This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Relaxing into Big-hearted Awareness with Dawn Neal. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Dawn Neal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Happy to be with you. As you know from the introduction or the registration materials on the web, this is not exactly an intro to loving-kindness or meditation class. You can find those elsewhere, but rather an exploration of how these two practices blend together. I will say more about each of them in a few minutes.
Basically, the rhythm of the day will be short instructional periods interwoven with guided meditations. We’ll have a couple of quick bio breaks more or less on the hour and a time for an optional Q&A in the middle. So if you want to stay quiet, you can just mute your sound system for the 10 minutes we’ll be doing that. So that’s where we’re going.
I’m going to start right in with a short precursor meditation for metta1, or loving-kindness. A little bit of orientation to that: it is both a contemplation and an embodied practice. By contemplation, what that means is we turn our minds particularly to a topic or a theme or an area and think on purpose. In the case of metta meditation, it often involves visualizing. It involves directing our attention towards a person or another being or ourselves and cultivating certain intentions, certain proclivities of mind by repeatedly doing this. So it’ll be a little bit different than mindfulness, although it definitely incorporates mindfulness.
To start out, again, closing your eyes and tuning into your body, your heart. Noticing breath, sensations, sound. And just noticing how you are today, however that is. The kind acknowledgment of what is.
On the out-breath, offering your presence, your attention to this group, to yourself, to this time as an act of generosity. On the in-breath, receiving whatever the moment has to offer.
The invitation is to call to mind a person, a being who in a simple, uncomplicated way brings a smile to your lips or a lightness and care to your heart. It could be a child, an animal, someone who has benefited you in some way with their presence. Noticing how it feels to imagine them. Offering good wishes, care towards this other one, perhaps like a gesture or an out-breath. Imagining their response.
It’s helpful to hone these good wishes with words, offering simple words. I’ll offer a few examples, or you can use your own.
Be safe, happy, healthy. Be peaceful, at ease, and free.
And then letting go of these words and that image or felt sense of this other one. And again, noticing the felt, embodied experience of this moment.
So that is a very brief taste of the process of loving-kindness meditation and a little bit of a microcosm of where we’re going today. We’ll be spending some time stabilizing attention using this process of metta, and then in the last third of our time, applying that to the wisdom awareness, receptive awareness practice of Sayadaw U Tejaniya’s style, which is based on the four foundations of mindfulness. It is the four foundations, but they’re approached through the mind and heart. So these meditations pair quite well together in my own personal experience.
But to name briefly, as many of you are quite well aware, I trust, love and kindness are universal qualities of human experience. They weave through every major religion, though no religion has a lock on them. They’re naturally arising, but in metta meditation, the Buddha operationalized this process to cultivate more love, more kindness, more care, more compassion through intentionally directing our minds.
It’s an invaluable basis for a number of things. It helps cultivate concentration or stability of mind. It helps cultivate mindfulness, and it can be a very playful practice. Stability, as I just said, refers to concentration or samadhi2, but it also has another meaning. It’s the stability of heart and mind that comes from integration, from the capacity to be kind, patient, and accepting with whatever is in our minds and hearts and whatever is in the world. Metta meditation, loving-kindness meditation, tends to cultivate both.
I’m not going to go into too much of the theory in a short chunk of time like we have today, but just to say that whatever predisposition we cultivate in our hearts and minds tends to be onward leading towards that predisposition. So it is possible to counterprogram against other things that maybe came from family of origin or from our culture or from habits of mind that are just not so helpful or healthy that we’ve picked up. Metta will typically soften those and eventually replace them to a certain extent, which makes it a lot more interesting and fun to be in your own mind, your own heart.
Loving-kindness practice is taught in two broad ways. One is using usually five categories of beings, and this comes from the commentarial tradition of the Visuddhimagga3. The other one, which comes from the suttas4, the ancient discourses, is more of a general suffusion of loving-kindness or compassion or joy, whatever the quality is that’s being cultivated, towards all of experience. Today, I’m not going to be teaching five categories. I’ll teach basically one, maybe two, and then focus a little bit more on this suffusing, this general cultivation, which tends to be easier to use to stabilize attention if you only have a few hours, which we only have.
Five principles to keep in mind, and they go with the acronym PAIRS: P-A-I-R-S. These principles help to pair your mind, pair your heart to metta.
I’d like to name that even just the wish, the desire to become kinder, gentler, is powerful. Already it starts working on you, even just cultivating that much. And no matter where you aim that wish, it benefits you first. So you’re automatically including yourself in this practice whether you realize it or not.
That said, if you practice it at home, I really strongly recommend that you include yourself specifically. In the ancient commentaries, the self was the first category. That’s not the case for most Westerners; we usually start with someone easier than ourselves. However, if generating kindness for yourself is easy, please feel free to do that instead of the easy being or the benefactor that I introduce.
In the ancient suttas, this suffusing of loving-kindness or compassion, altruistic joy, or equanimity—the four immeasurables—was simply suffusing one’s own mind and heart, and by virtue of doing that, automatically including anyone and everything else that arises in consciousness. So it was much simpler, and it was predicated on the idea that it was fairly easy to do for one’s own mind and heart.
This practice, like all meditation practice, goes more smoothly if you hold it lightly, if you start where it’s easy, and if you trust the process.
So with that in mind, let’s do a little bit of a longer practice. With whatever easy, joy-making, happy-making, or care-making being that came to mind in our first little short meditation, or if you prefer, you can choose someone else. The classic choice for this is the benefactor, someone who’s benefited you, who you have gratitude and appreciation for. And whoever you choose, let them be your metta muse. Let them be your inspiration.
Settle in. Calling them to mind, finding a posture that’s both comfortable and alert, and settling in for a moment. Taking a few moments of silence to listen to your body and mind as you imagine this other one.
Then with a couple of slower, deeper breaths, noticing the sensations around your heart or wherever your emotional core is. Really attuning to the connection between the embodied sensations, feelings, emotions, and this other one. Generate an image or visualization of them. Or if you don’t visualize, imagine that you’re visualizing them, or a felt sense of them as if they’re nearby, their presence palpable in some way.
Take a moment to recall, really notice what you appreciate about them, qualities they have. Then sending, offering your care, appreciation, kindness towards them. It can be helpful to link this care, these intentions, to the breath or to an imagined internal gesture of offering, or even to a visualization of light or beauty in their direction. Allowing a rhythm of this offering, perhaps on the in-breaths and out-breaths, to build. Feeling into these intentions.
And if it’s helpful to hone them with words, phrases, you’re welcome to use whatever words work for you in your own language. The encouragement is to keep them short, simple. I’ll offer a few as an example. It can be helpful to repeat them, but repeat them at the speed of mindfulness.
Be safe. Be happy. Be healthy. Be peaceful, at ease, and free.
If distractions arise, other thoughts, it’s natural. Part of the practice of metta is kindly, gently letting go of those other inputs and graciously returning the attention to cultivating these intentions of kindness. It can be helpful to allow a bit of a smile on your lips or to put a hand on your heart.
Noticing and appreciating any feelings, emotions, warmth or gratitude, appreciation, any intentions of goodness. Water them with your attention. Savor them. Any other emotions, thoughts, meet them with kindness, patience.
From time to time, noticing sensations in your core, in your heart, your body. Gathering the attention in a gesture, a movement of offering and receiving with this other one.
And then letting go of the felt sense or image of this other one. Feeling into your heart, your emotional core, your body, and offering these wishes of kindness outwards to the others in this Zoom room today or listening later, wishing your fellow practitioners well.
May they be safe, happy, healthy, peaceful, at ease, and free.
And as you continue to send these good wishes, the invitation is to notice, feel into receiving them even as you send them.
May we be safe, happy, healthy, peaceful, at ease, and free.
Then letting go of images, directed attention, or phrases, and just allowing whatever is present to flow through your body, heart, and mind in this moment as it is.
Thank you for your practice.
A few words about metta meditation, loving-kindness, goodwill meditation, and maybe just a little bit of how it links up with this practice of wisdom awareness, of mindfulness of mind, or mindfulness of heart as I sometimes like to call it.
As some of you already know if you’re regular practitioners of this, this is a practice that has kind of a lot of moving parts, or can. The real invitation, as I mentioned in my earlier instructions, is to be playful, be experimental, have a little fun with it, be imaginative. In this way, there’s a value in feeling into your strengths, your cognitive strengths, your strengths as a human being, whatever your learning style is, to make it work for you. I offer instructions about gesture for kinesthetic learners; that’s been really helpful and important for me. Visualization works really well for a number of people. Language or concept works well for others. Some people find all of them are helpful.
And for most people, it’s helpful to tune in in an embodied way. This isn’t just a mantra. It’s actually not a mantra meditation. It’s not just repeating phrases, though there could be, I imagine, some value in that. Instead, it’s intention cultivation by tapping into our entire system.
As such, this cultivating volition, intention on purpose, is a process of what’s called directed awareness. Most of you are familiar with directed awareness, whether you know that term or not, if you’ve done mindfulness of breathing. Mindfulness of breathing is directing the awareness at the breath, the sensations of the breath. Open awareness or receptive awareness, which tends to be what insight meditation opens out into regardless of what you direct your attention to at first, is a more receptive process, noticing whatever arises. This is part of how mindfulness of breathing is often taught, right? Notice the breath. When something pulls you away, notice that, acknowledge it, come back to the breath. I was offering metta instructions that were very similar to that: directed awareness, acknowledging all that arises, coming back to the intention.
I’m naming this in part because metta meditation can be practiced either way. It’s usually taught as directed attention. However, it is possible and beautiful to do a receptive practice of mindfulness, of simply cultivating an attitude of kindness towards whatever is coming up in your own body, heart, and mind without anything else at all—without phrases, without words, without visualization. Just receiving with kindness. I call this mindfulness of kindness, suffusing the cultivation of an attitude of kindness with mindfulness practice, awareness practice.
This process, whether you’re doing it in a directed way or a receptive way, is greatly benefited by noticing the attitude in your mind, noticing your relationship with reality in any given moment. I have known people who practice loving-kindness meditation—”May you be safe, happy, healthy, peaceful, easeful, free”—like a hammer or a chisel in their own minds and hearts. It’s not so helpful, because what are we actually cultivating there? Listen to the tone of voice. It’s demanding or even a little bit aggressive. So the attitude of mind, the relationship to the process, the mood of the heart is key in this kind of cultivation, and I would go as far as to say in any kind of meditative cultivation. Because no matter what is happening, whether you’re falling off the breath or you can’t remember a phrase, or you forget to do the practice 50 times in 30 minutes, you’re always cultivating something by the way you hold it, by your attitude towards it.
So cultivating as much patience, graciousness, and gentleness as possible is a way of cultivating greater capacity in our minds for mindfulness, kindness, metta, and for wisdom awareness, receptive awareness.
Those of you who are already familiar with the teachings of Sayadaw U Tejaniya, of receptive awareness or wisdom awareness, will recognize some of what I just said quite clearly. One of the key teachings of this is the third and fourth foundation: mindfulness of heart-mind and mindfulness of everything that arises in the heart and mind. One of the keys of this is to notice our relationship with what’s arising, or notice the attitude of heart and mind with what’s arising. So this is where metta and wisdom awareness kind of meet. With metta, there’s an intentional cultivation of a certain inclination. In wisdom awareness, it’s more open; it’s to simply notice. But in either case, noticing the inclination, the relationship of mind, is key.
I bring this up because we’re actually going to do another metta meditation in a little while here that will kind of shade into more open awareness. It’ll be more of a sutta-based metta meditation. But I’m bringing in the attitude of mind now because it’s key for both practices, and it opens up a meta-level move that you can do in your own mind and heart, a reframe you can do, which is that any challenge, any difficulty, any so-called purification that arises in practice can be onward leading as long as it’s met with an attitude of generosity, kindness, and patience with yourself. It becomes information that leads to greater wisdom or greater capacity or greater stability or all of the above.
So if it’s not possible, we might say, “Oh, it’s not possible for me to be kind to myself. It’s such a mess in there. I’m so critical.” That’s fine. Then do your best to just wish to be kind, to be patient with that, to be gracious with that. None of us asked for unhelpful mental patterns to arise in us. It’s not your fault. So, learn from it.
No matter what you’re doing, if you’re noticing it’s metta, fantastic. If you’re noticing it’s something else, that’s useful. Notice that; that’s information.
I’ll close this little mini-talk with one more process that’s been particularly helpful for me in cultivating both of these practices, and that is to appreciate the intention towards kindness as an active process. Appreciate your own wish to be happy. The shorthand for this is “love the wish.” And that begins to be onward leading in its own right, and it transitions to loving the awareness itself, or the capacity to be aware.
So with that, friends, we will do a five-minute bio break and come back together at 8 after whatever hour it is for you. Thank you for your attention.
We will settle back in for another period of practice. Just to orient you a little bit, we’ll do this practice session, and then around 10:30-ish, there’ll be an optional Q&A for about 15 minutes. As I think I mentioned earlier, if you don’t want to participate, you can mute. I will give you the exact time that we’ll come back so that you can turn on your sound again and participate.
Questioner 1: Thank you. I think this is mostly just a comment that I noticed and found really delightful. It’s the part of the meditation where the instruction was to, after using the image and the benefactor and the being, to then let it go. And then it just points to the afterglow inside of what arose, and then it becomes like, “Oh, this is actually just now my system, you know, and the lens through which I get to do whatever comes next.” So, I just love that: using the thing, creating the state, letting go of the thing, and then really embodying the state. So, thank you so much for that.
Dawn Neal: You’re very welcome. It’s one of the key learnings of metta meditation, actually, is noticing, “Wow, training can shift the mind state and the lens through which we see the world.”
Questioner 2: A challenge I have, a block or a problem, is feeling the receiving part. I don’t feel it.
Dawn Neal: This is not uncommon. I will say, it might sound kind of funny to say this, but it’s kind of a skill to receive kindness and compassion. It’s something that is learned for some people, depending on your own conditioning. So one of the instructions in metta meditation in general is to “fake it till you make it.” So if you’re not feeling receiving, imagine receiving. Just imagine it. And again, that begins to create new neural pathways, to create new habits of mind, inclinations of the heart to be able to receive. For not a few people, receiving is harder than giving in this practice, which is part of why I teach it. I don’t teach it because it’s easy; I teach it because it’s helpful. So, I hope that’s helpful.
Questioner 3: I have a problem with repeating it multiple times. I just do it once or maximum three times. I get bored repeating it.
Dawn Neal: Yeah. So, you don’t have to use the words at all. I hope that came through in the instructions, that they are optional. But most people find that repeating, especially if you do it with a rapidity that I just modeled, isn’t helpful. So what you might consider a sweet spot, if you do find the words helpful, is to do it once, feel the effect on your system for a while, and if and when the concentration starts to wane with generating the intention, then repeat, but wait until that time. You can just drop them if something else is there, some other piece of it that resonates more for you among the different components.
Questioner 3: I mean, I like safety and peaceful and free.
Dawn Neal: So you like those words in particular? Yeah. So you might experiment with just those, and maybe even those in any other language that you happen to speak, if any. It can be fun for people; there’s a different resonance when it’s in one’s own mother tongue. The other thing I would say is if words aren’t your thing—and they aren’t for a number of people—maybe focus more on sensation or visualization or the gesture. Sometimes when I teach a longer version of the metta part of this, I will ask people to come up with a gesture of offering, an actual gesture, and then do it a few times to get it into your body and then imagine that. So it could be like an offering of a hug or an offering of a thing. So just play. If you’re getting bored, play, get imaginative. There’s the classic way it’s presented, but this is a form of practice that benefits greatly from experimentation, imagination, and playfulness.
Questioner 4 (Margo): Hi, thank you. I have more of a practical question. I’ve been meditating for a long time and I’m just beginning to add in the metta piece. I like doing my classic sit and then add it either after or before. I’m just adding 5 minutes, 10 minutes. I’m just wondering your thoughts on how to structure that. I just started this like three weeks ago, starting with myself. And then somebody else told me that maybe starting with myself but also doing general at the end for all beings, and then moving on to the order… I get a little confused on the timing to stay with self. Do you have any thoughts on just giving me a little guidance on how to approach this?
Dawn Neal: Yeah, thank you. It’s a great question. The first thing I’ll say is the instruction I got from one of my teachers in Burma I found really helpful, which you’ve already kind of cottoned on to, and that is to do it either at the beginning or the end of the sit. It’s kind of up to you as to what works better for you. Many people find this practice, the metta part, builds a certain amount of momentum or, some people call it, “warming up the field.” It’ll shift the attitude or state of mind in a way that’s helpful for mindfulness. If that’s you, doing 10 minutes at the beginning of a set of mindfulness practice can be really helpful. And I’m saying 10 minutes, not five, because there’s actually been science done on this, and 10 minutes is the minimum efficacious dose for a shift of state. For some people it will take longer, but for many people that is enough to shift things to help with a little bit more stability of mind, a little bit more kindness.
The other thing in terms of structure… I talked about the categories or the commentarial way of teaching it, and that the earlier way is the radiating. Most people find that trying to do all five categories in half an hour, let alone 10 minutes, doesn’t work, to be blunt. So, if you’re going to use categories, the reason I’m only taking one or two per session is because there’s a benefit in building momentum with one before changing. If you want to work through all of them over the course of time, the recommendation is to do one plus all beings, or one plus self and all beings at most per meditation, and switch it up through your week. But really, most people find it’s helpful to choose one or two and focus on those for a long time before switching to another one. I did two months of intensive metta in Burma, and each category was at least a week, and that was 16 hours a day, not an hour a day. So that can be really helpful to keep in mind: simplicity. Keep it simple and notice for yourself your own feedback. Am I feeling a little bit more grounded? A little bit more like those intentions are being cultivated? Or am I feeling more distracted? And then simplify or shift things up based on that. I hope that’s helpful.
Margo: Very helpful. Thank you so much.
We’re going to shift now. We kind of shifted a little bit in the last meditation, letting go of the image of the other and sending metta to your own experience, your body, your heart, your mind. We’re now going to shift more to an awareness practice. I’ll give a little bit of an orientation about that for those of you who are not familiar with this particular flavor of wisdom awareness practice.
I’m using the word “awareness” and “mindfulness” as the same term. Awareness is useful for me because it lets go of some of the baggage of mindfulness, this idea of directed attention. Awareness for me has more of a connotation of openness, of allowing whatever to arise. The particular practice that I’ll be orienting you to was taught by Sayadaw U Tejaniya. “Sayadaw” is an honorific for a monk who’s done at least 10 years of monastic practice and is authorized at that point to teach. He teaches the four foundations of mindfulness—body, feeling tone, heart-mind, and the things that arise in the heart-mind (hindrances, beautiful qualities like the factors of awakening, or metta itself is the fourth foundation).
His teachings focus on all four foundations through the lens of these last two: the quality of the heart-mind itself and what people often call “the lists,” which is what’s included in the Satipatthana Sutta6 in the fourth foundation. It’s anything that arises in the heart and mind: a thought, an emotion, mindfulness itself, a view, an opinion, or a set of qualities. So it tends to be what we call in the meditation world “subtler objects.”
The encouragement is to be open to everything that arises, but especially notice the effects on your system of a thought or mood or what’s known as the attitude of mind itself—the relationship with reality, I sometimes call it. The simplest way to talk about this is as the mood, or the tint on a pair of sunglasses. It’s what colors everything you see, everything you experience. It’s the music underneath the dialogue in a movie, the soundtrack. It’s that general sense of the coloration, the affective sense of what’s arising.
This can be illustrated by a story. As was mentioned at the beginning, I teach the Buddhist chaplaincy training program here at the Sati Center. Long before I taught it, I took it, and in between, I worked and trained as a chaplain in hospitals. It’s a phenomenal training, offering kindness and compassion to anyone and anything that crosses your path in the hospital—a doctor, a nurse, a patient, a family member—and sitting with them and holding them in kind, compassionate awareness.
I’d been doing this for a couple of years. I hadn’t had time to sit a long retreat because I was working and very full with graduate school and training. I went on my first month-long retreat for quite some time. The very first day, hauling my suitcase up to the second floor of the yogi dorm, I sprained my back. It was excruciating. So the first week or two of that retreat, I was lying down in pain and was practicing with it. Maybe the third or fourth day, the focus of the mind was noticing the pain, noticing all the body sensations, and then this habit of mind—and this is the key with this kind of practice—asking yourself, “Am I aware?” popped up in the mind. It was a habit based on this practice. And then there was this backward glance towards the attitude, this tint, this filter. And it was so clear that what was there was compassion. It completely shifted the experience.
This open awareness process, the way it’s taught by this teacher, is to ask yourself now and then either the question “Aware?” or “Am I aware?” and then just rest in whatever is obvious. The pro tip here is if you can say yes to that question, you are aware. The next thing to notice is whatever is most obvious in your experience: a hurting back, a sensation, a question, confusion, joy, whatever it is. And just leave it there, and then notice the next thing that arises in awareness.
Step three is that glance backwards I was just talking about, to look at the tint in the glasses. That question could be, “What’s the attitude?” or “What’s the relationship?” which is short for, “What’s the relationship of this mind, this heart, to what’s happening? How am I relating to what’s happening?”
That’s a very brief introduction, but we’ll do a guided meditation to demonstrate it. It is basically using these, I call them vipassana7 koans, these questions. They aren’t intended for a verbal answer; they’re to allow your system to respond. If you notice loving-kindness, compassion, great. If you notice irritation, that’s fine. That’s information that leads to more wisdom. See if it’s possible to hold it with graciousness and kindness.
A lot of what’s happening is to simply be aware of whatever is arising with interest, with curiosity, and allow it to be there. If you notice, because we’ve been practicing with metta meditation, you may notice the phrases arising or images from that practice arising. That’s perfectly fine. That’s just another thing to notice. Nothing arising in wisdom awareness has to be a problem. It simply is an invitation to notice it. Notice what’s obvious. Notice the attitude towards it with graciousness, as much kindness as possible.
Let’s do some practice with this.
The invitation is to settle into a posture that’s alert but easeful, inviting the body to relax. Noticing any energy in your body, any leftover resonance from the words or the Q&A, and inviting awareness to be at the forefront of your attention. Noticing breath, sound, sensation. Tuning in again to your heart center, your emotional center, wherever that is, and noticing any emotion or mood. Then softening, relaxing with what is.
If it’s helpful to maintain a slight primary focus on breath or metta, allowing that to arise is fine. Also inviting in, receiving everything that’s here. Inviting interest by asking yourself the question, “Am I aware?” or simply, “Aware?”
What is obvious in this moment? And then receiving the answer in your body, in your heart.
From time to time, noticing, “What’s the attitude or inclination of the heart?” Receiving that too with as much graciousness as possible.
If the mind starts to wander, inviting mindful awareness to refresh. “Aware. What’s this moment like?” Noticing whatever is flowing through. If thoughts or distractions arise, noticing them as arisings in this moment. Staying grounded in the body, breath, sensations, and relaxing, allowing whatever is arising with interest.
“Aware. What’s this moment like? What’s the relationship with what’s arising?”
If metta phrases or other thoughts are arising, noticing them, allowing them, noticing the effects on the system—body, heart, and mind.
Now, the invitation is, if the receptive awareness feels strong, present, please feel free to continue with that. If it feels appealing, drop in very gently, like a pebble into a pond, the wish of metta. Allow the wish to ripple through every cell, every pore, every organ of your body. Loving awareness to ripple through the heart and the mind. Offering kindness, appreciation to the capacity for awareness itself and to everything arising in it. With or without words, allowing, rippling, receiving.
In the last few minutes of our formal meditation together, the invitation is again to open up the mind, open up the kind awareness so big that it can take in everything arising, including the aspiration, the wish that all beings may be safe, happy, peaceful, and free. Allowing the wish for goodness, for kindness to radiate out from the core of your body and heart like a sun, a star, in all directions.
Taking a deep breath or two before you’re completely out of meditative space. Noticing with that backwards glance the quality of your own heart and mind in this moment. Feeling into that, noticing the quality of it.
Thank you for your practice.
We have just a couple of minutes left if anyone wants to put in the chat or into the room something they’re taking away from this time together, something that is lingering with you before we part ways. After we do this for a couple of minutes, we will dedicate the merit.
(Comments from chat: “Inner peace.” “That softer, kinder heart.” “Aware. That’s checking in. How am I relating to this state? Rinse and repeat.” “Resting in the warmth of that. Feels wonderful to practice.” “Loving patience.”)
Thank you all very much for spending part of your day in practice with Sati Center and with me. It’s an interesting phenomenon that with metta, with awareness, with practice, the benefits of it actually grow when we give them away. So with an offer of generosity, an internal gesture of generosity:
May the goodness from our practice here together ripple through our own minds and hearts and lives, to all of the lives we touch and all of the lives they touch, outwards and outwards. May all beings be safe, happy, peaceful, and free. And may our practice here together be a cause and condition for greater love, liberation, and peace in the world.
Thank you all for your practice. Be well.
Metta: A Pali word meaning loving-kindness, friendliness, or goodwill. It is one of the four Brahma Viharas. ↩
Samadhi: A Pali word for concentration, a state of meditative absorption or stability of mind. ↩
Visuddhimagga: “The Path of Purification,” a comprehensive 5th-century Theravada Buddhist commentary written by Buddhaghosa. It provides a detailed manual for meditation and the path to enlightenment. ↩
Sutta: A discourse or sermon attributed to the Buddha or one of his close disciples. ↩
Brahma Viharas: The “divine abodes” or “four immeasurables,” which are four sublime states of mind cultivated in Buddhist practice: Metta (loving-kindness), Karuna (compassion), Mudita (altruistic joy), and Upekkha (equanimity). ↩
Satipatthana Sutta: “The Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness,” a key Buddhist text that provides detailed instructions on the practice of mindfulness meditation through four foundations: mindfulness of the body, feelings, mind, and dhammas (mental objects/principles). ↩
Vipassana: A Pali word meaning “insight” or “clear-seeing.” It refers to insight into the true nature of reality, specifically the three marks of existence: impermanence (anicca), suffering (dukkha), and non-self (anatta). It is a form of meditation practice. ↩