Oct 23 -- Loving-kindness meditation

Hi, everyone.  Transcript from yesterday's class is at <http://wutyl-ithaca.blogspot.com/>.  Since people seemed to find  the guided meditations helpful, I have excerpted them: 

Meditation 1 (just the kitten)
Meditation 2 (sequence of people through to someone who annoys you)

Next week, we'll be doing insight meditation, which helps cultivate equanimity, another of the four immeasurables.

Best regards,

Alex

**************************************************************************************************

S: My excuse, which is no excuse, is that I’ve been traveling since last Wednesday, until yesterday, so that’s my excuse, which is no excuse, but I’m sticking to it.  I know it’s a pretty crappy excuse because when you’re on a plane what else are you going to do, so... But it was good, what I did do.  And your haircut looks great, by the way.

A: Oh, I actually haven’t had a haircut. [Laughter]

S: That’s right, exactly.

G: [whispering] He’s not grading us.

S: It’s an old habit.

A: Yeah, well, the Buddha’s gonna get you.  It’s not up to me.  [Laughter]  He’s a vengeful god.

P: I’ve done a little bit more than that, but not much more.  I still run into this problem that I have trouble putting my mind into a scenarios, like you sent me the thing about the loving-friendliness, and imagining this little kitten.  But the kitten isn’t there.  It’s easy for me to focus on my breath because it’s actually there.  But if I try to get my mind thinking about this kitten, the abscence of the kitten just sort of overwhelms and I start thinking about other things.  It’s partly just because I’m just tired all the time, my mind is tired.  But if you have any advice for convincing my mind to think about hypothetical things, I don’t know.

A: Well, it doesn’t necessarily have to be hypothetical.  It could be a person that you feel love towards, possibly your parents, or even a specific incident where someone was kind to you, or you were kind to someone.  Does that seem like something which might work better?  We’re going to get an opportunity to experiment with it today because the topic’s metta.

P: Potentially [that would work] but remembering an event is different from the event itself.  I can think about how I felt, but it’s hard to actually make myself feel the same thing.

G: I have some ideas.  I went to a meditation talk on Saturday and some folks were talking about this because I was asking them “What do you think of tonglen, what’s your idea of this?”  A couple of things that they said were that a person who made a really big impact on them is someone who works in hospicare in Ithaca.  So everyday he deals with people who are in the most challenging stages of life.  They’re going through death, their loved ones are there with them, and they’re going through a lot of other challenges.  And he manages to the best part of each person, no matter what they’re going through at the moment.  So what he does, and what they recommended was before you’re even going toward tonglen, you’re just saying “Hey, do I have in me this joy?”  Because if you don’t have that, then there’s nothing to meet the sorrow with.  So I’m feeling super down right now.  Probably not a great time to do tonglen right now, so what you start with is the joy.  And when you get that, then as soon as whatever you’re faced with hits that, hits in your stomach, it just sort of disappears, because it’s absorbed by all that joy.  And that’s what you’re breathing out in tonglen.  But when I put that into practice this weekend, I tried the idea of  not just saying “I take in your sorrow then breath out joy,” but then a very applicable way this weekend, what we talked about last week was, OK, I’m really, really attached right now, because I had expectations from a friend.  I wanted them to spend a certain amount of time with me, to hold me as very important, and how to face that dead-on with tonglen was to imagine that they had made someone else the most important person in their life.  And to just run with that.  So that’s how I took the giving it away to work, to allow them to spend absolutely no time with me, and [for me] to have absolutely no fun, because they’re giving all of that joy and laughter to somebody else.  And when I pracitced that, I was able to give up the attachment.  Maybe not 100%, but I did and it was miraculous, because I was feeling resentful about that.  So that was the tonglen for me.  So it wasn’t about anything abstract.  I think that you can come at it from a lot of different angles and you can draw on your attachments because they’re so powerful.

A: That’s not a bad idea at all.  So the idea there is that you’ve got an expectation of enjoyment or love of some kind for yourself and you imagine that love or joy, and start there.  

[To “P”]:  I’m curious, how do you motivate yourself to do the work you need for school and things like that.

P:  [Laughter] That’s a bit of a problem.  It’s “I have to get this done, because if I don’t get it done now, then I’ll have to do it later because I’ll feel bad about not doing it.

A:  Uh huh.  So in a sense, this is one of the key skills that Buddhist meditation develops, and it does take practice for a lot of people, and it’s a matter of exploring your way around until you find an approach to it which does work.  The way we’re approaching it at the moment is kind of head-on.  “I’m just going to feel metta.”  And if that’s not working, one way to approach taht is to look at the points of resistance that are coming up for you.    This is actually the way that Ken teaches in his book, and it didn’,t work for me, so I’m teaching what worked for me, but I’m familiar with the methods in his book, so one place to start with that is just, if you say to yourself at the moment, “May I be happy, well and at peace,” what comes up for you when you say that?

P:  Good question.  

A:  Nothing much seems to come up?  What do you experience in your body?

P: Confusion.

A: Confusion!  That’s good.   Confusion about what?

P: What I’m feeling, I guess.

A: You’re not sure what you’re feeling?  OK, so that’s a good place to start.  So, this is the way I recommend you approach what we’re going to be covering in class today.  Do the practices as I describe, and notice what’s coming up in physical sensations, thoughts and feelings, and look for any points of resistance tehre, and just experience those, and if anything comes up which starts to feel overwhelming, that’s good, that means you’re on the right track.  If you can experience those points of resistance as they arise, that attention in itself is like the conflict resolution that we’ve been doing up to this point.  It’s a kind of tonglen in a way.  You’re just experiencing teh resistance in your body, and just by experiencing it, you’ll be able to see what underlies it and then we can talk about ways that you can respond to that.

One of the principles of Buddhism is that loving-kindness isn’t about liking or disliking something.  One the examples Ken gives is he’s got this Aunt in England who’s told him several times, “You know Ken, if you ever commit a murder, you be sure to come here.”  And this to him exemplifies loving-kindness.  “I don’t care that you’ve done this terrible thing, I still appreciate you, and I see the inherent goodness in you.”  So the theory behind what I’m recommending to [“P”] is that that appreciation is there in everyone’s experience, and it’s just that there’s something covering it over at the moment, and coming to an understanding of what’s covering it over will allow you to uncover it with practice.  So the fact that you have a solid breath meditation at the moment, it sounds like, taht’s going to be useful.  Because when difficult experiences come up in this, you can use the breath as a point of stability to remain in a attention as those reactions arise.

S: I don’t know if I got the transcripts or not.  I may have given you a confusing email address.

A:  I’ll check.

So, metta.  If you’re here from Quaker meeting and you’re wondering about what you should be doing there, metta is a great place to start.  In Christianity, metta, loving-friendliness, is very important, and devotion to God, and devotion to Christ is a form of metta, too.  And then there’s the whole “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and as I said in the first class, one of the nice things about Buddhism is that it actually gives you this method of cultivating that love, even when your neighbor’s an asshole.  But we don’t start there, we don’t start with assholes, but I wanted to show you this example of what this looks like in the context of conflict resolution.  There are a number of different facets to [metta], but it’s a good example.

[Presentation of youtube video, Former Ku Klux Klan leader Johnny Lee Clary on Enough Rope with Andrew Denton.]

The mythology is [I don’t know if this is even in the suttas] that the Buddha first taught metta to some monks who had gone off to meditate in the forest, and they were frightened of forest spirits.   So metta is a classic antidote to fear or  aversion.  Basically anything you don’t like.  On the other hand, from a Buddhist perspective it does protect you against things in the sense that it’ll protect you from ill will, but obviously it won’t protect you in any practical way.  There’s another story of the Buddha going up to a  serial killer and converting him on the spot, and I don’t think anyone should really try that, and obviously this guy [in the youtube video] was in pretty serious danger.  And that gets to a general issue about the four immeasurables, which for the newcomers are compassion, metta, equanimity and joy.  These are results of practice, they’re n there in all of us, but the practice is not to act as though you have these qualities.  The practice is something I’m going to describe today, and the behaviours come out of that.  And it’s important to keep that in mind, or you can end up with really unbalanced behavior, where someone feels like they need to be compassionate and they make distorted decisions because of that, for example.  

But the practice of metta is very easy, and very very pleasant for most people.  It’s the immeasurable that I’ve gotten the most mileage out of in terms of my own practice, and it’s the one which people have classically started with because it can very quickly lead to deep states of very enjoyable concentration, much like the joy practice which we did in the first class, but some people find it a little easier.  The main reason I chose joy first for this class is that joy is more appropriate in the context of resolving habits, which is the theme of this class.  

For the practice of metta, it seems really sappy, and it is.  You want to get some sap flowing for this.  Despite the sappiness, it really leads to some practical results.  The first one is motivation.  If you can cultivate metta for a situation or task that you’re feeling some kind of resentment or ill-will to, that’s really useful for motivation.  The second is that metta is really the font of creativity.  From metta comes an appreciation of all the good things in a situation and once you see those you can start figuring out ways of putting those together.  So in the Vajrayana sequence of the immeasurables which we’re covering in this class, we start with compassion to see the pain of the situation, see the problems, and often in an interpersonal conflict, it’s enough just to hear those, and that will suffice for the conflict to resolve.  For instance, the conflict which Gloria was talking about at the start with her friend.  If her friend were (well, I’m speaking for you so tell me if I’m wrong), but many people in that situation, if you were to say you seem upset, what’s going on, and Gloria were to say, “Well I’m disappointed, I wanted you to come to this thing, and I wonder where our friendship stands,” for a lot of people that would be enough to heal the rift and resolve the conflict.

I used to volunteer on the suicide hotline, and they train you in a method for talking to people who call up, and the first thing you do is basically Rogerian psychotherapy: someone tells you what’s happened and how they feel about that, and you say back to them “So, it sounds like such-and-such a thing happened, and you’re feeling so-and-so about it.”  And it sounds so hokey when you put it that way, and in a sense it is, and it’s not something you can use in ongoing interpersonal relationships, but it’s remarkable the number of times that just doing that would calm people down, and they would feel a lot better as a result.  But of course, that’s often not enough.  It’s not enough for Bill Clinton just to tell us that he feels our pain.  There often is some a genuine problem or conflict of interest, and that’s where you start bringing in the positive aspects of the situation and trying to put together a solution.  So on the hotline it was, “Well you could call this crisisline, or this is the number for legal aid, etc.” whatever was appropriate to the situtaion, and taht really comes out of metta.  

I’ve been using metta and loving-kindness interchangably.  I hope it’s clear what I mean by those two words.  

So metta is just a soft, warm, open appreciation of the current circumstances.  So we start by cultivating metta for things which we already feel that way towards.  I’m going to teach a metta meditation from the book Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond.  He starts with a kitten which he’s just found on the street which is hungry and wet, and he imagines feeding it and warming it up.  But the object of metta can be anything that you feel this way towards.  It can be a family member, someone who’s shown you a lot of kindness, basically anyone.  And then you go through this progression.  You move from someone who’s very easy to feel this way towards to someone who’s a little more difficult to feel that way about.  Maybe someone who’s a close friend who you’ve known for a year or so.  And you just keep going through a progression of people like this, so it’s kind of like resistance training, like weight-lifting for metta: the stronger you get with metta, the more difficult the person work with.  And in principle, you can feel metta for anyone.  You could feel metta for the perpetrator of a genocide against your people.  But obviously you don’t start there.  You start with what’s easy and build up these capacities slowly.  And as you do, you meet points of resistance, like I was suggesting might be the case for [P] at the moment, and when that happens, it really helps if you can experience metta for those points of resistance.  So at that point, you’re moving away from metta as something you feel towards a person, to metta as something which you feel towards  what’s arising in your experience.  And for some people this can seem like a jump, but actually, when you think about what a person is in terms of your personal experience, a person is just something which arises in your experience.  So this really goes back to the exercise that I was teaching you in the first class where you feel these feelings of joy and then based on those you cultivate exactly the same feeling for, say, that vase of balls over there.

G: Which you should, because they’re awesome!

A:  Yeah, that is a pretty cool vase of balls, actually.  That is a nice setup.

But it’s fine to work with people for the time being if you find that movement to other things is difficult.  We can come back to it later.  On the other hand, that movement is the path to these really blissful states of concentration, and I highly recommend it if you can feel any sort of love and appreciation just for the experience of the breath, that’s a really fast route into really fast route into really blissful, relaxing states of concentration.  But maybe we’ll cover that in another class.

Let’s go through a complete metta practice with just three people, someone you feel these feelings of softness, generosity, warmth, appreciation; someone you feel neutral towards, possibly someone you meet at the bank occasionally, something like that; and lastly someone who causes a bit of difficulty in your life.  Not someone you hate, but annoys you, let’s say. 

Oh, and I forgot to say, the person you like doesn’t have to be a person.  It can be an animal like a kitten.  Actually, who here has a thing against kittens?

S: They’re delicious!

A: Awesome! [Laughter]

Have you ever been to the aww section of reddit [http://reddit.com/r/aww]? There’s just picture after picture after picture of these really cute animals, and often if I want to get to sleep I just go and look at those.  It’s great.  So that’s my prejudice, I don’t want to lead anyone else…

G: It’s a dark path.

A: True! True!  Yeah, and no reddit aww for me this week.  It’s been difficult.

So why don’t we start there.  Is there anyone who has difficulty conjuring an image of a kitten and feeling some sense of warmth and appreciation for it?  OK, great.  And does everyone have a friend, neutral person and difficult person in mind?  Great.  So let’s start by…

R[?]: So there’s four things.

A: Yeah, we’ll use the kitten to prime the pump, so to speak.  And then we’ll do ourselves at the end of that as well, so really five things.  And if you run into difficulties as we go along, that’s OK.  Just note them as they arise.  Just keep doing the practice.  And the idea is that each person you cultivate metta for, and then you’ve got a kind of momentum from that which goes into the next person.

So let’s imagine a kitten.  You meet this kitten on the street.  It’s really cold, it’s hungry, it’s mewling, it’s wet and its bones are sticking out.  You pick it up, take it home, put it near the heating vent, you give it some food, and imagine yourself stroking it, and the cat really appreciating it.  And you say to the kitten, “Kitten,

I love you, and I am your friend.  I will always love you, I’ll always care for you, I’ll always respect you.

May you always be happy, always well, always at peace.

May you never suffer, may you always find love in your heart, may you enjoy everything that arises in your life.

[Note:  The above formula is repeated several times through the class, and is represented below by the gloss “I love you, and...”]

[This particular instance goes from 34m30s through 36m20s.]

So now just note the physical sensations in your body.   Note any points of sweetness, anything that’s enjoyable.  Just concentrate on those kinds of sensations.

Questions, comments, insights?

S:  Just hearing you saying what you were saying allowed me to go into the feeling if that makes any sense?

A: Yeah, completely.

S: But for some reason when you stopped talking, my image of the kitten wavered.  I had this image, and then it kind of changed, and I started thinking “Maybe this kitten, maybe that kitten, maybe that kitten…”

A: Just do all the kittens!  [Laughter]

S: I found myself at some point trying to move away from the focus on the kitten.

A: What about the sensation?  Was there a sensation of sweetness in the body?

S:  Definitely while you were talking, afterwards less so because I was getting distracted.

A:  Yeah, so it’s a matter of practice.  Why don’t we try this again, so we’ll just do it silently this time.

[three minutes later]

A: By the way, for the newcomers, when I teach a class it’s much easier for me if it’s a conversation.  So you’re welcome to jump in at any time with anything.

AA: I’ll jump in.  I found this one much harder because your voice wasn’t there anymore.  I noticed at one point that I was thinking the words that you said, but I couldn’t hold the image of my friend, and then I was holding the image, but I couldn’t think the words, and then different people popped into my head, so I just included them, and then I got fascinated with the rug, and went back to trying to think of the words, and it went on like that.

A: That’s good.  So you went straight to imagining a human.

AA:  Yeah, multiple people popped in, actually.

A: But you were able to feel the sweetness?

AA: Yeah!

A: OK, good.  I’ll rip out my guided meditation before, and I’ll email it to everyone.  It sounds like that’s actually helping people, at least some people, so I’ll provide that as audio.

How was it for you, [P]?

P: I had the same difficulty as before, so “I don’t know this kitten, what would this kitten look like,” I’m thinking about that and that’s just too much for me to think about, my mind moves too slowly.  I hadn’t gotten to imagining the kitten on the street by the time it had moved to the heating vent.  I guess it’s hard for me to think of the kitten in time for me to make it work.

A:  Sure.  Do you work with animals at all?  I know you’re doing agriculture. 

P: Not currently.

A: Do you have pets?

P: At [my family] home, but not here.

A: OK.  If you like we can stop at my place on the way home and you can feed my cats.  They’ll love it, and if you think that would help to generate that sensation.  [Laughter.]

Does anyone feel like a cookie?

G: Do I look like one? [Laughter]

A: Would anyone like to receive a cookie from [P]? [Laughter]

G: Oh, practice, interesting.

A: It works for me.  I just love doing that kind of stuff.  Any time I can make people happy, it’s great.  And this was even before I got into Buddhism.  It was always that way for me.

So what about resistance, [P]?  So the main thing was that you hadn’t visualized the cat?

P: Yeah, pretty much.

A: OK, and what about the second silent version.  Did the words do anything for you?

P: I guess the words helped me stay on the track.  With the silent version I was thinking, “Why can’t I visualize the kitten,” and this whole existential thing.

A: OK.  Cool.

R: I had no problem visualizing the kitten.  But at the end I was sort of fighting off sleep.  I’m just a bit sleepy at the moment.

A: OK, that’s good.  That’s a sign that you’re doing it right.  There are these different factors which lead towards enlightenment, and some of them are the calm and concentration, which this metta practice will lead to.  And it’s not a good idea to do this practice if your mind is feeling sluggish.  It’s better to do something which’ll rev the mind up a bit.

G: Like anger? [Laughter]

A: No, that’s one of the five hindrances.  You can’t do that.  Well you can do it, but you know…

P: One of the five what?

A: Hindrances, so Buddhist practice has two big components, concentration and discernment, and concentration comes first because you need the stability of mind to see how everything’s working.  And there are five hindrances to concentration, ill-will/anger, sensual desire, torpor (which this practice brings up for me, too), restlessness and anxiety (which this practice is very good for), and uncertainty and doubt.  So, the first jobs in Buddhism is to learn how to respond to those hindrances as they arise.  But insight meditation, if you’ve done any of that, is a good way to wake up.

S: Can you say more about falling asleep?  I’ve had that a number of times, like in the last Quaker meeting I was at, I was partway through and suddenly realized [I was asleep.]  Can you say how that’s a good thing?

A: Well, it’s an expected consequence  of doing this kind of practice if your mind is a little bit tired.  If you were doing metta instead of joy in Quaker meeting before, with something like loving feelings toward your son, that you were sleepy is a sign that this is working.  I mean, the real sign is this sense of sweetness, but drowsiness is a good sign, as well.

R: But shouldn’t your mind be active, as well?

A: Yes, I’m not saying it’s a good thing in general for this practice to lead into a dull state of mind.  But the fact that we’re doing this as a beginning practice and it’s having that impact on you suggests that it’s working the way it’s supposed to be working at this stage.  As you go on, you learn to respond to  what’s coming up in your mind, and so you might start with metta practice to settle yourself and then if you get drowsy, you might switch to the joy practice from the first class, and then you can move between those.  For instance if you do the joy practice too much, you might become elated, so you might want to switch to the insight practice we’ll do next week. 

It’s kind of like a sport in the end.  You learn what causes what mental states, and what practices you can use to respond to those mental states.  The ideal state, as expressed in the suttas is “The monk goes and sits beneath the tree, ardent, alert and mindful.”  And that’s always the state which you want to be heading towards.  Mindful, alert – not sluggish, and serious, that’s what ardent means here, that you’re serious about the goal of establishing concentration.

That’s what I mean, you do want to be heading towards an active mind, but some of these practices do also slow your mind down a bit.  And the fact that that’s happening in this case is good.

G: I have something to add about wandering mind, which some people mentioned they were having problems with.  Sometimes you’ll be walking down the street, and you’ll realize, “Oh, hey, I’m thinking!  Awesome!”  And it could be that you’re stressing yourself out, but it’s totally cool.”  Like, “Yeah!  Awesome!  Thinking!”  If you just keep doing that, it’s no problem.  You could make yourself miserable about it, but you don’t have to make yourself miserable for making yourself miserable.  You’re just like “Hey!  Thinknig!”  And the fact that you recognize that, that’s all it takes.

A:  Yeah, that’s wonderful advice, and that’s exactly where we want to head with this stuff.  

So I’ve been saying we start by cultivating the four immeasurables for people, but eventually we can connect to them no matter what arises in our experience as a consequence of doing this kind of practice.  In fact, here’s an exercise Ken recommends.  [“I’m angry… and I’m glad!”  But the class didn’t really connect with it, so I won’t transcribe the whole thing.]

That comes halfway through the book, so let’s forget about that for now… But that’s an example of where this is heading.  There’s a lot of stuff in the suttas about when you reach a certain stage, you can “loathing in the presence of loathsomeness, non-loathing in the presence of loathsomeness, loathing in the presence of the unloathsome, etc.”  It sounds crazy, I know, because we’re used to imagining our emotions as directly connected to the situations that we find ourselves in, but this is one of the key points of Buddhism, that that connection we imagine is actually a fabrication, and that’s one of the things we’re headed toward.  You might wonder “How can I live if I can experience whatever emotion I want whenever I want,” well, that’s where compassion comes in.  That’s where paying attention to the situation comes in.

G: I know I brought it up early, but the reason I think it’s so important is that as soon as you start thinking about meditiation, that’s really the crux of it.  If there was no other practice that was helpful to you, the most important is how do you make friends with yourself.  Because I have to hang out with myself all the time, and if I wasn’t best friends with myself, it’d make like very difficult.  In fact, I wasn’t always best friends with myself.  But as [an experience is just starting to arise], like I was so angry at the other kickball team the other day, so angry.  But [my response was] “Oh, hey, I’m doing that again.”  And I could have been mad at myself for being mad at the other team, and getting on the field and yelling at them (which I did), but I wasn’t mad at myself for that.  You know, there’s no harm done, just sometimes you just get angry.  If you always just treat yourself as your best friend, as in “All right, my mind’s doing that, no problem,” [whatever’s coming up just dissolves and brings you back to right now.  It’s a revolutionary approach for me, and the most important piece of my meditation practice.]

S: What does this have to do with repression?  We’re often told about the dangers of repressing emotion, how it will always come out in some different way, and that’s maybe not ultimately psychologically damaging, but certainly not a good thing.  In what way is this different from that?

A: Well, to start with, it can lead to repression.  And that was part of why I started with those warnings.  You don’t want to go through life pretending to be this loving being.  You want to establish a natural relationship to this stuff.  Because otherwise it can lead to repression amongst other things.  The best case is you just become ridiculous.  The worst case is, well… much worse.  The worst case is you get addicted to this stuff, as in you have a strong connection to metta, but you use it to repress aspects of your experience.  Like I met this person on an internet forum.  She called herself a “bliss bunny.”  So she was doing a kind of Guru Yoga practice, that’s a devotional practice where basically you love your Guru.  And it leads to these very positive feelings, very stable states of concentration that I’ve been talking about.  It’s better than drugs.  And she’d been doing this for eight years, and she was an addict.  She was saying on the forum, “I’m about to lose my house, and I don’t know how to cope with all this stuff.”  And I said to her, you’ve got to get out of that religious community, because you’re an addict, and they’re feeding your addiction.  And she couldn’t do it.  She left the forum, and presumably she’s still in trouble.  So yeah, there are definitely dangers involved with this stuff.  But the benefits outweigh the dangers.  Particularly if you’ve got people depending on you, like you do.  You know, you’re not going to become a bliss bunny when you’ve got to look after your son.

R: I really like “bliss bunny” as a t-shirt, though.

S: It is also just a question of being really conscious, actively aware of your emotional state and how your emotional subjective experience is responding to an object?  And then instead of just letting the object command your subjective experience, allowing for a  moment of thought about it?  So instead of my step-father Alan just pissing me off, and that anger just totally consuming me (which it does), instead I’m getting that instead of having that happen [you can learn to] be aware that that emotional reaction is happening, and instead of having “me” simply having a knee-jerk response to that emotion, learning how to experience it in a conscious way, engaging it emotionally and intellectually.

A: Yeah, that’s exactly what’s going on here.

S: Which is different from repressing it, because instead you’re becoming more [aware of what’s going on.]

A: Well, you can use metta just to block something as well.  And actually, I’ve been using joy to do that repeatedly for the past few weeks.  In fact, I was counseling you all to do that, basically, with the joy meditation.  You realize that your attention has wandered, it comes back [snaps fingers] joy.  You’ve come back, that’s a great thing.  And at least for me, whatever I was thinking about before just stops and I go back to the breath.  Doesn’t have to work that way, other things can go on, and we can talk about that as it comes up.  But you can use it to repress stuff as well, and sometimes that’s even the right move, but the ideal is what you were describing.  These things which come up and try to control our lives, the habits which are the topic of this class, ideally the first step is [see their operation], see that they’re not you, and come into a  better relationship to them than you had before.

Why don’t we go on with the meditation again.  [To P] You don’t have to do this intricate visualization with the cat.  Just imagine feeding the cat, stroking the cat.  Why don’t you take a head start, actually.

P: OK.

A: So, just take a minute, and let us know if any feelings of warmth coming up, or do it with this pet that you have at home.  What kind of pet is it?

P: It’s a dog.

A: OK, perfect.  And the rest of us, we’ll just sit and follow our breath for a moment.

[A minute passes]

Any luck.

P: Maybe it’s partly just that I’m pretty tired.

A: That’s OK, no worries.  So, just follow along as best you can.  [This meditation starts at 1h6m40s and ends at 1h17m20s.]

Let’s start with the kitten again.  [Repeat of the mediation from before.]

Now, notice any sweetness in the sensations from your body.  Just attend to those for a few breaths.

Now imagine the person you like.  And imagine giving them something which they’d really like, tickets to a concert by their favorite music group, or a new car, or something like that.  And imagine their response.  And say to them "I love you, and..."

And again, just notice any sensation of sweetness in your body, attend to that for a few breaths.

Now imagine the person you feel neutral towards.  Imagine they just dropped $200, and you gave it back to them.  And imagine their response.  And imagine saying to them "I love you, and...." 

And just attend to any sensation of sweetness in the body again for a few breaths.

Now imagine the person you find a little bit difficult.  And imagine saying to them, “You know, you were right all along.  You were just trying to help me out.  Thank you!”  And imagine their response.  And say to them "I love you, and..."

And again, just attend to any sensation of sweetness.

Now imagine yourself standing in front of a mirror.  You’re looking at yourself.  And you’ve just done something really worthwhile, really good.  And imagine how that feels.  And say to yourself "I love you, and..."

And again, just attend to any sweet physical sensations for a few breaths. 

Questions, comments, insights, problems?

G:  That was great!

S: That was really good, actually.

A: Yeah, this is good stuff.  And you can’t go all the way with this but you can go a long way.  You can develop really stable states of concentration this way. 

S: Recently as part of this conference trip I went on, I managed to tack on a few days to visit my home town, so I got to see all these old friends, and this one friend, I hadn’t seen her for years, but I when I imagined her, I got this weird tingly feeling and I thought, “Is that what he’s talking about?”  But transferring that became difficult.  I was still able to actively build it up in some instances, but transferring it to my step-father, I just couldn’t build it up.

A: I think your step-father was a really difficult person to…

S: Yeah, he’s an interesting guy.

A: No, I’m not talking about your relationship to him, I’m talking on the level of the practice.  You might want to start with someone a bit easier. [Laughter]

S: Yeah, [I’ll do that.]  That was hard to do.

G: “He is difficult, how did you know?” [Laughter]

S: Yeah, let me start telling you stories, we’ll be here all night…

A:  Yeah, group therapy starts at 9:15.

S: Your voice was helpful.

A: Oh, good.  OK, so I’ll send the recording of this to all of you.  [Some administrivia about publishing policy for transcripts vs recordings.]

OK, I suggest doing that [practice] this week.  And [to S], don’t push it.  This is like physical training.  If you push it too hard… I spent a few months with this where I was doing the [“open your heart to this experience” from the primary practice] and I would get this massive tension [in my head] so it just became a fight, which is like the opposite of metta.  So start with stuff where it’s easier to feel it.

S: Yeah, because even the guy who was kind of neutral, he works at some coffee shop I’ve seen around.  I was able to get [some metta going] with him, but I couldn’t transfer it [to my step-father].

A: Yeah, I’m not surprised.

OK, so it’s a little bit early, but shall we finish up?

G: Time for cookies!

R: What’s all this cookie business?

A: I brought some cookies, and there’s some apple crisp for me, because I can’t eat the cookies.  [To P]: Would you like to serve us?

P: Should I? [Laughter]

A: If you want, yeah.  They’re just out on the left-hand side of the bench, there.