The Buddhist Antidote to Anxiety: A Live Meditation Miniseries

Last day today at 4:00 PM

UPDATE: The last day of the miniseries is today, Friday May 23rd. I’ll be going live at 4pm ET to wrap up this series on the Brahma Viharas—you can catch up on the past four days and get all the info below. Hope to see you later. IPMF.

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To state the blazingly obvious, we live in anxious, angry, unstable times.

Which poses an urgent question

In the face of the chaos, how do you want to be?

There are lots of options: you can engage in all-caps activism on social media; you can self-medicate with booze, shopping, or food; you can put your head in the sand; etcetera. The menu of dysfunction is vast.

The Buddha, however, offered a smarter alternative.He designed a meditation practice specifically as an antidote to anxiety. It goes by the supremely treacly name of “loving-kindness.” I prefer to call it by its ancient Pali name, metta, which can also be translated as “friendliness.”

The basic gist is that the opposite of fear—the root of most anxiety—is love. I know, I know…this raises a whole bunch of questions, such as: does this cheesy shit work?

The short answer is yes. There is research to show that this practice— which of all sending good vibes to people you care about, people you don’t, and maybe the hardest of all: yourself—has psychological, physiological, and behavioral benefits, all of which can equip you to better handle our modern dumpster fire.

And loving-kindness is actually just one of four related practices, known as the Brahma Viharas, or the “divine abodes.” Again, not the type of language that usually appeals to me, but I’ve spent many years testing out these practices in the laboratory of my own mind and have found them to be immensely useful.

So, every afternoon at 4:00PM ET, from Monday May 19th through Friday the 23rd, I’ll walk you through one of these four divine abodes:

• Day 1: loving-kindness (metta—as described above).

• Day 2: compassion (karuna—how to engage with the world without being overwhelmed by it).

• Day 3: sympathetic joy (mudita—how to not give into envy, and all the pain that comes with it).

• Day 4: equanimity (upekkha—how to keep perspective and calm when things go to shit).

• Day 5: We’ll double down on whichever abode feels appropriate.

Every day, you’ll get an email when I go live, and you can join me via the Substack app or on your desktop. I’ll do a short talk at the beginning of each session, then we’ll do a 10-minute meditation, followed by Q&A. I'll also post the recording so you can revisit the session whenever you need it.

Like any good drug dealer, the first hit is free—Monday's session is open to everyone. The following four days will be for paid subscribers only.

And as a paid subscriber, you'll also get access to an open chat thread throughout the week where you can ask questions and connect with others. (I'll be active there too.)

Join us. The world is insane, but you don’t have to be.