Loving Kindness

I mostly picked up Sharon Salzberg's Loving Kindness simply because it was our shelf already.  It's a perfectly nice book with all kinds of thoughtful suggestions about how to have a more positive perspective on your self, others, and the world.  If you are primarily interested in meditation as a means of reducing stress and other negative emotions, it might especially appeal to you.  Since that's no longer really my primary motivation with meditation, the book didn't strike that much of a chord with me. 

In addition to the fairly general how-to-relate-to-the-world-more-positively type thoughts, the book details the basic phrase-based loving-kindness meditation, and gives various exercises surrounding it.  Maybe I'm overly focused on meditation technique these days, but these exercises seemed to me the most valuable part.  For example, I had not spent a great deal of time reflecting on the directedness of metta -- the way you are asked to orient your loving-kindness towards yourself, then towards a benefactor, a friend, a neural person, and a difficult person, and finally to all beings.  This always seemed to me like a sort of obvious great chain of being way of approaching the mystical oneness of the universe.  As if it was just the same metta drawn with a bigger and bigger circle.  While on some level, yes, that's the whole point, I found that following the exercises actually made me much more aware of a sort of spectrum of metta, as if it had different flavors or frequencies as the circles expand and contract.  Surely, there's a great deal of resemblance, but the good will you feel towards a friend is not the same as you feel towards a benefactor.  The idea of exploring these distinctions will be the biggest thing I take away from the book.