This episode was supported by the John Templeton Foundation Initiative,

Spreading Love Through the Media.

I'm Dacher Keltner, welcome to Happiness Break,

where we take a few minutes out of our day to cultivate things like calm, kindness, and compassion for ourselves and others.

Research shows that strong, loving relationships are key to our mental and physical

health, bringing us joy and a sense of security. When we feel a deep sense of love for

others, our bodies release oxytocin, the love neurochemical, and that helps strengthen

emotional bonding and trust. We also experience a surge of dopamine contributing to pleasure and the rewards of social

interactions and also serotonin which can help regulate our moods.

So today we're doing a practice to tap into a transcendent form of love.

Guiding us is Henry Schuppmann, a poet, mindfulness teacher,

and author of Original Love, The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening. Here's Henry. In this meditation, we're going to explore what I mean by the term original love.

Many meditation traditions speak of original nature as some kind of substrate of experience

that can be found through meditation,

where there is much less separation between things, where there's a kind of common ground

that all beings perhaps share. There are different ways it's described, but it's something that all of us can

actually experience in our sitting from time to time. I think of it as a very loving place.

It's a place where we feel extremely connected and as primates, we really need to feel connected in order to feel safe.

And the idea that we meditate kind of alone, that mindfulness is a practice we need to do

in a solitary way is, I believe, not quite right.

I think it's a key part of mindfulness practice to actually discover how connected we already are to the world we're in.

You know, we're made of the same stuff.

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