2025-02-06
8 分钟This episode was supported by the John Templeton Foundation Initiative, Spreading Love Through the Media.
I'm Dacher Kiltner.
Welcome to Happiness Break, where we take a few minutes out of our day to cultivate things like calm,
kindness, and compassion for ourselves and others.
Research shows that strong, loving relationships are key to our mental and physical health,
bringing us joy and a sense of security.
When we feel a deep sense of love for others, our bodies release oxytocin,
the love neurochemical, and that helps strengthen emotional bonding and trust.
We also experience a surge of dopamine contributing to pleasure and the rewards of social interactions and also serotonin,
which can help regulate our moods.
So today, we're doing a practice to tap into a transcendent form of love.
Guiding us is Henry Schupman, a poet, mindfulness teacher,
and author of Original Love, The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening.
Here's Henry.
In this meditation, we're going to explore what I mean by the term original love.
Many meditation traditions speak of original nature as some kind of substrate of experience that can be found through meditation,
where there is much less separation between things, where there's a kind of common ground that all beings perhaps share.
There are different ways it's described,
but it's something that all of us can actually experience in our sitting from time to time.
I think of it as a very loving place.