Inter-being loving kindness: a meditation for more-than-human kinship
A meditation practice for cultivating loving-kindness and kinship with the more-than-human world.
Find a quiet space where you can sit comfortably or lie down. Let your body soften. Find stillness. Let your eyes relax or close.
Take a few long breaths. With each inhale, imagine you are breathing in sync with the trees and plant beings, taking in life-giving oxygen. With each exhale, release with mindfulness. Know that you are returning life back to the plant beings surrounding you in your home or just outside in a continuous partnership and eternal exchange.
Let your body remember this profound planetary togetherness with each breath.
Let your body remember this profound planetary togetherness with each breath.
Begin with yourself
Take one more deep breath into every tissue and bone, into every inner and outer space of your body, into every cell. As you release that breath, settle into stillness and tune into the rhythm of your heartbeat and the natural rise and fall of your breath.
Visualize a radiant, warm light of love and kindness emanating from your heart. With each breath, feel this light expanding to hold your entire being in its gentle glow. Now repeat inwardly:
- May I be held in love and kindness
- May I be safe from harm, seen and unseen
- May I feel joy and belonging in this world
- May I be free to rest, to grow, and to be
For the waters and their keepers
Inhale. With your expansive breath, extend your light of love and kindness beyond your body. Imagine it growing larger and larger until it becomes so expansive it can no longer be contained. Feel it flowing through underground springs and streams, rivers and lakes, until it finally reaches the vastness of the oceans to envelop whales, coral, algae, plankton, and other beings beneath the surface. Feel their presence in these sacred waters, remembering that this primordial wet world was your first home too.
- May you be held in love and kindness
- May your rhythms and migrations be honored
- May you thrive in health
- May your songs be heard and your silence respected
Breathe in and let this breath be like a rising tide washing over and cleansing you. Exhale and return to that radiant light of love emanating from you and extending to our water kin.
Now take a deep breath in, knowing that the air that animates your body has been home to and breathed by countless beings, from the tiniest microbe to the greatest whales, for millions of years.
For the air and sky beings
Knowing the water beings are held within your light, let your breath carry that loving radiance and sense of companionship upward to embrace the birds in flight; bees; bats; moths; butterflies; pollen, spores, and seeds floating in the wind; clouds; and all our air and winged relatives.
- May you be held in love and kindness
- May you be safe and soar freely in clean air
- May you always have abundant nourishment
- May your calls be expansive through spacious skies
Now take a deep breath in, knowing that the air that animates your body has been home to and breathed by countless beings, from the tiniest microbe to the greatest whales, for millions of years. You are part of this ancestral connection and deepen it with each breath you take.
To the grounded and still beings
Now extend that breath that unites you with all beings, carrying your radiating light of love and kindness. As you exhale, allow that breath to guide you down toward your sitting bones and through the ground. Entangle your radiating light with roots, trees, mycelia, mosses, grasses, lichen, and stone.
- May you be held in love and kindness
- May you be allowed to grow, rest, decay, and regenerate according to your rhythms
- May your slowness and spaciousness be held as sacred
- May you be honored as elders and teachers
Take a deep inhale and as you exhale, feel yourself surrender to the ground and the beings of the underground networks who are always there holding you, sustaining you. Feel how the warmth of the earth’s fiery heart, this elemental force, connects you to all life-forms, seen and unseen.
To those we have harmed and the relationships we want to heal
Now, with your light of love still radiating from the earth’s hot molten core, gently visualize the relationships that ask more of us. Some beings frighten us and challenge our comfort, and there are beings whose gifts we cannot see, whose very existence we sometimes wish away. Yet they too swim in these waters, fly in these skies, root in this earth, and live around us and within us.
Take a breath in, recognizing the great vital force that animates all beings and that we all have a part in life’s unfolding and wondrous expressions.
With the same tender presence you’ve offered to all life, extend your compassion to the viruses; mosquitoes; parasites; predators; those beings we have marginalized and called pests, invasive, or weeds; and all beings who ask us to expand our capacity for understanding and compassion.
- May you be held in love and kindness
- May you be met with curiosity instead of fear
- May your place in the planetary web of life be honored
- May your right to exist be respected
Take a breath in, recognizing the great vital force that animates all beings and that we all have a part in life’s unfolding and wondrous expressions. Exhale and begin to feel a softening as you release judgments or narratives that have previously created any feeling of separation.
For the forgotten, the extinct, the unseen, and the becoming
With this feeling of absolute love and kindness in a unity much grander than yourself, let your expansive, far-reaching breath carry your luminous light of love and kindness through all the beings you have embraced and beyond. Extend that light through the long arc of earthly time, feeling yourself converging with all there is, all there was, and all that is yet to come. Think of all those who came before you; all the ancestors who live in your cells, in the deep crust of the earth, in the soil beneath you, and in the water and air around you; and all the invisible beings that hold ecosystems together.
- May you be held in love and kindness
- May all of those who are still becoming have the chance to thrive
- May the wisdom of our ancestors, human and more-than-human, guide us forward
- May your emerging potential unfold freely
Closing the meditation
Breathe into that love that transcends form and time and space and boundaries—that is fluid, regenerative, and potentiated by your presence and your breath and your awareness. Let your exhale become a gesture of gratitude to all the beings and all the relationships around you, within you, and beyond you that make life possible.
Feel the deep embrace of the radiating, ever-expansive web of love and kindness you’ve woven together. It has always been there to hold you, to support you. You can tap into this planetary togetherness whenever you need to remind yourself that you are not alone but intertwined with countless expressions of life. As you carry this practice into your daily life, let kindness permeate and flow through your thoughts, words, and actions.
When you’re ready, return to your breath. Return to your body. Return to the world gently.
This meditation emerged from collaborative work during the MOTH Gathering at Hollyhock on Cortes Island in 2025 to imagine ways of extending the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to encompass the more-than-human world.
