Today's free guided meditation comes from the Mental Health Ambassadors initiative at the University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB). Throughout the pandemic, the group has held virtual meditation sessions over Zoom. The one I'm featuring today was hosted on May 27 and posted to YouTube on June 9.

The session is a loving-kindness meditation, and Dr. Kristine Hurst-Wajszczuk appears to treat her audience as new to the practice, as she starts with a disclaimer: "Some of you may initially find this meditation a little bit mushy." My own disclaimer: the sound quality on this video isn't flawless and there's some street noise going on behind her, but I didn't find it too distracting.

I'm often doing these meditation sessions on a Wednesday afternoon after lunch. This may be a mistake. I can find it difficult to keep my posture upright and my mind focused when all I want to do is put my head down on my desk and doze off. Hurst-Wajszczuk's steady pace helped keep my attention, as she moved right from a brief instruction on breath focus to the loving-kindness portion of the session. (She seems to know her audience is not filled with seasoned meditators who can sit for long periods of silence.)

She starts by instructing us to cultivate feelings of loving-kindness for a person whom we love or with whom we have a very close relationship. I found it interesting that she started with this person and then moved on to cultivating loving-kindness for ourselves. I appreciated not having to establish feelings of warmth and kindness to myself right away. (I want to put some work in and earn it first!) For this loved one and then for ourselves, the message was the same: "May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be at peace. May you be free from suffering."

Now that we're feeling good from building ourselves up with loving-kindness, Hurst-Wajszczuk asks us to extend those same affirmations to someone we don't know particularly well, and then someone with whom we have a contentious relationship. (Though, not our "worst enemy," she says.) She doesn't say it specifically, but I find it's helpful not to think too deeply about whom to select. For each category, I focused on the first person who came to my mind and let go of any misgivings about wishing them health, happiness, peace, and freedom from suffering.

Over time, I've found that meditating on those with whom I don't get along doesn't bring me into a negative frame of mind. Where I used to resist this portion of a loving-kindness meditation and find myself consumed with the feelings that person brings up in me, I now see it as an essential component of getting myself into a more magnanimous space.

Finally, Hurst-Wajszczuk asks us to extend this loving-kindness from our personal space out into the world. We start with just the building where we live or our neighborhood, before expanding it to everyone in the state and, finally, the whole world.

Again, she moves a bit faster than most other guides in loving-kindness meditation, and I imagine this is connected to her audience (or the fact that she's not physically with anyone and can't adequately judge the mood in the room). Nevertheless, the speed allowed me to keep a pretty vivid visualization in my head of these positive, loving feelings moving out into the world, through all the people I know, and the huge number that I don't.

Following the meditation, Hurst-Wajszczuk speaks briefly about what loving-kindness means to her, and how she believes we need to take it a step further, into positive acts that can sustain those we care about and those we don't even know.

She brings up the Hebrew word "Chesed," which is often translated to "loving-kindness," but can also be broadly used to describe acts of kindness toward humanity. Though loving-kindness is, in general, a good thing, and we would all benefit from being a little bit nicer to each other – especially when the alternative is this – the world needs more than kindness right now. It needs action.

This practice can inspire us to take more sustainable and positive actions, showing loving-kindness to be a force for good and not just a generally-pleasant feeling.