Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher and lived as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing, and is now based in New York. She provides individual spiritual mentoring and leads retreats internationally, offering mindfulness programs for educators, parents and youth in schools, in addition to activists, people of color, artists and families. She mentors with the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, was lead teacher for Mindful Schools’ year long training for educators, teaches teens and adults with Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, and is a guiding teacher for One Earth Sangha. She edited Thich Nhat Hanh’s Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children and has been published in numerous other books and magazines. She explores the interweaving of art, play, ecology and embodied mindfulness practice and is an InterPlay leader. Read her recent article, In Times of Crisis Call Upon the Strength of Peace, published in Lion’s Roar magazine.
We introduce sending metta for all beings and the guided meditation leads us to offer metta to self, a dear friend or benefactor, neutral person, difficult person and then in the 2nd half of the meditation much guidance is offered for the ways we can include all beings in our metta.
We begin with Al Lingo, Kaira Jewel Lingo's dad telling stories of his time in the Civil Rights Movement working with Dr. King and then explore the importance of cultivating our hearts and minds to be able to support justice in the world, and also the importance of cultivating bodhicitta. We end with Dr. King's words condemning the war in Vietnam and the damaging effect of militarism on our collective health, and our current bloated military budget.
We cover what compassion is and how it can help soothe our pain much better than avoiding or denying it. We distinguish between compassion and pity and then offer a variety of compassion phrases we can use. In the guided meditation, we begin with a dear friend who is undergoing some kind of suffering and then move on to ourselves, offering self-compassion for our own physical or mental suffering.
We cover the 3 elements of metta practice: generating the energy of friendliness, visualizing the person/being you are sending metta to, and repeating the phrases. We offer various versions of the phrases and introduce the first few categories of beings we can send metta to: self, benefactor, and dear friend. In the guided practice we begin by feeling held and loved by others and then offer this to ourselves, then move on to benefactor and dear friend.
In this Opening talk, the teachers offer a land acknowledgement, introduce themselves, and Kaira Jewel gives a short talk on what metta is, how to practice metta and how we can take refuge in the retreat container.
This session is an invitation to come home to our body and mind so that we can meet the uncertainty of our times with courage and tenderness. With so many aspects of our lives impacted and disrupted by uncertainty and change, we will create space to care for our nervous systems, deepen connection to ourselves and others, and become intimate with the real unreliability of our circumstances and where we can nevertheless find true refuge. We will practice to hold ourselves and our communities with compassion and wisdom.
We explore the three kinds of feeling tone: pleasant, unpleasant and neutral, and also, their underlying tendencies of grasping, aversion, and ignorance. Spanning feelings that arise from the body and mind as well as worldly and unworldly vedanā, we investigate how to create space between the feeling tone and the reactivity that usually follows it so that awareness of feeling can lead to awakening.
Credit for Polyvagal Nurturing based on Dr. Marti Glenn's work & research.
Kaira Jewel also offers this video as an aid for Vagal Nurturing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0ozoPNTqig
Given on Dr. King's birthday, we explore how we can each give rise to bodhicitta and support the realization of justice: the expression of love in public. Kaira Jewel first shares about the personal impact of Dr. King on her life, introducing her father, Al Lingo, who makes a cameo appearance to briefly share about working with Dr. King in the Civil Rights Movement in the South. She then explores the friendship between Thich Nhat Hanh and Dr. King and their common effort to build the Beloved Community. Then we look at how caring for ourselves is caring for others and vice versa, and how bodhicitta is an inexhaustible source of energy and confidence, because it helps us clarify what our ultimate concern is. We end with how we can engage in activism, and work on behalf of the world in a way that doesn’t lead to burnout.
We begin with metta as heart training, a practice of awakening and growing our heart and explore how our practice of metta can also support and help to transform others. Then we move into obstacles to metta meditation and how to practice with them, covering when metta feels mechanical, distractions, grief, doubt, anger, and struggling to offer metta to ourselves. We close looking at how metta can be a protection and also how the Earth can be a source and inspiration for metta.
We begin with a 5-step process for caring for strong emotions and then look at ways to cultivate and strengthen the Brahmavihara of mudita or joy, also in relation to working with jealousy.
The talk begins with an introduction to the Four Brahmaviharas and an exploration of how they are distinct (drawing on Ven. Analayo's sun simile). We then explore what equanimity is and how it supports metta when it comes to keeping our hearts open to those we find difficult. We also explore how equanimity helps us to stand up for what we believe in. The talk ends with a song based on a Thich Nhat Hanh poem about how to face injustice and hatred and still continue on.
In this meditation, we begin by visualizing benefactors offering us kindness, care and acceptance. We practice to truly let this in, and fill our bodies and minds. Then we begin to generate it for ourselves. (Gratitude to John Makransky for inspiration from his "Receiving the Healing, Liberating Power of Love" meditation.)
This evening's Metta chanting starts with an invitation to the Devas, followed by the Karaniya Metta Sutta in Pali and English, and the Metta practice chant.
