Hello and welcome to the Metta Hour podcast with Sharon Salzberg. I'm Lily Cushman. I produce this

podcast. And we're coming to you today with episode 270, which is the second of a two-part episode

from the archives, loving kindness and difficult circumstances.

This was recorded in the early 2010s when Sharon paid a visit to Asheville, North Carolina, for a weekend

teaching on loving kindness and difficult circumstances. So today is part two. If you're just

tuning into this, you might want to go back to episode 269 and catch the first half of the teaching.

So in this part, Sharon dives into all things loving kindness, starting with the word loving kindness and the translation from

meta, M-E-T-T-A, which of course you know is the name of this podcast but also happens to be on the top of the

building of the Insight Meditation Society and Sharon tells that story of how that came to be.

She looks at a lot of the cultural baggage of the word love in our society and some of the difficulties around how you

translate the word meta into English, how different people do that and some of its different

meanings. She goes on to talk about how we can look for the good and some of the bias that we have in this culture

around kind of denying joyful, good, and positive experiences, and how important that is

in the broader context of our well-being. She shares some hilarious stories about how to make a gratitude

list and a lot of our conditioning around gratitude, how we're biased to look for the negative,

look for the bad. And she also tells her only joke in this podcast, so look out for that.

The recording goes on to take some questions from audience members, covering a whole variety of things, some specifics about how we can balance concentration and practice,

how we can work with the space between the breath when we're doing breath meditation,

and then some broader questions like how we can find openness despite our conditioning,

how we can let go of grievances, as well as the Buddhist approach to intention and motivation.

So let's dive right in.

This is loving kindness in difficult circumstances, part two.

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