A Vast Amount of Kindness

“What the world needs now is love sweet love
No not just for some, but for everyone”
—Hal David, Burt Bacharach

I’ve been doing a lot of loving kindness meditation lately, and I had a bit of a revelation the other day.

I use the Insight Timer app as a timer when I meditate. When you open the app, it tells you how may people are using the app around the world at that moment.

For example, at our Tuesday night practice (a truly wonderful community of people that come together for a short meditation on Tuesday evenings by phone and zoom - join us!), there were 11,000 other people using the app at that moment. Eleven thousand! And we know that that number just represented the people who happened to be meditating when we opened the app. Over the course of our 30 min practice, many people would finish their meditation, and others would start theirs, so maybe there were really 50,000 people whose meditation overlapped with ours. Just using that one meditation app! We know that there are many other apps, and that many people don’t use an app when they meditate. So maybe there were 500,000 or more people meditating with us over the course of that 30 minutes.

We also know that there are many, many forms of meditation. But even when we do other forms of meditation (Body Scan, Breathing, Equanimity) many people, myself included, like to end our practice with some form of a kind wish for all beings.

So, we can image that at some point around the time that we were sending loving kindness out around the world through our practice on Tuesday evening, hundreds of thousands of people might have been sending loving kindness out from their practices to all beings….

…And since we fall in the bucket of “all beings”, that love and kindness was being sent our way.

What a shift in perspective this was compared to the fear and division that are being peddled in the name of news and information! Whatever form of media we choose to use, we need to understand that it is just a straw through which we are being shown the world. The bigger, more complete picture is more loving, more kind, and more connected.

And it feels good, really, really good, to pause and let that sink in every once in a while.

So let’s remember that, and do what we can to remind others, too. We are loved, we are connected. We are kind, and we love. There is a vast amount of kindness in this world. And we can always add more.

May you feel loved and connected,
Your CMP family