Living Lovingkindness

Living Lovingkindness is an online meditation workshop led by Sharon Salzberg, offered through Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. It is a program of lovingkindness and compassion practice for anyone who feels cut off or caught in their own thoughts and wants to learn to meet difficulty, and joy, with a steadier and kinder heart. It is held over Zoom, so you can take part from wherever you are.

What to Expect

The workshop is built from three elements: teaching talks, guided meditations, and live question and answer. The central idea is that lovingkindness and compassion let us open to suffering, our own and other people's, without being engulfed by it. The program also makes room for taking in the joy in life, which can feel out of place in hard times. Over the course of the workshop, the aim is for our words, hearts, and actions to line up with a larger vision rather than the smaller views that anxious, fearful thoughts push us toward.

The program runs as two sessions on consecutive days, each from 9:30am to 12:30pm Pacific Time. The first session opens with teaching, guided meditation, and Q&A. The second continues with further instruction, practice, and inquiry. Even if kindness has not been the habit of a lifetime, the invitation is to cultivate the ability to abide in its power.

About Sharon Salzberg

Sharon Salzberg is a New York Times bestselling author and one of the first teachers to bring mindfulness and lovingkindness meditation into mainstream American culture, more than fifty years ago. She was born in New York City and grew up in a Jewish family. After losing her mother as a teenager, she went looking for understanding through spiritual practice, and travelled to India after high school, where she first encountered meditation and immersed herself in Buddhist teaching and mindfulness.

In 1975 she co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, which has become a pivotal center for mindfulness and meditation practice in the West. She is known for inspiring generations of meditation teachers.

Before You Go

No prior meditation experience is needed. The workshop suits people new to lovingkindness practice as well as experienced meditators who want to go deeper. It is taught in English, in the Buddhist and Insight Meditation tradition.

Registration includes both live sessions, the guided lovingkindness and compassion meditations, the teaching talks, the Q&A, and unlimited access to the recording, which becomes available about ten days after the program. Meals and printed materials are not included, as this is an online program.

Pricing is on a sliding scale, with scholarship rates for BIPOC participants, young adults, and those practicing mudita or karuna. Spirit Rock asks people to pay at the highest rate they can afford, since this supports scholarships and the teachers. No one is turned away for lack of funds, as space allows. If the program fills early, a waiting list is created.