly-sized flicker, and then feel it grow bigger and more expansive. Then, allow this pink glow to carry feelings of love, compassion, and peace.
Then, let this light spread across the rest of your body. Notice how the light makes you feel, and how your body responds to it. After, allow yourself to feel softer, lighter, and more at ease.
Now, begin to visualize somebody that you love and care for. This can be a loved one, a friend, or maybe even a pet. This person or animal may be alive or have passed. Don’t think too much–let whoever comes to mind be your focus for today’s meditation.
Send the light to that person. Imagine the light cascading from your body and into the room that you’re in, visualizing that very light flowing out of your space and towards that person. Afterwards, see your loved one surrounded by that light.
Next, continue to visualize your loved one being surrounded and embraced by this loving light. Feel that same sense of softness, lightness, ease, and peace in that person as well. Allow yourself to feel connected and united with your loved one.
When you feel that it’s time to ease out of your meditation, let go of that image. Then, gradually allow the light to return back into your space and into your body.
Feel yourself receive the same love that you’ve given your loved one, remembering that self-love is essential too.
Slowly, let this stark, bright radiance gradually fade into a soft glow–until it is no more than the size of a firefly, of a pinprick.
Finally, to end your meditation, start to refocus your attention back to your breath. Wiggle your fingers and your toes. Feel your body once again rooted to the earth. Open your eyes. If you want to remember how to send love from a distance, refer back to this meditation.
First published in September 2020; updated January 2022
