Welcome to The Metta Letters
The letters began in 2023, blossoming out of the hearts of a small gathering of women sitting weekly in meditation every Monday at 2 p.m.—Metta Mondays—sitting in quietude, offering loving-kindness out into our gorgeous, complex world, and all the while strengthening their own heart-threads of love, rewiring kindness and care into their nervous systems. Out of this warmth and care, a newsletter was born, and The Metta Letter organically blossomed into form.
Each Monday, this newsletter arrives in your inbox with reflections, poems, inspiring quotes, and sparks of goodness for your heart—like a love letter slipped under your door, or finding a poem by Mary Oliver taped to the glossy, 3-by-6-inch ceramic tile walls descending into New York’s subway.
Where two or more are gathered—you and I here, communing in words and reading—some unknown, holy goodness blooms. This is the magic of community, the superpower of being human!
If these weekly shares, these moments of tenderness and wonderment, resonate with you, I'd love to hear, and it’s important for me to put into words how grateful I am that you’re here.
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“The Metta Monday Letter starts your week with a rocketblast of all you need to make it to the other side. Wini gathers up a bouquet that stirs me, fuels me, and often draws out a tear. Her well is deep, and she harvests broadly, drawing on sages and poets and zen masters.” — Barbara Mahany
“There are not many newsletters that I love and read in their entirety, but one that I actually look forward to every Monday is Wini Nimrod’s “The Metta Monday Letter,” in which she offers a meditation that is always relatable and grounded in current experience, plus two poems, three quotes and a closing song and blessing. Reading these newsletters feels like real nourishment for the mind and soul. You can read them online or have them sent to your inbox.” — Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
A Peek Into Me . . .
Some poems call into your heart your whole life. You hear it, and goosebumps shiver down your spine—you may or may not know why. They are poems that spend a lifetime being known and unwinding your soul.
Here are mine: Late Fragment by Raymond Carver, Go to the Limits of Your Longing by Rainer Maria Rilke, Faith by David Whyte, and this quote by William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar (Act 4, Scene 3): "On such a full sea are we now afloat; and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures." My meditation teacher, Dona Monterrilli, recited this quote to me in 1998. I wept—where there are tears, there is true—and it became a seed to water, to bloom, to guide, to encourage heart and not miss this venture we call life.
For over three decades, I’ve devoted myself to loving up and paying attention to the body, heart, and soul of humans as an integrated holistic health practitioner—I’m a soul tenderer.
I’m a poet, spiritual director, meditation teacher, and massage therapist. I hold an MA in Pastoral Counseling from Loyola University Chicago, an MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA, and trained at the Chicago School of Massage Therapy, the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, Center for Intentional Living and the Guild for Spiritual Guidance. My meditation practice is rooted in both Buddhism and Christianity through the practices of Awakening Into Presence, and I’m a Certified Meditation Teacher through the Open Heart Project, currently completing a second certification, the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield.
The Metta Letter is a heart offering into our world, like throwing postcards from a car window hoping it finds a field, a home and heart to land in as care and nourishment.
I live in the Midwest with my spouse and my grown son’s blue-tongued skink, Godzilla. Yes, my son is long moved out of the house, but his babysitter (he now calls her his adopted sibling), Cristina, gifted “Goddy” to him when he was 8 years old—now he’s 27.
“Loving-Kindness. A word that makes most people’s eyes glaze over. But if you reinsert the space between loving and kindness, you actually come upon something interesting, which is an emotion expressed in a way of being in the world. Love manifested as kindness.”
– Rabbi Shai Held
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