When we feel threatened, stressed, or overwhelmed, the body naturally tightens into vigilance, judgment, or emotional armoring. Over time, these protective patterns can quietly become our baseline way of moving through the world.
In this talk, guest teacher Sean Oakes, PhD explored how loving-kindness (metta) is not just an idea or intention, but a felt, embodied practice that helps interrupt fear and soften habitual reactivity—allowing warmth, safety, and connection to become traits we can increasingly live from.
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Talk: Mettā as a Somatic Response to Trauma, Oppression, and Hatred
Timecodes & main topics:
- 00:00 — Loving-kindness as an embodied practice
Metta introduced as a somatic discipline that interrupts unwholesome patterns like fear, hatred, and grasping. - 03:18 — The twofold training of the Dharma
Letting go of unskillful habits while actively cultivating wholesome qualities such as compassion and openness. - 06:15 — Why the nervous system defaults to fear and judgment
Humans as “soft mammals” wired for threat detection; hatred and aversion understood as protective survival responses. - 09:28 — Metta as a radical intervention
Recognizing when protective hostility is no longer needed and consciously setting it down in safe moments. - 11:36 — Radiating loving-kindness through the whole body
Metta described as a full-body state that suffuses experience rather than remaining a mental wish. - 16:30 — Interrupting conditioned identity and separation
Insight practice reveals how identity and division are constructed through relationships and social conditioning. - 24:21 — Returning again and again to loving-kindness
Training the body to relax armoring and allow kindness to become a baseline state. - 27:00 — Practical somatic training in daily life
Using ordinary transition moments—walking, opening doors, pausing—to embody warmth and presence.
A Meditation: Radiating Mettā Through the Whole Body
Sean Oakes, PhD (he/him, queer, of Spanish/Puerto Rican and Northern European ancestry living on unceded Pomo land in California), teaches Buddhism, Yoga, and somatic practice. He received teaching authorization from Jack Kornfield, wrote his dissertation on extraordinary states in Buddhist meditation and experimental dance, and focuses on the integration of philosophy, somatics, and social justice discourse with the Dharma. He teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, East Bay Meditation Center, Insight Timer, and elsewhere.
