It is really all in the title.
According to my meditation app, I’ve just earned a 15-week streak badge.
Fifteen weeks of daily meditation.
I’m a sucker for badges (even digital ones), so I was quietly chuffed.
I don’t follow a strict plan. Each day I just open the app and do whatever meditation shows up. At the moment, I’m using Happier, and a common theme across many of the sessions is loving-kindness.
In a loving-kindness meditation, you bring to mind people who are struggling. Sometimes people you know. Sometimes people you don’t. Sometimes people in general.
You notice the pain they’re experiencing…. and then you try to make contact with the part (or parts) of you that wish them freedom from that struggle.
You sit in that space.
Full contact with the reality of suffering.
And full contact with the wish to alleviate it.
It’s easy to do this with people you love.
With practice, it can even become possible with people you don’t.
What you’re really doing, I think, is building the capacity to keep caring — even in the face of a lot of suffering.
And that’s not easy.
In the face of suffering, our more automatic responses are often to turn away, to distance ourselves, to avoid. We might become angry, cynical, or resentful.
That’s understandable. Those reactions make sense. In any given moment, in any given day, you’ll likely find me in one of those states.
But they’re probably not places from which we’re able to take particularly wise or helpful action in the world.
Kindness is not an easy state to sustain when you’re paying attention to how hard things are — personally, socially, globally.
Which is why it isn’t just a feeling.
It’s a practice.
And as we move into the holiday season, my practice includes writing this brief post.
I don’t know what you’ll be doing while you’re on break.
But I do know that I want you to be happy, safe, healthy, and to live with ease.
See you in 2026.
