Love ❤️

We want to spread love in the world. We aim to practice, demonstrate, and share a style of practice that we call “Love.” It is focused around mettā, the brahmavihārās, and other positive, wholesome qualities of the heart (e.g. gratitude, appreciation, forgiveness, generosity, laughter/humor, acts of kindness, etc.).

We joyfully demonstrate the more loving world we want to live in. We practice love ourselves, and demonstrate it with our lives. We aspire to be capable of feeling intense loving kindness at all times and radiating it throughout the whole universe. We demonstrate love, kindness, presence, curiosity, grace, expanded awareness, and encouragement in everything that we do. We have so much fun together that our lives and the world are irrevocably more loving.

We want to help as many people as possible to feel mettā, the brahmavihārās, and other positive qualities in their heart, and to begin to cultivate those feelings. We create educational materials (guided meditations, books, events, etc.) that help people practice love at scale.

We want to identify and catalyze especially loving beings in our network, and help them to manifest their love and kindness in ways that radically transform their lives and the people they are connected to.

We aspire for this practice and the culture around it to be modern, relevant, and resonant, by making it fun, cool, inspiring, sexy, hot, interesting, hype, pop, etc. We do so by incorporating it into various domains of culture, including:

  • Dance: We run dance parties designed to help people practice loving kindness and the brahmavihārās with dance and music.
  • Music: We make music that is resonant with love, in collaboration with musicians, producers, DJ’s and other creatives. We are trying to create a genre, mettāwave, that is like progressive trance or deep house, but designed for practicing with loving kindness and the brahmavihārās.
  • Art: We make beautiful, resonant, cool visual art that expresses love, that inspires us and others.
  • Relationships, Sex, Poly: We are sex-positive, poly-friendly, and encourage love to manifest through friendships and relationships of all kinds.
  • Drugs: We have a liberal view of the Buddhist 5th Precept—discouraging addiction, heedlessness, or harm, but knowing that psychedelics, empathogens, and other substances can be useful aids for practice and the spiritual path.

dare to let love be the answer

What is Love?

Love is a meditation practice that includes any and all cultivation of positive states, thoughts, and feelings, including loving-kindness and the Brahmavihārās.

Loving kindness, or mettā, is a meditation technique where you intentionally cultivate thoughts of good will and feelings of unconditional love and care towards yourself and others. Loving kindness is relatively easy, extremely enjoyable – even blissful – and it can genuinely change your life.

Loving kindness is a translation of the Buddhist word mettā. Other translations might include friendliness or goodwill. Loving kindness is one of the four Brahmavihārās, alongside compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

However, the practice of love also includes the cultivation of other states, thoughts, and feelings, such as gratitude, forgiveness, generosity, and humor.

all there is to do is to be present and loving, in this moment, for the rest of one’s life

Practice

We have a number of ways for you to explore the practice of Love:

one loving thought a day is a minimum viable mettā practice

Music and Dance Parties

We run mettā dance parties designed to help people practice loving kindness and the Brahmavihārās with dance and music.

We are creating a genre, mettāwave, that is like progressive trance or deep house, but designed for practicing with loving kindness and the brahmavihārās. You can subscribe to Tasshin’s SoundCloud here, and see all of our mettā dance party sets here.

feelings of love long to manifest as acts of kindness in the world

Team

B.I. Haynes

Benjamin “Bee-Eye” Haynes was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his nickname “B.I // Bee-Eye” from his identical twin brother who could not pronounce Benjamin when they were little.

After studying Economics and Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, he went into education for several years, teaching English in Malaysia and then working for Kaleidoscope Education. Later Bee-Eye became a community organizer in Washington, DC after lobbying a real estate company to turn a vacant, abandoned lot behind his apartment into a community garden.

He currently is the director of programming for Dharma Gates, a non profit creating pathways into meditation practice for young adults ages 18-35. He also devotes time supporting the nonprofit Psych Crisis.

Benjamin cherishes the chance to work as an event coordinator in the Love Department, especially because he really loves to get groovy and shake his booty for the benefit of all beings.

Tasshin Fogleman

I’m an extremely online pilgrim wandering this precious world for the benefit of all beings. 💗

I live a simple life, dedicating my life to being of service, supported by the generosity of others.

I have three main endeavors: spreading love, following my curiosity, and empowering others.

Cultivating and expressing love is one of my favorite practices and it is a privilege to do it as part of my life’s work, for my own joy and the benefit of the world.

Vincent Briere

Vincent is a Strategic Technology Leader and Trauma Recovery Coach based in Seattle, Washington.

Vincent is passionate about transformation with a vision for sustainable growth for individuals (Complex Recovery), businesses (Vertiance) and himself.

Dharma lover and outdoor enthusiast, he also served as board chair and now vice-chair for Evergreen Treatment Services (ETS), a Seattle-based, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization transforming the lives of individuals and their communities through innovative and effective addiction and social services.

Vincent feels deep resonance and alignment with the guild’s Love Department mission to spread Love and help all beings.

Zev Benjamin

Zev spent his early years studying to be a wizard of computing. After years of individual tutelage and independent study, he was initiated into the mystery school of MIT, where he earned a BS (2008) and MEng (2009) in computer science and electrical engineering. While he wove digital spells for corporations, other passions started to take root.

Zev began attending regional Burning Man events in 2013, and, inspired by burner culture, he delved into the realms of community and events, sex magic, and molecular spirits. In San Francisco, he founded the community house Gentle Mesa (2015). Soon after, he left software engineering to focus on community-building. Along with a skilled crew, he hosted many parties and events and began to learn the art of creating and holding containers. He multi-classed into sex wizard and shaman.

Zev attended his first meditation retreat under Soryu Forall at MAPLE in 2019. Thus began his training as a spiritual monastic. He went on to do an apprenticeship (2019) and then residency (2020) at OAK (the California branch of MAPLE). After a year and a half of training, he departed OAK to deepen his training as a mendicant, wandering the United States and living out of a van. Eventually Zev missed the rootedness of place and a consistent group of people and returned to the Bay Area (2023) to begin building long-term community.

Today, Zev continues his spiritual journey by crafting transformational containers, mischievously subverting the profane for virtuous purposes, and seeking truth and beauty in all aspects of his life.

Aspen Smith

Aspen is a software engineer and musician based in Brooklyn, NY.

She plays bass in Good Cry, an indie rock band in Brooklyn, and has been playing around on Ableton since high school. She believes in music as a primarily social, primarily playful, spontaneous expression of love and friendship.

She works on the OCaml standard library and compiler at Jane Street.

the true measure of your practice is the kindness of your actions

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