Loving Kindness: from Mantra to Prayer
Queen of Cups, 2025
The first meditation practice I ever tried was loving kindness. Well, having spent eight years in Catholic school, I suppose this is not strictly true. But allow me to come back to that later. When I first moved to Brooklyn I had taken a job working for two of my photography idols, Doug & Mike Starn. I had fallen in love with a project of theirs where they photographed moths on large format film, printed them on hundreds of delicate pieces of rice paper forming composites up to 10 feet in scale then pinned those to the wall where they were allowed to slowly deteriorate. I have always been a sucker for the ephemeral.
It was in many ways the worst job of my life. I worked as the studio assistant / receptionist. Whenever someone entered the warehouse they had to pass my desk which was directly below my boss’s office. Every time he heard me laughing with someone he called down with a made-up task. He said if I was laughing I wasn’t working (I was 23 and making $25K a year with no health insurance but my boss didn’t think I should be laughing). Anyway, I worked with this incredible photographer Lisa Elmaleh and she invited me to go to these free mediations at the Tibet House on 15th Street led by Sharon Salzberg. I knew absolutely nothing about buddhism or meditation but it sounded interesting.
The Tibet House is a New York City icon, and I didn’t realize it at the time, but so is Sharon. She had this delightfully down to earth style of teaching where she would share self deprecating stories of her early attempts to meditate in Indian Ashrams in the 70s, then she would laugh uproariously at her own memories. It was exactly Lisa’s and my speed. Over the span of several months she slowly introduced us to the practice of loving kindness. She gave us a mantra to repeat, she noted some typical roadblocks we might encounter, then we sat in silence and gave it a go. May we happy, may we be healthy, may we be peaceful, may we be loved. A seed had been planted.
That was around 2007. It would be three years before I found yoga and another four before I embarked on my own teacher training, but even in my very first attempts at teaching I would often share a short version of loving kindness at the end of a class. I would always say proudly, ‘this is the first meditation practice I was ever taught.’ I would spend no more than five minutes guiding my class through a basic sequence that started with sending love to yourself then slowly expanded to family, friends, community and eventually we sent love to every being in the universe. It wasn’t something I practiced often or regularly, but it was something I came back to time and again for it’s beauty and simplicity.
I come from a line of devout catholics, our practice passed down from my grandmother who had a faith that was quiet yet immovable. All I have to do is imagine her kneeling next to me in prayer and a stillness settles over my heart. I was taught to pray in Catholic school in maybe the only way prayer can be taught to children: rote memorization and the subconscious transmission achieved via saturating our little spirits over and again with the words and the songs. I was told to pray for all the people I love, but without any practical explanation of the how of it so the concept of prayer lived in me as woefully abstract. Loving kindness was like a mapping of the territory. Somatic imprinting matched with guided visualizations. From that dropped in meditative place, imagine a loved one and hold them in your heart. Imagine loving them. How? Give them a hug, allow it to feel real. Perhaps, a kiss. Take it further. Imagine your being awash in white light. Place your hands over their heart and allow the light to pass from your hands to their heart. Imagine their being awash in white light. This, it turns out, is prayer.
Towards the end of the pandemic my Aunt Donna, as part of her lenten practice, decided she’d like to commit to a movement practice. She recruited me to teach a yoga class via zoom and roped in a few other aunts and cousins. The idea of teaching my family intimidated me. I always feel self conscious when I teach. I realized very early on in my teaching journey that whatever plan I had for a class, whatever movement I planned to teach or philosophy I was interested in sharing, immediately went out the window. I found myself at the mercy of the energy in the room. Teaching became one of my first tangible experiences in surrendering to a literal flow. I would start every class with a few moments of silence and ask for guidance then Om three times and let go. It feels more vulnerable than it sounds. I expected teaching my family to feel excruciating.
My aunts don’t need me to teach them how to pray. They were imprinted with the same somatic blessings as I was, and they’ve been committed to their faith for decades. Instead I had the opportunity to share what I learned and bring it back home. I’ve never had more eager students. Of anyone I ever taught they felt no self consciousness whatsoever about meditating together. After all, they’d been praying together their whole lives. And I discovered that my own self consciousness stemmed less from teaching, but from butting up against our culture’s discomfort with prayer. It’s a heavy feeling to guide a room that is psychically resisting you.
I began to work more deeply with loving kindness. At some point in, I realized I no longer need to use a timer or limit myself to five minutes or even use a mantra. I could sit in meditative silence for as long as I wanted and call person after person into my mind and love on them. Memories float up from my depths of people I knew long ago; I send them blessings and well wishes. I hug them or laugh with them. Strangers I encounter as I go about my life: “Have a great day.” This too becomes a prayer. When I went whirling in Turkey, for the first time, I experienced glimpses of what it means to offer love to all beings everywhere. Deeply dropped into a state of ecstatic trance, images of people I haven’t met arose. Glimpses of hospital scenes in Palestine, a mother in Ireland. I held those beings in my heart and shared my light with them too.
It’s easy eighteen years later to look back and see the tapestry of my life thus far woven into a beautiful tapestry. At the time, I could’t foresee that when I decided to move to New York, I would be quietly initiated into a decades long loving kindness practice. Or that that practice would stitch backwards to link with the teaching of my Catholic faith and forward again to link me with the Sufi idea of the Beloved. It’s a golden thread that I have woven step by faithful step, following the yearnings of my heart.
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