Our practice comes down to building up Path factors. Building up skills of integrity, loving-kindness, clarity of mind, and calm in order to be able to fruitfully meet dukkha. Clearing the ground, so citta is properly fed and encouraged to meet where the sense of self, the identification experience, comes to light – then citta can speak from its depth.
This heart meditation guides us in how to cultivate a deep quality of friendliness in relating to our inner life and each other. The gift of this practice is a direct sense of belonging – knowing that we can never be alone (given at the Fall 2019 IMCW 7-Day Silent Retreat).
The ground of loving kindness is seeing the basic goodness in ourselves, each other and our world. This is what gives rise to pure appreciation, friendliness, love and the felt-sense of belonging. In this talk we explore what obscures and contracts our perceptual field, and the pathway of purposefully awakening this transformational capacity of cherishing all life.
Here is a simply guided meditation to bring kindness and patience to our mindfulness practice. As mindfulness develops it brings both clarity and warmth to our awareness.
When we fully inhabit our body, we discover the space and wakefulness of awareness itself. In this meditation, we rest in this open awareness, and when the attention narrows into thoughts, we practice relaxing back into the openness that includes passing sounds, sensations and feelings. We close with a brief offering of lovingkindness to our own hearts and our world (with community OMs – no bell at end).
Metta practice is one version of the ancient vocation to live from kindness and love, that is found across spiritual traditions. In Buddhist tradition, it is in the family of “heart practices” that are called the brahmavihara: Lovingkindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity. In this context, we explore how metta practice both opens us up to this deep kindness and warmth and to what is the way of metta. We also examine some of the challenges of metta practice.
