Lovingkindness
Sharon Salzberg · 1995
Lovingkindness (1995) is a book by Sharon Salzberg on mindfulness & inner peace. Sharon Salzberg's classic guide to metta, the Buddhist practice of lovingkindness, and its companion states, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, offered as trainable skills for a happiness that doesn't depend on getting what you want.
It reframes love as a skill you can train like a muscle, and hands you the exact phrases a 2,500-year-old tradition uses to widen the heart from yourself all the way out to your enemy.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Lovingkindness pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- **Metta is not a feeling you must manufacture** but a directed intention: you silently repeat phrases of goodwill, planting seeds, and trust the warmth to ripen on its own rather than forcing it.
- The Buddha taught that if you searched the entire world you would not find anyone more deserving of your love than yourself, so **self-love is the foundation of the practice**, not selfishness, and for most Westerners it is the hardest place to begin, not the easiest.
The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 9 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- The Revolutionary Art of Happiness
- No One More Deserving Than Yourself
- The Practice: Phrases and Categories
- Metta: Dissolving the Illusion of Separateness
- Karuna: The Heart That Trembles
- Mudita: Joy in the Happiness of Others
- Upekkha: The Spaciousness of Equanimity
- Generosity, Faith, and the Underground Spring
- Meeting the Enemy: Forgiveness and the Full Circle
Finish Lovingkindness tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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