We come to a close with our last day of the Real Happiness Challenge. I hope that this has assisted you in your meditation practice. We explored various techniques over the last four weeks and now we come to see our interconnection with everything in today’s practice. Here we see how all of our encounter...
Our practice is compassion as we near the end of our Real Happiness Challenge. We look at the quality of our compassion so that it is a component of loving-kindness. We work with a difficult emotion and notice how we feel about this emotion. We pay attention to our body, the sensations, and the relationship...
In our practice today, we include all creatures great and small and truly all beings. We offer lovingkindness to all beings in various categories, including enlightened beings and unenlightened beings. As Sharon says, “Enlightened beings are those who are good hearted, committed to wisdom, to love, to compassion. Unenlightened beings are those who live in...
We take what we have learned so far with our lovingkindness practice and expand our circle by now including others. We start in the same way and this time we imagine each person. First, is a friend, we repeat the phrases. May you be happy, May you be well, May you be safe, May you...
Today’s Lovingkindness practice is a visualization. We start off as usual, settling in and being with the breath, then imagining yourself in the center of a circle. You are surrounded by loving beings that you have met or beings that have inspired you. Maybe these beings actually exist, maybe they are historical or mythical persons...
We are back to our walking meditation but this time we are incorporating lovingkindness. What a day here to do so with 46 degrees and sunny. I’ll take it after our time of bitter cold and snow. The focus here is practicing the phrases of Metta as you are walking, with yourself, with others, with...
As I have worked with students and clients over the years, I have noticed the persistent urge to run away from unpleasant or difficult thoughts and feelings. Now, I know in my years I have had those exact same experiences as well so I have compassion. What helped me was my dedication to the practice...
We’re still working with emotions this week as we just about bring the week to a close. As we work with emotions more and more in our mindfulness meditation practice, we can tune in more quickly to what we are feeling. In our practice for today, as we sit we come to a place of...
As Sharon writes for today, “we take a deeper look at some of the common emotional states that tend to arise in meditation. When we look closer at an emotion such as anger, and in doing so, see that it is actually made up of many different component parts: there are moments of sadness, moments...
In working with my thoughts this morning, I literally had a pain in the neck! My thoughts went to quite the variety: I should change my sleeping position, Oh no, my shoulder aches too, Why am I in pain?, What if it doesn’t stop? Will it ever stop? Will I ever be “normal” again? I’m...
Today we are working with difficult emotions in our meditation practice. Years ago I was afraid of allowing painful emotions to surface but through practice I learned that I don’t have to push the sadness or anger away, I can invite the emotion in and greet the emotion as if it were an old friend....
Today we work with positive emotions and pay attention to that experience. As Sharon says, we need to find and nurture the positive parts of ourselves. Too often we do focus on what is negative and unpleasant. Here we bring to mind a moment of pleasure or positivity that we have had recently. It can...
