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Well, it would be if i were cultivating it into loving-kindness.
Then i could pick and pluck lovely out of myself to give to others. Or maybe they could pick and pluck lovely out of me to give to themselves. Or just reach delicately in to catch the pleasing aroma of my heart.
But what i cultivate when i do loving kindness meditation often feels barren, devoid of sweetness, lacking in anything flourishing or flowering.
Like it was this morning. Mostly what i could find were drab weeds in there. Choking off the lovely, stifling and suffocating up the kindness.
My heart needs some deep digging.
Getting to the heart of the matter.
Getting to essentials.
Being essential.
Being heart-alive.
A heart engagement with life.
A heart-felt committment to live.
Giving with the heart, sharing from the heart.
Loving kindness meditation suddenly feels very simple, straightforward, uncomplicated.
Great trip to Newquay Zoo today.
Delight was in me. I was in Joy.
So this is what all the work i’ve been putting into Loving Kindness practise brings me!
I felt very loved up, inclining kindness everywhere.
My heart wide-open.
Life at its best: unstoppable, irresistable.
Slipping in some metta this morning.
As a way of softening up concentration meditation.
There is a feeling of power in being so concentrated, but i feel everso slightly self-congragulatory and aim orientated; like a bloke determined to push through the pain barrier and do his 1,000 sit ups before breakfast.
Metta is less masculine than concentration meditation, more feminine. Well, that’s how it seems to me. I have to open myself up more, have a more soft-centred approach.
Be more in the heart of my being.
Which is in the being of my heart.
I kind of got there too this morning. Crept into the corner of my left ventricle.
Feeling – for once – all cosy and warm.
Just as i tried before, the better way into metta for me seems to be via positive memories; bringing to mind happy days and happy moments triggers a little gladness gland inside – and out seep feel-good hormones, to slip slide all down the back of my consciousness.
This time, the happy memory wasn’t so far away in the distant past: it was being in Budapest back in January; the icy day i went to the zoo, the spa-bath etc.
I let this “happy” feed into my metta culture; wishing all people could experience their own kind of Happy Budapest.
Giving gladness away feels life enhancing, self-enlarging.
More metta today. Trying to metta-tate. Lol.
The biggest stumbling block is the first step: offering loving kindness to yourself.
Being willing to love me and be kind to me unreservedly – cus i’m worth it, and worthy of it; so hard to believe, or credit it.
This is gonna take years of practise.
To break and dismantle all that unloved me down.
Me lovable? – nah.
Thought i would give myself a go at metta meditation again this week.
I haven’t found it an easy practise in the past. Something too forced or contrived about it. Or cheesy. Or sweet. Or too soft for my hard-boiled nature. These are the thoughts that seem to re-emerge whenever i attempt loving kindness.
Ans sure enough, this morning i experienced the same kind of internal objections.
“Who are you bullshitting?” i could hear my inner cynic saying to itself.
It’s only when i do loving kindness that i become aware that there is such a cynical voice as this within me. And it feels so adamant, so insistent.
It objects to love and it abjures kindness most vociferously! That’s all soft talk. Thats all sentimental hogwash.
That cynic has always refused love or kindness as of right; life isn’t kind, and life isn’t particularly loving either. It’s a harsh indifferent universe we all live in – so just learn to survive in it, as cynically selfishly as you can get away with.
I got nowhere near metta this morning.
Loving kindness isn’t only synonymous with happy feelings.
It can also be cultivated through sadness.
It then turns into compassion (there’s a Buddhist word for this which i can’t remember. I must study more, get googling. Lol)
I feel this compassion directly sometimes; when on Samaritans for example. It’s a “being with” feeling that connects me into “suffering with” the person who is in distress; without casting judgement or giving advice.
It’s a kind of spaciousness – a spacious acceptance and allowance is flowing through the between of us.
A warm regard, a tenderness.
Maybe i have more loving kindness available to me that i realise.
Once again, i’ve gone into reminiscence mode this morning while sitting. I’m not sure you could call this – strictly speaking – meditation. But it’s all in a good cause – a means to an ends.
Actually, i didn’t have to be footling into a back catalogue of distant memories to find my Happy feeling; I could summon up more recent memories; from last year, from this year, from last Saturday.
From this Saturday: Stover park picnicing in the rain feeding the ducks.
I was happy.
A feeling of gratitude in me. Even for the rain. Especially for the rain (it was making the ducks more ducky)
Happy was becomes Happy is.
I experienced it again this morning.
I’m reading there are many ways – little tricks or techniques – into loving kindness.
One, is to go back in memory to times when you felt happy; to remember what that happy smelt like and felt like, the sound and the texture of it, the specific place, that precise moment, those particular people within which your happy occurred etc.
It was surprisingly easy for me to do this this morning: my mind zoomed right in to memories of 1981.
And zoomed further in again to “The goatfield in Cassamagioli” memory, the “Up the black cherry tree in Switzerland” memory, the “Day out in Brighton” memory…..
I really zoomed in to that day in Brighton; being in the “alternative bookshop”, browsing through books by Paul Goodman, Cecil Taylor piano impro pulsing in the background, Patrick chuntering on about “Free Will”, lovely Beatrice from Berlin peeping smiles through the bookcases at us…..
That was a happy happy day.
A “Happy to be here is all” kind of day.
And because of these warm reminiscences i felt a glow of loving kindness this morning.
The glow has stayed with me all day.
