Working with Loving-Kindness in Three Levels - Allowing

Allowing through conceptual practice.

A meditation ghatika (twenty-four minute practice, one sixtieth of a day) undertaken in three stages, this loving kindness exercise was taught to me at the Vajrayana Institute, as a component of enhancing the virtuous factors of the mind. In Vajrayana teachings, sentient beings do not exists so much in dualistic body and mind as they do between dualistic insight and 'space' (not the 3D kind). The setting of this practice in that space graces me with a new perspectival frame - my vivid imagination is stimulated, perhaps, through these words that bring forth (for me) new ontological spaces.

I believe this practice is a composite collection of practices that the teacher has found useful. It's actually had me in tears, earlier this evening, I'll tell the story as we work through.

Firstly we settle the body through mindfulness and awareness, bringing comfort, stillness and vigilance to our meditation posture. Attuning to the breath, we place ourselves in a more open, expansive frame of mind, ironically by attending closely to the tactile sensations of the body.

The first step is to extend to the self in the mind's eye a gesture that accompanies these words:

'May you be safe.
May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you be at ease.'

Making the picture in the mind as vivid as is possible - extending to the self 'a nice cup of soothing honey and lemon tea' as the teacher, Wai Cheong, described it.

(I have real trouble with this part. This is the crying bit. I completely dislike looking at photos of myself - asking me to put myself in my mind's eye and then to be kind to myself is about as attractive an idea as taking my breakfast outside and coating my vegemite toast in mud before eating it).

The second part though, makes my spine shoot up straight, in meditation posture, instantly. We get to extend our loving kindness to somebody else, with the same four lines as above,imagining them as vividly as possible, bathing them in a glow of warm, lovely light. I get that happy healing 'zing!' thing happen when we reach this part of the practice, a part of me sincerely wonders whether there might be a type, a sort of personality type, where, like me, there's a group of people who're most healed in the very act of being called to heal, with loving kindness, for someone else.

Not just physical healing. There's a thousand needs for different kinds of healing through the extension of loving kindness, every day, in an everyday way.