Loving kindness. We all need it.

In the free Insight Timer app (available for ios and adroid), you can find short, 6-minute and 10-minute guided loving kindness meditations offered and led by Sharon Salzberg.

Loving kindness meditations involve silently repeating to yourself phrases that offer a benevolent or caring expression of the heart toward yourself and toward others. As Sharon Salzberg describes, these phrases are “an offering, a gift-giving…a blessing for yourself” (quote from early on in the 6-minute version of a loving kindness meditation led by her on Insight Timer).

When you orient yourself toward doing something nourishing—doing something that is oriented toward nourishment—try to do this thing without expectation or need for a certain outcome but rather with curiosity, with care, noticing what your experience is during and after, noticing also what your experience is between a string of nourishing things, however short the string or however long.