I’ve been in many rooms where people talk about loving-kindness as though it’s pleasant. A warm glow, a softening of the chest, a feeling of goodwill spreading outward like ripples on water. That is not what happened to me.
What happened to me was ugly crying on a meditation cushion. Heaving, embarrassing, completely unpractised crying. Hot tears, the practice entirely forgotten, just me sitting there feeling ashamed and sorry for myself. Not exactly what the brochure promised.
For a long time I assumed something was wrong. My guides gently encouraged me to look for answers instead. What I found changed how I understand both the practice and myself.
Buddhist teacher Khandro Rinpoche says that the attitude of kindness and compassion is always born from recognising how much you are at the receiving end of others’ kindness. When you ignore that fact, she says, you develop “a very individualistic, hardened, island kind of a mind.”
When I heard that teaching, it landed. I’d felt like the one who was giving for most of my adult life. In close relationships, at work, in most exchanges. The only place I ever felt like a receiver was with teachers and guides. And even then, I kept a mental ledger I wasn’t fully aware of. Not a literal scorecard, but something close enough.
The transactional framing went deeper than relationships. When I tried to extend it further – to the farmer who grew my food, the truck driver who moved it, the person at the till who handed it over – I got stuck. They were being paid. So how did any of that count as kindness? My definition had requirements: benevolence had to be voluntary and uncompensated to qualify. Everything else was just commerce.
The universe, as it turns out, had a different definition.
I was attending a live transmission in Thailand. Alone, without knowing a soul, in a hall of at least five hundred people – mostly Thai and Chinese nationals, an ocean of faces and a language I did not speak. I was possibly the only Indian person there.
Due to a miscommunication about equipment, I’d arrived without earphones for a segment that required a translation app. So I sat there unable to participate, and the thoughts started up immediately. The money I’d spent travelling. The leave I’d taken from work. The poor organisation. The things I should have checked. A tidy loop of self-referential frustration, each thought feeding the next.
Then my neighbour leaned over. A Thai woman I’d never met. She asked if I was managing, realised I wasn’t, and without hesitation offered me her earphones for the entire session. She didn’t need them – live Thai translation was being provided – so she could follow along without them.
A small thing, you might say. And in one sense, yes. But I know myself well enough to know that if the situation had been reversed, I would have hesitated. I would have turned the hygiene consideration over in my mind. I barely share earphones with my husband. Handing them to a stranger would have been unthinkable.
I asked her several times if she was sure. When I finally accepted, my eyes filled up. For a few minutes I couldn’t hear what was being said in the teaching because of the rush of emotion. It took a while for my nervous system to settle.
Had no one ever been kind to me before? Of course they had. I’d simply been so consumed in my own thoughts that I’d missed it. My threat perception of the world had built an armour solid enough to keep most of it out.
The crying on the cushion kept happening every time I engaged in compassion practices. I went looking for an explanation, partly because the shame was becoming its own obstacle.
Meditation lowers cortical distraction. As the noise of the thinking mind quiets, the limbic system finally gets the space to process what it never could during the ordinary busy-ness of life. Practices like open awareness, body scanning, and loving-kindness quiet the cortex before the limbic system has built enough capacity to stay within its window of tolerance.
From a nervous system perspective, stillness removes external regulation. When attention turns inward, the body sometimes responds – this is too much, too fast. Without adequate resource built up, the system floods. The sadness and grief that were waiting for conditions to feel safe enough finally emerge. And then overshoot the window.
When I offered myself compassionate phrases – “May I be safe. May I be held. May I be loved” – my nervous system heard something else underneath: where was this when I needed it?
The tears were not weakness or instability. They were attachment grief meeting warmth for the first time.
Without enough resource, compassion can tip into flooding, collapse, and shame. The question “Why can’t I handle loving-kindness?” is itself a symptom of the same wound the practice is trying to reach.
I’ve written before about how progress in meditation rarely looks like bliss. It tends to look more like a slightly shorter recovery time after an argument, or noticing that something which would have ruined your week now only ruins your afternoon. It is incremental and quiet and mostly invisible until one day it isn’t.
What I understand now is that compassion, when it finally meets the body rather than staying in the head, is potent. And potency requires pacing, not avoidance. The answer to being flooded by loving-kindness is not to skip the practice but to build more resource first. Grounding before opening. Stability before softness.
It also requires unlearning the transactional model. Recognising that kindness is not a ledger, and that receiving is not weakness. That the farmer and the truck driver and the woman with the earphones are all part of the same web – and that I am too. Khandro Rinpoche says that ignoring this fact is what makes compassion difficult. I’d been ignoring it for decades.
I still have moments on the cushion where the tears come. Less frequently now, and with less shame attached to them. Each time, I try to remember that they are information, not failure. The nervous system processing what it finally feels safe enough to process.
Compassion is no longer abstract for me. It lives in the body now. And the body, as it turns out, has been keeping receipts all along.