Loving-Kindness: A Tiny Meditation Guide for All Beginners

My first book, Loving-Kindness: A Tiny Meditation Guide for All Beginners is now available everywhere books are sold!

Order from your local book store to support your local bookstore, or just paste in Loving-Kindness: A Tiny Meditation Guide for All Beginners in the search box of your favorite online retailer.

If you have any curiosity about meditation and specifically loving-kindness meditation, I invite you to take a look. It offers guidance I wish I had years ago, before I was even a teenager, when it was becoming clear that growing into a being I wanted to be required skills I didn’t have and didn’t know how to learn.

Back then, meditation wasn’t being taught at my school or home. Even in Japan, where I was growing up, meditation was a bit esoteric, the pursuit of religious professionals and enthusiasts.

Thanks to those enthusiasts, meditation is now common place. Perhaps too much. Sanitized for use in the wellness industry, and promoted for its promise of greater happiness, meditation has become a “product” that makes people money.

But context and values matter.

I used to subscribe to a meditation app that offered a ten minute guided-meditation every day. It made “meditating” super easy. Just find ten minutes and a space to relax, put on a headset and close my eyes, and tada! A box in my to-do list checked-off! But whether the experience was actually calming or meditative was hit or miss. The messages in the guided meditation would annoy, anger, and alarm me. Poison can come in the form of soothing well-intentioned massages of inspiration and wisdom.

It takes more effort to identify and articulate your values and to guide yourself in meditation. And it’s well-worth the effort, if only to know that you don’t need gurus or gadgets to find peace, calm, or happiness.

And if you value loving-kindness, you may wish to practice it.

My first instinct in writing this note was to apologize: the book is not perfect, and all the infrastructure the goes around publishing a book, a website etc., are not in place. But this just shows how much room I have to grow in my practice of loving-kindness. And that is why I wrote the book: to remember what I need to remember and to share what is valuable to me just in case you might find it valuable too.

AND — As a bonus the book includes lovely hand-drawn illustrations of people meditating by artist Sophie Northcott! She is currently working on adding color to your drawings, for a future full-color edition.