Bodhipaksa's Blog, page 23
November 18, 2013
The Urban Retreat, Day 1: Demystifying lovingkindness
This post is part of our Urban Retreat, running from Nov 9 to 16, 2013. To subscribe to our Urban Retreat posts, which will be delivered to your inbox each day of the retreat, go here.
The Urban Retreat is set up to help you bring more depth of practice into your life. In particular we’re focusing for the week on lovingkindness (metta) practice, so that we can move towards having a heart that “blazes like the sun.”
I was surprised recently on a retreat, when I asked how many people practiced lovingkindness meditation regularly, to find that fewer than half the participants did. I’d expected almost every hand to go up, since in the Triratna Buddhist Community of which I’m a part, lovingkindness meditation (metta bhavana) is regarded as a key foundational practice, along with mindfulness of breathing; alternating the two practices is the standard recommendation.
It turned out that a lot of people had difficulty with the metta bhavana practice. They felt a sense of failure and despondency around it, and so they tended to avoid it. And as I talked to those people it turned out that this sense of failure came out of a misunderstanding of what metta was. They believed metta to be an emotion. They believed it to be an emotion they hadn’t yet experienced; it was something grand and awe-inspiring and deeply moving; it was something powerful and even over-powering. And because they’d sat there, trying to make this grand emotion happen, and seeing “nothing” happen (actually we never have “nothing” happen, but let’s set that to one side for now) week after week, month after month, year after year, they came to think that experiencing metta was something they just weren’t capable of.
But metta isn’t an emotion. It’s a volition.
OK, so what’s a volition? A volition is a wish or desire (it’s from a Latin verb volere, which means “to want”). Specifically, it’s the wish that beings be well, happy, and at peace. Now that wish may be accompanied by certain feelings, like a warmth in the heart, or it may not. Whenever you act in a way that values someone’s well-being and happiness, you’re acting out of metta. So to take a very ordinary example, you’ll hold open the door for the person behind you. You wouldn’t want to let the door slam on them because that would kind of suck for them. And most of the time you don’t want to cause them to suffer. But there’s not usually any great upwelling of emotion when you hold open a door for someone. Maybe you get a little glow of happiness, but maybe not.
And this is all very ordinary. This quality of wishing that beings be well, happy, and at peace is woven into the fabric of our lives. Metta is not some strange new thing that you’ve never experienced. Of course, if you discount all the metta that’s woven into your life, then you’ll think it’s something otherworldly. That’s unhelpful, because cultivating metta is not about creating something from scratch. It’s about growing and developing something that’s already there.
“Cultivating” is an agricultural metaphor. When you cultivate plants you don’t start with nothing. You start with seeds. And the seeds of metta already exist within us, in the form of the ordinary kindness we experience from day to day.
Our task, in cultivating metta, is to connect, or perhaps reconnect, with our ordinary kindness, and to encourage it to grow.
Here’s how I do that, and how I encourage other people to do it. I start with two reflections:
I want to be happy.
Happiness is hard to attain.
I take these one at a time, and drop them into the mind. I allow them to resonate, and I feel their truth. I recognize that each of these statements is true for me. I connect with the yearning I have to be happy, to be at peace. I notice that this yearning is often frustrated in small ways — that happiness is elusive.
And this can cause a slight heart-ache, but that’s OK. That sense of vulnerability is us connecting with the fragility and difficulty of human life; it’s not easy to do this thing we call being human.
So having dropped these thoughts into the mind, and felt the truth of them, the part of me that wants me to be well, happy, and at peace starts to wish me well. And so I then start to drop metta phrases into the mind — phrases that help the seeds of metta to grow.
These days the three phrases I most often use are:
May I be well.
May I be happy.
May I find peace.
The exact words don’t matter, though, and you can choose whatever works for you.
After I’ve wished myself well, I move onto a friend, and I consider that my friend too wants to be happy; that my friend too finds happiness elusive.
And then I do the same with a person who I don’t have any strong feelings for, then someone I have difficulty with.
Then I have a sense that whoever I was to meet, either in the external world or in my thoughts, I’d meet them with kindness, and there’s sense of taking my awareness out into the world.
And then finally I bring my metta into the world, as I get up and return to my normal activities, allowing the practice to inform my thoughts, words, and actions.
And I may find that feelings arise (and often they do) but they’re a bonus.
So that’s how I do the practice, with a recognition that metta is something inherent to us; something that we all experience.
Below you’ll find a video of guided lovingkindness meditation that I led a few months ago:
If for some reason this doesn’t show up, you can go straight to Youtube.
Related posts:
Join the Urban Retreat, Nov 9–16
Struggling with a “lack of lovingkindness” (Day 7)
Effortless lovingkindness (Day 6)
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November 17, 2013
A guided meditation, and an invitation
Below is a guided meditation that I led on Saturday, at the closing of Wildmind’s contribution to the week-long Urban Retreat, led by the Triratna Buddhist Community. It’s a guided meditation on cultivating compassion, with a short talk at the beginning.
Now the invitation. Most of the guided meditations I lead and talks I give aren’t recorded. For example, back in February I led a retreat in Florida, and nothing was recorded. I’ve led workshops in Maine and Toronto, where again nothing was recorded. I intended to record the talks and meditations, but the trouble is that I get very focused on the act of communicating and forget to hit “record.”
So this is another good reason to support the Free Bodhi project. One of the things that will happen once I have more admin support is that I’ll have someone to take care of making sure that the recording equipment is set up and ready to go, and that the recordings are being made properly.
In fact even the kind of online event that’s in the recording above will happen more smoothly. At the moment I have to do all the set-up myself. In the half-hour before that guided meditation started I had to set up the Hangout, copy and paste links, send out invitations, choose the correct settings so that the graphics would display (I forgot to do that on the previous recording), and deal with people who were having technical difficulties getting into the hangout. It’s rather stressful doing all that, and I’d rather be focusing on how I’m going to lead the meditation and what I’m going to say in my introductory talk.
So in the future, the plan is to have Mark (who is lined up as my business manager and assistant) take care of all that for me. All I’ll need to do is show up and teach, which will be better for everyone involved — including you!
So please support the Free Bodhi project. Help free me up from admin so that I can concentrate on teaching. You’ll find that we are offering some great perks for donors to our project.
Related posts:
Guided compassion meditation (karuna bhavana)
Guided Meditation: Mindfulness of Breathing
Guided meditation: mindfulness of breathing
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November 16, 2013
Free Market Jesus speaks…
Free Market Jesus speaks…
Reshared post from +STUPID HUMANS
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View this post on Google+
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Wordless Wednesday: Blue-eyed Jesus
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The Free Bodhi Fund
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Cyberlust!
Reshared post from +Laurent Le Pen
Here is the typing experience of the +Omate TrueSmart using +Fleksy revolutionary keyboard
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November 15, 2013
Some great advice on distraction, focus, and creative productivity
Why I don’t check Facebook until 6 p.m.
Herbert Lui does marketing for clients such as Pivotal Labs, Busy Building Things, and Renegades. He is the author of a free guide to building credibility online. This post was …
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November 12, 2013
Amazing Mars panorama
Mars Panorama – Curiosity rover
360° panoramic photography by Andrew Bodrov. Visit us to see more amazing panoramas from Out of this World
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November 11, 2013
In honor of Veterans' Day
Here are some family members who served in the military.
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Five benefits of helping to free Bodhi
We do a lot here on Wildmind with the intent of helping people become happier. And we do it on a shoestring. And with a tiny team.
There is a “we” at Wildmind, but only barely. I have an assistant who works part-time, three days a week, and who takes care of our online store. This helps pay the costs of running an office and an extensive website. We have a volunteer in Toronto who posts the news stories. And we have a couple of regular or semi-regular (unpaid) contributors to our blog. A professional bookkeeper comes in two afternoons a month. But otherwise it’s all up to me. I write the blog articles, I put together our website, I teach courses, etc. I also handle publicity, planning, computer maintenance, and a gazillion other admin tasks.
I’m going to offer you five great reasons why you should donate to our Free Bodhi project — to help free me up from admin so that more people can benefit from meditation and Buddhist practice.
1. Help millions of people to get started with meditating.
Our structured meditation guides, which I began creating in 2001, have benefitted literally millions of people. In the last five years alone we’ve had five million visitors to our site. Just think about that: by supporting us you’re literally helping to bring the benefits of meditation to millions of people! We have plans to bring to our site a completely revised form of free meditation guide — much more interactive and with more of a multimedia focus. And I can’t do that without your help.
2. Bring greater depth to the practice of hundreds of thousands of people.
We started our blog in 2007, and hundreds of thousands of people benefit from the articles we’ve published. We track what the media are saying about meditation, and bring you news about the medical and psychological benefits of meditating. We bring you book and film reviews. And we bring you the fruits of decades of practice, as expressed in our articles about practicing meditation, and on how to bring a more mindful and compassionate attitude into every aspect of your life. Our most popular blog post has been read by more than a quarter of a million people! The second most popular has been read by almost 200,000. You can help free up my time so that I can write more blog posts.
3. Help me create more free guided meditations.
Recently Google has made it possible for me to run “Hangouts on Air,” which are public broadcasts of videoconferences. I’ve been using those to lead guided meditations, which are not only broadcast, but are recorded and posted to Youtube. This is a fantastic way of creating guided meditation recordings. And by supporting Wildmind you help make these possible.
4. Create a Year of Going Deeper
Earlier this year I ran a series of activities called 100 Days of Lovingkindness. This created an amazing archive of resources that’s still online, and free for anyone to use. Next year we plan to build on that success, and to run no fewer than eight structured activities. We’re calling this our Year of Going Deeper. This will give people everything they need to progress spiritually, from a first introduction to meditation, to more in-depth guides to Awakening.
We quite literally will not be able to do this without your help. I need your help. I need a business manager who can free me up from admin so that I can concentrate on writing and teaching.
5. Giving is receiving.
This one’s rather different. Studies have shown that giving to others makes us happier than keeping our resources to ourselves. In giving to Wildmind you’ll know that you’re achieving a lot of good in the world. You’ll have the pride in knowing that you’re not just consuming resources created by others, but that you’re helping with the creative process. You’ll feel the pride of knowing that Wildmind, and its activities, are yours. In giving, you’ll feel good.
So please help support the Free Bodhi project. Help free me up to make the benefits of meditation more widely available.
Related posts:
Free Bodhi!
Free Bodhi! And benefit innumerable beings, including yourself
Why free Bodhi?
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November 8, 2013
Guided meditation Hangout on Air
The meditation takes place in a Hangout on Air, which means that it's a pubic broadcast of a videoconference. You can watch the broadcast on the event page (click below). I hope you can join us. And if you're interested in joining the rest of the Urban Retreat, you can sign up here: http://wld.mn/urbanretreat
Reshared post from +Wildmind
As part of our Urban Retreat, from Nov 9–16, 2013, we're holding three guided meditation Hangouts, exploring lovingkindness meditation. You're invited to watch the live broadcast of the hangout.
Related posts:
The Urban Retreat on Wildmind (Nov 9–16)
Guided Meditation: Mindfulness of Breathing
Guided compassion meditation (karuna bhavana)
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A year of going deeper
We have exciting plans for next year. We kicked off 2013 with a 100 Day Meditation Challenge, and then continued with 100 Days of Lovingkindness. Lots of work went into these, and for the second event I managed, somehow (mainly by sleeping very little) to produce a blog post for every one of the 100 days.
I loved the focus that this gave to the blog and to our practice. Many, many people participated in these challenges and experienced big breakthroughs with their practice.
I also loved the fact that over the course of 100 days I managed to write 90,000 words on lovingkindness practice. That material is going to evolve into a book, for which I already have a publisher lined up. And that book, once it’s published, is going to end up reaching even more people. I love synergy!
Inspired by the good that came from these two events, I want to run even more special events in 2014. We’re calling this our Year of Going Deeper. So we’re running even more events, and this will give a wonderful focus to our practice. It will also lead to me developing a large body of blog posts and guided meditations that will be freely available as a gift to the world. And we’ll also end up with more books, CDs, etc.
Soon we’ll be announcing how these events will work, and how you can sign up for them (they’ll all be free, although donations are encouraged), but I want to give you a sneak peek at what’s coming up. Here’s the program we’ve put together:
Jan 1 – 28 Sit : Breathe : Love (A 28 Day Meditation Challenge)
Jan 31 – May 10 100 Days of Lovingkindness
May 13 – Jun 9 Sit : Breathe : Love (A 28 Day Meditation Challenge)
Jun 6 – Aug 10 60 Days to Jhana
Aug 13 – Sep 9 Sit : Breathe : Love (A 28 Day Meditation Challenge)
Sep 12 – Oct 23 42 Days: 6 Elements (An exploration of the 6 Element Practice)
Oct 27 – Nov 23 Sit : Breathe : Love (A 28 Day Meditation Challenge)
Nov 28 – Dec 25 4 Weeks of Insight
We decided that although a 100 day meditation challenge at the start of the year was a wonderful thing for those who participated, it was also daunting for many people, which meant that they didn’t even try. So we decided to start with a 28 day challenge in 2014 instead. The aim is to help people develop a habit of daily sitting.
And so that people don’t feel that they’ve “missed the boat” if they can’t get on board for the first challenge, we’re repeating the challenge throughout the year. The 28 day challenges will focus on mindfulness practice.
The program follows the traditional approach of exploring samatha approaches to meditation, which help us develop calm, concentration, and emotional positivity, before exploring vipassana (insight) approaches to meditating.
In the end what we’ll have is a whole program that gives you everything you need, meditatively speaking, to reach awakening.
I hope you find this program as exciting as I do.
But here’s the thing: I have way too much on my plate as it is. This program can only happen if I’m freed up from some of my administrative responsibilities so that I can concentrate on writing and teaching.
And that’s why we’ve set up the Free Bodhi project, where we’re raising seed money so that I can employ a business manager. We’re trying to raise enough to employ a business manager for six months. What about after that? Well, having a business manager (actually he has a name — Mark), will help Wildmind become more financially stable. Our publicity will be better, so that more people will attend the events I’ve been telling you about. And with more people, we’ll receive more donations. I’ll also be freer to develop books and CDs, which we’ll sell through our store and through Amazon. So within six months we project that we’ll bring in enough extra revenue to support Mark indefinitely.
There’s more I could say. I’ve been thinking much more long-term about Wildmind, and what we’re doing. But I’ll save that for another blog post.
In the meantime, I invite you to contribute to our Free Bodhi project so that the program above can become a reality.
Related posts:
Why free Bodhi?
Day 28 of Wildmind’s 100 Day Meditation Challenge
Get started with “100 Days of Lovingkindness”
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