Welcome to Commune, a global wellness community and online course platform featuring some of the world's greatest teachers.

We are on a mission to inspire, heal, pass down wisdom, and bring the world closer together. My name is Jeff Krasno.

Today's lesson on meta, or loving kindness, which includes a guided meditation, is an excerpt from

Sharon Salzberg's commune course, Compassionate Resilience. At its heart, loving kindness is a practice

meant to give us the tools to love in the face of fear, to know that even in our hardest moments,

love is a state of being that can be cultivated. To access the full compassionate resilience course,

try commune membership free for 14 days

at Onecommun.com slash trial.

And with that, I hope you enjoy this lesson and meditation

with Sharon Salzberg.

Thank you. lesson and meditation with Sharon Salzburg.

Welcome back. Today we're going to talk about loving kindness, most particularly offering it and receiving it ourselves. So loving kindness is the common term for what in the Buddhist tradition is called M-A-M-A-T-T-A. It's usually translated as loving-kindness, sometimes as love, sometimes as my preference,

which is the force of connection. We talk about loving kindness, not in terms of, say, liking somebody or approving of them, but having this bone-deep recognition

that our lives are connected. And for ourselves, it's a way of appreciating our potential.

It said that no matter what we've gone through, no matter who we are, what our history,

or what we may yet go through,

there is within us this possibility of growth, of change, of clarity, of love, of connection.

And so we practice loving kindness as a way of affirming that truth.

I've often been approached by scholars and translators and asked,

well, why say loving kindness?

It's such an odd term.

It's not something, say, if you go to a coffee shop,

...