Talk On Loving-Kindness And Compassion Meditations As Spacious Divine Abodes

So,

As I said earlier,

Tonight's talk is about metta bhavana and karuna bhavana.

Remembering that bhavana means the cultivation,

Or cultivation.

Metta translates as love and kindness,

Or probably more accurately,

Warm friendliness.

The word metta comes from the root met,

Which means friend.

So metta is friendliness,

It's a warmth.

And karuna is the way we describe compassion in Pali.

So,

What is metta and what is compassion?

And perhaps I should explain them first of all by talking about the four brahma-viharas,

Which translate as the four divine abodes.

They are also called,

In Tibetan Buddhism or Mahayana Buddhism,

The four immeasurables,

Because they are immeasurable,

They're boundless.

So love and kindness and compassion are one of the four divine abodes.

The other two are appreciative joy and equanimity.

And these four divine abodes are a set of meditation practices in Buddhist traditions.

And they are also just ways we relate to ourselves and one another.

We can relate to ourselves and one another with warm friendliness,

With compassion,

With appreciation and gratitude,

And with equanimity.

And these four qualities are all about,

As I said earlier,

Relationships.

They're about how we relate to ourselves and others.

And they are divine abodes because they're lovely places to hang out in.

They're divine.

And I look,

I've given many talks on these four divine abodes and I apologize if I'm repeating myself,

But it's okay.

I kind of enjoy repeating myself about these divine abodes.

Some of you in the audience,

Oh,

There's a love heart come up on the screen,

Isn't that lovely?

Some of you have heard me talk about these divine abodes many,

Many times and that's okay.

It's all good.

So in the talk about it,

It actually starts to stimulate it anyway.

These four divine abodes,

They are considered as uplifting and divine,

God-like in the Theravada tradition and as I said earlier,

They are considered as boundless in the Mahayana tradition.

Boundless because in two ways,

They do away with boundaries of self and other,

Like they remove those boundaries we have in relationships to another.

We have lots of boundaries when we relate to people sometimes.

And they are also boundless in that they're expansive,

Infinite,

Infinitely spacious.

So these qualities,

Both meditation practices and also ways of living and abiding in the world of people,

Places and things.

And when we wake up and to the degree we wake up,

To the degree we have insight into our own nature,

Into our own ways of habits and patterns and did I use the word kilesa the other day?

The things that get in the road,

I did talk about the hindrances.

I don't know if I mentioned the word kilesa.

Anyway,

Kilesa is greed,

Ignorance and hatred basically in all forms and shapes and sizes.

When we get to know ourselves fully,

We wake up to ourselves.

The way we relate as even semi-enlightened beings or fully enlightened beings is through these four Brahma Viharas.

We relate naturally to ourselves and others with loving kindness,

Compassion,

Appreciative joy and equanimity.

And before I go on to talk specifically about compassion and loving kindness,

I'd just like to say that these qualities have what we call near and far enemies.

And some of you are nodding your heads.

You've heard me say this before.

I'm going to give the spiel because the agenda for tonight,

The talk,

Is to clarify the four divine abodes,

Then hone in on loving kindness and compassion,

Then talk about how we cultivate these qualities as a meditation practice,

As an expansive state of mind,

And then talk about some personal experience,

Hopefully so you can relate this to yourselves and your own practice.

So these four divine abodes,

These qualities have near and far enemies.

A near enemy of these qualities,

Actually I'll talk about the far enemies first.

The far enemies of these qualities are their direct opposite.

So loving kindness,

Which is this quality of warm friendliness,

An open heartedness,

I'll just define it in some ways.

Loving kindness is warm friendliness and an inclination for the wish of happiness to all beings.

It's based on happiness basically.

The way we can understand loving kindness is with a smile.

It's a smile in our heart.

It's based on seeing the good,

The wonderful,

The beautiful,

The positive in ourselves and others.

It's based on,

You know how when you meet a warm friend and you smile,

There's a natural feeling come from your heart where there's a smile or when you see your grandchildren or when you see your children or when you see your partner,

There's a natural smile come into your heart and you smile on your face sometimes.

That is what loving kindness is about.

It's the wish for happiness for oneself and others.

So the far enemy of loving kindness is hatred,

Bitterness,

Resentment.

You can see how this works.

It's the direct opposite.

The near enemy is interesting.

The near enemies are qualities that,

Ways of expressing these qualities in a distorted way that looks like these qualities on the surface but in fact they're distorted aspects of them.

As Alan Wallace describes them,

False facsimiles,

False facsimiles of these qualities.

They look like it but they're not it.

So some of the near enemies of loving kindness are attachment,

Attachment to beings,

Attachment to things,

A conditional attachment,

Conditional love,

Not unconditional love,

The opposite of unconditional love.

It's like narrowing somebody out and getting dependently attached to them or a sense of subservience or a sense of co-dependence on someone.

These are all examples of the near enemy of loving kindness.

And you can see how it may look like loving kindness but in fact it's a distorted aspect of them because it doesn't lead to feeling uplifted.

The way you can tell a near enemy from the genuine article is that the genuine article or the genuine aspect of these qualities is uplifting,

Is wholesome,

Is divine,

Not burnt out.

So compassion,

I'll come back to talking more about loving kindness and compassion after I go through the whole lot of them.

Compassion,

There's many ways of understanding compassion.

One way as Thit Nhat Hanh describes it is the quivering of the heart in the witnessing of suffering,

With the witnessing of suffering.

And if we go to the way His Holiness the Dalai Lama describes it,

It is a sensitivity to suffering with the commitment to alleviate it,

To relieve it.

And there's various ways that's been changed.

Some mindful self-compassion,

They take out the word commitment and they use the wish.

So sensitivity to suffering with the wish to alleviate it.

And so compassion,

The near enemy,

The far enemy of compassion is obviously cruelty,

Is sadism,

Masochism,

High self-criticism in some ways,

Although you could have that as a far enemy of loving kindness as well,

High self-criticism.

Just this tendency to want to hurt somebody,

Whether that be yourself or another.

I think there's a German term called,

I can't even pronounce it,

Anybody who speaks German,

Scholtenfrasch or something like that.

It's like having joy at someone's misfortune.

I think that would be the opposite of compassion,

If that makes sense.

The near enemies of compassion are very interesting.

They look like compassion,

But they're not.

We can think about burnout.

Some of us here,

Well a lot of us here are health professionals.

And health professionals are particularly prone to burnout.

It's sometimes called compassion fatigue,

But truly it's called empathy fatigue.

It looks like compassion,

But we just get burned out.

We want to help someone so much,

We go out of our way to help people,

But in fact it's not uplifting at all.

We know it's a near enemy of compassion because we're feeling fatigued.

We're feeling burned out.

We just don't want to know about it anymore.

It's unpleasant.

Another near enemy of compassion is despair.

When we see the troubles in the world,

The difficulties in the world,

The suffering in the world,

And we want to do something about it,

Yet we respond with despair.

It's kind of powerless.

It's a sense of hopelessness.

This is another near enemy of compassion.

The genuine compassion,

One would be able to see the suffering in the world,

But feel empowered to act.

Feel empowered because they're seeing it clearly.

They're not necessarily taking it personally,

For example.

Another near enemy of compassion,

And this is something we see in health professionals as well,

Is rescuing.

Going in,

Jumping in,

Fixing something.

Yet another near enemy of compassion is aversion to unpleasant experiences.

You might see someone suffering and it sparks in you an unpleasant feeling,

So you want to rescue them so that they don't feel so bad.

Sorry,

They don't feel so bad,

But you don't feel so bad.

Mostly it's about aversion of your own discomfort.

This is a near enemy of compassion.

Coming on to appreciative joy,

And I'll just briefly talk about this.

I'll talk more about this in our final session,

Whether you're here for eight days or.

.

.

If you're here for eight days,

I'll talk about it after 11 a.

M.

On our Friday.

If you're here for 10 days,

And you're welcome to come back anyway if you decide you want to go away,

I'll talk about it on Saturday night as the talk.

Appreciative joy simply is rejoicing and celebrating and empathizing with the joy of others,

And also appreciating one's own.

.

.

Sorry,

Not only with the joy of others,

But with their successes,

With their qualities,

With their virtues.

You're empathizing with them.

You're celebrating in that.

You're celebrating their successes and so on,

Their good qualities.

It is also related to yourself.

It is the capacity to appreciate your own good qualities.

I like to believe that gratitude and appreciative joy are the same thing.

There's a few nuances that are different.

There's a few ways they're different,

But I like to think of gratitude and appreciative joy as the same.

Appreciative joy,

Gratitude is about.

.

.

You know what gratitude is,

Is just feeling thankful,

Grateful for what people have done.

You can even be grateful for yourself.

I know after many of us have trained as professionals,

For example,

You think about that person who started that training and all the time and effort you put through,

Can you develop any gratitude towards that person who is yourself for doing all this stuff?

Can you,

For example,

You might be on this retreat and it might be a terrible experience,

But it also may be a really wonderful experience.

Can you be grateful for yourself for coming to this retreat,

For putting yourself in this situation of growth and development and cultivation and the growing of wisdom and ultimately psychological freedom?

That's what I understand as appreciative joy.

The near and far enemies,

Very briefly,

The far enemy of appreciative joy is cynicism,

Boredom even,

Jealousy,

Envy when it's related to another person,

And cynicism when it's related to yourself.

You know,

Do you doubt yourself sometimes?

Sometimes I've told stories about an encounter with Rick Hansen that I had once upon a time,

And I won't go over that story again,

But basically I was demonstrating how it's easy for a lot of us to praise and see the good qualities in another person,

Yet sometimes it's hard for us to acknowledge our own good qualities,

Recognize our own virtues,

Our own skills,

Our own lovely qualities,

Our own efforts and so on.

And Rick Hansen showed that to me one time when I was with him.

And so a far enemy of appreciative joy is these qualities.

So what's the near enemy of appreciative joy?

And what I'll say is that it's a kind of nauseating positivism.

You know,

Like,

I won't say narcissism,

But I was just thinking of some people,

Some people in politics who just think they're fantastic.

It's sort of like that.

But it's not quite that.

It looks like they're,

It looks like everything's wonderful,

Everything's going well,

But it's actually being in that old river called the Darl,

If you know what I mean.

Like it's not seen clearly the way things are.

So now we come to equanimity.

And I,

Equanimity,

I'm going to devote a night to equanimity,

And we'll do it in the morning on equanimity practices on Thursday night.

And as we'll discover,

And probably as you already know,

Equanimity is the result of insight practice,

Or one result of insight practice.

So it's a result of practice.

And it is also a practice in and of itself.

When you cultivate this state of mind,

And you abide in it,

It can come,

And we use it in relationships,

In a way of relating to yourself or others,

It becomes a divine abode.

So equanimity,

In short,

Is being unshaken by the ups and downs of life,

Being unshaken by the vicissitudes of life,

Not being blown around by the eight worldly winds,

Which I praise and blame,

Loss and gain,

Pain and pleasure,

And fame and disrepute.

And it is also being impartial in terms of attraction or aversion to other beings,

And seeing other beings and yourself impartially,

Like without preference.

That's a hard one.

It's also seeing that every individual is on their own life trajectory,

And they are the owners of their own actions.

They need to be responsible for themselves.

Nobody else can be responsible for their actions.

They will receive the consequences,

Good or bad,

From their actions.

Nobody else will receive those consequences,

If that makes sense.

So near and far enemies of equanimity.

The far enemy of equanimity is being shaken,

Emotionally shaken around,

Sort of being pulled backwards and forwards with attraction or aversion,

Or being shaken around basically,

Emotionally overreactive to things.

Events in life too are emotionally reactive.

The near enemy is interesting.

The near enemy is a kind of dissociative disengagement.

Equanimity is a relation,

When it's considered as a relationship quality,

It's deeply engaged with oneself and others.

It's deeply connected.

But when it's a near enemy,

It looks like equanimity,

But it's actually a dissociated offness,

It's a cold aloofness,

It's another sense of denial about what's happening.

It's this cold heartedness,

And not having any warmth in your heart in relationship to oneself or others.

So there's the four divine abodes as a whole,

And lubricate my vocal folds a little bit,

Moisturize them,

Hydrate them,

I think the word is.

Is that right,

Mary?

So love and kindness and compassion,

They're different.

You can see that love and kindness is based on happiness,

Whereas compassion focuses on suffering.

Because love and kindness,

The symbol of it is a smile and a kind of warm feeling,

Whereas with compassion it's suffering.

You don't necessarily smile when you see someone suffer,

But when you have compassion there's a different expression on your face,

Isn't there?

I was watching Helen before when I was talking about my sore throat and my inflammation in my sinuses,

And there was a look of compassion on her face,

There was a distinct experience of that.

However,

When we practice,

You can practice,

Sorry I'll come back,

When you practice love and kindness it can be just straight love and kindness,

When you're doing it as a meditation practice it can be straight love and kindness,

And so on with compassion as well.

And often they kind of blend together,

It's kind of a mix of love and kindness and compassion.

And I used to have this feeling that love and kindness and compassion as these divine abodes were like to project out into the world or onto myself,

Like projecting them out to give my love and kindness.

In my old age,

And I've been around for a little while,

Probably much longer than some of you except for one or two,

I've come to realize that it's not projecting out,

It's not doing anything really,

But it's more like opening your heart to let it be.

Opening your heart to it,

It's opening your heart and letting it in more than anything else.

And in the letting in,

It just radiates from you,

So you're not doing anything,

You're not giving it to anybody,

You're not projecting it onto anybody,

Including yourself,

But you're letting it in.

Something about love and kindness,

Because it's based on happiness,

I think to know happiness,

You know,

Genuine happiness,

Not this happiness that's derived from getting what you want or need,

For example,

Like hedonic happiness,

Which is very healthy for us,

But there's more to happiness than just that,

Getting what we hedonically enjoy.

To know true,

To know,

Even have a taste of genuine happiness is one way we open up to love and kindness,

And to know suffering is one way we open up to compassion,

And there's poems about this.

Lamyeshi in Sami Ling Monastery,

And I remember this because I was listening to a talk the other day that I gave about compassion,

And I remember making a reference to this.

Lamyeshi says that one practices compassion with tears in their eyes,

And there's some truth about that.

You're not slipping into the near enemy of compassion,

But you're actually resonating with suffering,

And when you have your own suffering,

You're actually opening up to that.

You're actually turning towards it and opening to it rather than avoiding it,

Rather than running away from it,

Rather than pretending it's not there or doing something.

It's actually this opening up to the reality of dukkha,

Basically,

To the reality of this first noble truth that I've talked about with you guys.

I know that I've been experiencing that in the last couple of days,

You know,

Been having headaches and then confronting technological challenges.

On Friday night,

I was with Lisa and Amy trying to work out how to do another meeting,

And my head was exploding,

And I had a headache and a sore throat.

I tried to go to bed and I hit my head,

Remember that?

Eventually I just sat on the lounge.

I tried to go to sleep,

I couldn't sleep,

And that's how I was saying,

I sat on my lounge,

And I just sort of let it go.

I just sort of,

This is what's happening.

Name it,

Feel it.

But it's more than just naming it,

Feeling it.

It's like applying mindfulness to it,

Sinking into it,

Turning towards it,

Facing up to it,

Surrendering into it,

Acknowledging it,

Accepting it.

And when you can do that,

There's some sort of clarity about it,

And a stimulant for compassion is the witnessing of suffering.

There's all sorts of strategies for how we can cultivate compassion,

And one strategy is to bring to mind someone who is suffering,

And notice your heart's response.

And most often it's compassion,

So then you let that compassion arise and you focus on it and it becomes stronger and stronger.

When it's related to oneself,

It's about being mindful,

Turning towards the difficulty,

Sinking into it,

Being courageous,

Being courageous.

I know Paul Gilbert talks about compassion as courage,

And it is courage because to be with your own suffering is difficult,

Yet it is the path to enlightenment.

Remember,

No dukkha,

No freedom from dukkha.

Remember how I said that?

No mud,

No lotus is the saying by Thit Nhat Hanh.

So if we can turn towards difficulty,

Understand it completely,

Open up to it,

And see it completely,

Then our response will be compassion.

And if it's for ourselves,

That's the response.

And that response actually helps us bear that which is difficult to bear,

Which is one definition of dukkha that I've read,

Is that which is difficult to bear.

And I remember,

I can speak a little bit of Thai,

Not so well these days,

But I can still understand Dharma talks in Thai.

And one of the Dharma teachers in Northeast Thailand many years ago,

He would say,

You know,

A dukkha is when you just can't bear it anymore.

For you feel like you've come to the end of your tether.

You just can't stand it anymore.

That's dukkha.

So to turn to and face that,

And then have the arising of compassion,

It makes us more capable of bearing and holding that difficulty and being with it.

So that's for ourselves.

And you guys will know as health professionals,

You'll know that when you're able to sit with someone suffering,

Rather than rushing in and trying to change it,

Like fix them up,

Trying to rescue them,

Trying to apply all the cognitive behavioral strategies,

You know,

To make them feel better.

When you can actually just sit with them and be with them and join them and resonate with their suffering.

You know that that's compassion,

And you know,

You're not burned out by that.

You just being with it courageously and being with that with an open heart,

And they can feel it.

And you know,

They'll come in to see you and they offload all their stuff and you're sitting there helping them bear that difficulty.

And you're staying with them with that,

And they say,

Oh,

I feel much better now.

Thanks a lot.

See you next week or something like that.

So compassion is something like that.

And loving kindness is similar.

These four high qualities bring tears to your eyes.

I'm just thinking of my happiness with the people I love.

And that includes everyone,

My clients,

And obviously my family.

It's a way of when you can open up to that happiness rather than pretending it's not there or denying it,

When you can actually tune into the reality of that warm friendliness that you have.

It's a way of opening up your heart.

So I want to talk about how we now cultivate loving kindness and compassion.

And there's lots of different ways.

I mean,

There's books and manuals written about this.

You can attend courses on it,

Mindful Self-Compassion,

Compassion Focus Therapy,

And loving kindness are all over the place.

So there are many strategies within the Buddhist teachings for cultivation of compassion and loving kindness.

Compassion particularly in the Mahayana tradition.

And I'll give you some ideas.

Some ways we cultivate it is by thinking about a person that will stimulate this quality.

For me,

All I have to do is think of my lovely partner and have loving kindness and compassion.

I have a lot of loving kindness.

It just arises.

And I think of my grandchildren.

I think of my clients.

I mean,

It's a different sort of awakening.

It's more compassion with my clients.

But you think of someone who can awaken that quality.

Then you have a rise in your being and you focus on it.

Do you remember how early I was talking about what we attend to becomes our reality?

Do you remember that?

By William James and the principles of serenity meditation and one-pointedness.

One-pointedness,

That's one of the factors of the jhanas.

It's the fifth factor and it's this capacity to see a massive experience happening yet go in and hone in on one of those experiences so that everything else falls away and you become completely absorbed in that experience.

If you can stimulate the feeling of loving kindness in whatever way you can,

Like I thought of your partner,

I thought of your children,

I thought of your grandchildren,

I thought of someone who's a dear friend,

I thought of your dog.

And I noticed there's a beautiful dog in one of those squares up there.

Can I see him?

Is he visible?

Is he in the room with you,

Chris?

He's over there,

A lovely puppy dog in the background there.

So think of your pet or think of something that is,

Oh,

There's a dog,

A lovely dog,

Anastasia,

What a beautiful puppy.

We figured out all the dogs,

Talking of loving kindness.

Dogs are love magnets,

They're fantastic.

Think of a love magnet and watch your heart's response,

Then hone in on it,

Hone in on it.

That's one way of cultivating loving kindness.

Then you sort of put aside the flack,

Use those skills of focused attention,

The skills you've been cultivating today and yesterday,

You focus in on it and it becomes your reality.

You become absorbed into it and it into you.

What happens,

And same with compassion,

Sorry,

I'll just talk about compassion.

With compassion,

I think I mentioned this already,

But I'll say it again anyway,

You think of someone who is suffering.

It's probably better to think of one person rather than the multitude of the world because you'll get overwhelmed.

You think of one person who is suffering and watch your heart's response.

It's a quivering of the heart,

It's a quivering.

You may get tears,

You don't need to identify with it,

You don't need to make it into a false facsimile of compassion.

You recognize the sign and then you absorb into that sign.

You focus in on it and go into it and it becomes you.

And the experience is spacious,

It becomes boundless,

Expansive.

It's good to recognize signs and the way you can recognize signs is pay attention.

Pay attention to everyday activities and when you see a lovely puppy somewhere or when you see someone,

Pay attention to the way you're feeling,

Someone you really like and have a warm feeling towards.

Pay attention to what's happening and you go,

Oh,

That's love and kindness.

That's compassion.

So become familiar with it and then when you're sitting down to do a meditation practice,

You can bring it to mind and it will arise.

Rick Hansen,

I mentioned Rick Hansen earlier tonight but also I mentioned him the other night when I was talking about an acronym called HEAL.

And HEAL is a really good acronym for the cultivation of serenity actually but in particular about the cultivation of wholesome qualities,

Wonderful qualities.

And you can use this kind of formula for loving kindness and compassion as well.

So HEAL stands for one,

Having an experience.

H stands for having an experience.

E stands for enriching it.

A stands for absorbing into it or letting it absorb into you.

And L stands for linking or learning.

One of my clients said learning.

I say that's true too.

So linking it.

So I'll just break this down a bit.

Having an experience.

So it would be,

You've had an experience of loving kindness somewhere along during the day.

So you pay attention to it.

You turn from your negative bias to positive bias.

You know how we're walking around with blinkers with negative bias and not picking up on these things.

So you open your awareness,

You set about your intention to be aware of some positive things.

You set your intention to be aware of loving kindness for example.

You notice it.

You explore it.

You enrich it.

You take note of how it feels in your body.

What's around it.

Other stimulates around it.

Other sensory aspects of it.

You put into your memory.

You might even add some words to it.

Like ah,

Loving kindness or happiness.

Whatever it is,

You enrich it.

And then once you're enriched enough,

It starts to,

It's like paddling that board again and starts to take on its own energy.

You let it happen and you go into it.

You absorb yourself into it.

You sink into it.

So that's one way of understanding heal but I'll just clarify what the L stands for.

L stands for linking it.

Meaning once you get that positive experience,

You can link it to something similar that relates to the experience but is a negative experience.

So that it just takes up the space of your heart so much so that the negative experience has no room to be.

Loving kindness is the direct antidote for hatred.

For ill will.

For that hindrance that I spoke about last night.

It's the direct antidote.

So if you're having a problem with ill will,

Having a problem with ill will with someone or yourself and we have ill will directed towards ourself regularly.

A lot of people who I see are depressed often have ill will directed at themselves like self-loathing,

Self-hatred,

Self-denigration.

So when you have so much love in your heart,

So much happiness in your heart,

When you have absorbed into this experience and you bring to mind,

You link it to a negative experience,

The overwhelming result is that there's no room for the hate.

There's no room for the aversion.

There's no room for the self-loathing because it gets filled with love or loving kindness.

Does that make sense?

I think Rick Hansen's,

I reckon Rick Hansen's a bodhisattva,

Which means someone who's helping beings on the way.

He's a great guy and I really like his teachings and I mean he puts all these frameworks into neurological perspective so it's really helpful in that respect.

So and compassion is the same.

You know you have the feeling of passion,

Take note of it or you can stimulate it in your meditation practice.

You can bring it to mind and get the feeling going.

I haven't said much about words at this point.

A lot of the way they cultivate these qualities in mindful self-compassion and other Western approaches is by using words and phrases.

And they also do this in Buddhist traditions and there's a bunch of phrases that are,

You know there's lots of different phrases that you can use for loving kindness and compassion.

So when you stimulate this quality,

When you enrich it,

You can add words to it and then you can add,

May I be happy or may you be happy or may you be free from suffering or may I be free from suffering and so on.

That will help it.

Yet I just want to go into a technical thing.

The addition of words in the Buddhist traditions didn't really come along until the 9th century after the Buddha passed into Parinibbana,

The 5th century with the writing of a text called the Vasudha Marga which is the path of purification.

And early Buddhist development of these qualities were about creating a sense of spaciousness.

It was creating this sense of being in an abiding or spacious quality and words weren't related to it.

They weren't anything like saying may you be happy,

May I be happy and so on.

It was just in this spacious place and if other beings got in contact with that spacious place,

Fantastic.

They would also receive the loving kindness that you're radiating.

So I can see it's getting late for some of you,

Early for others but I'm going to finish up in a little while but I'm just going to give you a personal example of how I develop loving kindness and how I use it.

I used to just rely on words and I just used to say the phrases and that would be uplifting.

Even if I was so tired or so aversive that nothing else could happen,

I would say the words in my mind like may I be happy or may beings be happy.

And it was enough to carry me through and sometimes over the years I just had no energy to cultivate loving kindness at all.

And the best I could do was just be mindful of the state I'm in.

Because loving kindness,

Compassion,

These qualities can't be forced.

They are like a natural opening of a flower,

If that makes sense.

It's like a natural opening.

You can't make the flower open faster.

Although I was watching some videos tonight,

My partner Mary was showing this beautiful opening of flowers and I was thinking,

Oh,

It's just like loving kindness but it was happening in minutes.

It was really cool.

So the example I want to talk about is something that I developed on the last couple of retreats I've been on over the last couple of years.

And there was one point in time where I realized it wasn't projecting out,

It was just opening up.

Opening up deeply and being totally receptive of experience.

And there was this,

In my meditations one day I had this experience of complete receptivity.

Was just like complete opening and acceptance of pain and suffering.

It was really quite lovely.

And then one day there appeared a luminous kind of disc-like thing,

A vision.

It wasn't just a vision,

It was a feeling sign I suppose.

And it was like this luminous light.

But it was like a well as well that was infinitely deep.

And it kind of appeared in my heart.

So I looked at that and then I went close to it and I touched it and it just seemed to heal me.

Like if I could immerse myself in that pond,

In that luminous well,

It would transform me.

And other times I wouldn't get close to seeing that well or seeing the sign of that.

And other times I would just strengthen it.

The way I would strengthen it would be kind of putting in the well everything I knew about loving kindness,

All my loving kindness experiences like thoughts of my partner,

Thoughts of my children,

Thoughts of grandchildren,

Thoughts of my teachers in Thailand.

I have some very strong moments of experiencing loving kindness coming from my teachers in Thailand.

Filling it up and even memories of my own loving kindness to my clients,

My own compassion clients,

Filling this well up so that it's an infinite source,

A resource of loving kindness.

And then just going into it and sinking into it and being transformed by this loving kindness.

Then sitting there and just letting it radiate out so that it touches the hearts of all beings,

Whatever beings there are.

And I'm not sure if there are any beings out there,

But I think there are.

So I hope tonight's talk has been useful.

It's about working with the know of experience.

Like I'm having a bit of know of experience with my sinuses and my sore throat.

I don't want it.

Just turning that no to a yes,

It's okay.

I can accept this.

I can love this ultimately.

Okay,

So let's have a few moments quiet and I'll rest my vocal phones a little bit and then we'll open it up for discussion.