The Spiritual Electrician, Adding a Higher Amp Service

If metta were a cloud would it look like this? Would your metta cloud be pink?  Metta, if you're not familiar with it, is the practice of generating loving kindness, offering well wishes and blessings to ourselves and others.  Two weekends ago I sat a metta retreat for the first time.

It is a wonderfully nourishing practice, very different from traditional meditation, different in that you are using words and images in your meditation.  Our Dharma teacher described it at one point as "rewiring" our systems.  We become spiritual electricians, installing a higher amp service.  We  engage ourselves in the work of planting seeds of generosity and kindness in minds that habitually subsist on a diet of leaner and meaner fare.

We started by creating a set of 3 to 5 wishes for ourselves. There are standard ones such as:  May I be happy.  May I be well.  May I be peaceful.  It was suggested that we  personalize the wishes so that they would really speak to what resonated for us.

I chose:  May I be healthy and at ease.  May I be peaceful and content.  May I love myself completely.  May I be kind.

We were to repeat the phrases but also to try and feel what it was like to experience them in a visceral, body way.  How does it feel to be truly peaceful and content?  We were reminded that generating these wishes for ourselves was not selfish or self centred but that everyone benefits from each of us experiencing these blessings.  They ripple out into the world through us in many ways, tangible and ethereal.

Next we chose a loved one to offer these wishes to, then a neutral person and then a person we found difficult.  It is of course easy to send warm wishes to a loved one, no stretching required.  And choosing a neutral person was interesting.  I often have fairly instant reactions to people, based on their appearance and behaviour ( ie this person is so sweet, this clerk is grumpy), so surprisingly it was a bit hard to find a neutral person. Finally after combing the local shops I found a new sales clerk at the local hardware store.

I had no trouble choosing a difficult person!  I decided to generate the wishes for both of us together and then the person who had been the loved one decided they should be part of it, so off we went in our little metta mobile (kind of like a smart car, but a kind one instead).  There was a lightness to it, so the mind didn't seem to bawk at wishing my difficult person well.

We were invited at another point to create wishes for all sentient beings and radiate those, feeling what it was like to send our blessings out to the unknown, to send them out on a large scale.

It was a delicious, sun filled day at Stowel Lake Farm.  Red winged black birds wobbled on old bullrush stalks around the pond, waiting to swoop for the next bug.  A giant cat named Gorilla wandered into the meditation hall to soak up all the metta rays.  We were reminded to drink it all in, to appreciate the beauty when outside doing our walking meditation.  We were reminded to savour the wonderful meals and think about all the people it had taken to bring this food to our table.

There was a delicious expansive feeling to the weekend, as if you could feel your heart growing larger.  And it was truly a rewiring of the habitual focus on what is wrong in the world.  The energetic shift was amazing and after a weekend the phrases became burned into the brain for retrieval. These minds need training if they are going to behave any differently than they normally do.  For the most part they run wild, generating thoughts that are often not particularly helpful, worries, fears, desires, dramas. These metta phrases have become a nice thing to fall back on when I need a little reorienting or when I find myself in a difficult situation, just pull out a metta phrase or two.

So I invite you.  Hop in your own little metta mobile and go out for a spin.  I don't think the roads can get to crowded.  What metta wishes will you put in your tank?

"We See The World As We Are"

"We see the world not as it is but as we are" Someone made this comment at the second day long of our intro to Vipassana/ Insight meditation workshop. This is something that rings so true for me these days and something I am paying a lot of attention to.

How could it be otherwise? Even scientists will tell you that there is no such thing as objectivity. Every researcher influences the outcome of her research. Even by the very questions we ask, we influence the results, the information we uncover. And of course this speaks to the unfathomable connection between everything, large or small. A big tenet of Buddhism is, "we are all connected". Someone said, and I love this way of expressing it, something to the effect, "tug on one small thing in this world and you will find everything is attached", kind of like the cosmic thread in our universal picnic cloth.

But I digress. I think I love this comment about "seeing things as we are" because it reminds me that if I change how I think, I can change how I see the world. This is another tenet of Buddhism, "we can change". We can become more compassionate, more relaxed, more friendly to ourselves and others. There is such a huge field for us to play in here. We are not our thoughts, not even a collection of them. The mind is simply a sense organ, sensing thought in the same way your nose detects scents. Where do our thoughts come from? Good question. All 72,000 if them that we are supposed to have in a day.

By working with our minds we can nourish new ways of seeing the world. When people talk about fate or karma, this is where the very fixed view falls apart. We create karma, we come here with certain karmic residue, but by our actions, by our intention we can work with our lives. We are not victims, we are co-creators of our world (no rose coloured glasses here kids, I am not getting all new agey on you).

So I am loving my new Vipassana training which is helping me focus on, well focusing, bringing intention and a fresh presence to my meditation, to the minute details of my life. I love the metta practice which I have never done before. It is like eating this wonderfully nourishing and sweetly, delicious meal. Wish yourself well, wish others well. Does this sound hokey, or silly or like some overlay? Try it. Try repeating. May I be relaxed and content. May I be open and spacious. May I be healthy and strong. This is a re-educating of the mind that says, "man this day sucks" and lists all the things that didn't work out.

It's easy to see the relation between what we put in our mouths and how our body feels but how about what we fill our minds with. If you're like me it's easy to get hung up in a litany of small grumbles, about the weather or the neighbour or the driver who cut us off, or the friend whose neglected us, the family member who irritates us. It takes intention for most of us to see the world differently but I tell you it is worth every bit of effort. The sweetness of the day awaits you. Unwrap it and pop it into the lips of your awareness.