Fifth Week Meditations Begin – Chant

For this week, I want to explore something I’ve been toying with anyway, an apparently Buddhist-practice called Metta, I think; I will do some research and post right here this week. It’s a form of chanting / mantra meditation, and the focus is compassion. I have a small chant that I will recite daily; it’s from Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion. She has an exercise in her book that is ‘Developing your own self-compassion mantra’. Here’s what I developed, and voila!

Here’s my chant for the week:
I attend to my moments of suffering;
Suffering is just a part of every life;
My I embrace myself with love and gentleness in these moments;
May I give to myself genuine compassion.

Before I started the exercises and meditation, I took her self-compassion test on her website. Yeech… the high score is 5, the average score is 3. I scored a 1.4 – the word ‘merciless’ comes to mind. In Kristin Neff’s book on Self Compassion, she talks about trying to motivate yourself with something she refers to as ‘the demoralising whip’. That’s me all over; it’s how I was disciplined and motivated as both a child and an adult, so it’s all I knew, up to this point. She also addresses the fear of giving that up, for fear of becoming spoiled, lazy and unmotivated. I really, really need to pay attention, because those are the very things I was accused of as a child, and punished for, with shaming and blaming and the demoralising whip. The only way I ever learned to ‘motivate’ myself was to be an emotional punching bag. The ‘definition’ for ‘compassion’ in my family is ‘spoiling’. My family as a whole is actually Calvinism in a modern-day context. No wonder I’ve been an anxious, driven wreck my entire life!

And yes, the Buddhist practice is know as a metta meditation. To summarize, the practice is briefly explained as:

The Pali word ‘Metta‘ is commonly translated in English as ‘loving-kindness.’  Metta signifies friendship and non-violence as well as “a strong wish for the happiness of others.”  Though it refers to many seemingly disparate ideas, Metta is in fact a very specific form of love — a caring for another independent of all self-interest — and thus is likened to one’s love for one’s child or parent. Understandably, this energy is often difficult to describe with words; however, in the practice of Metta meditation, one recites specific words and phrases in order to evoke this “boundless warm-hearted feeling.”  The strength of this feeling is not limited to or by family, religion, or social class.  Indeed, Metta is a tool that permits one’s generosity and kindness to be applied to all beings and, as a consequence, one finds true happiness in another person’s happiness, no matter who the individual is.
– Yale Education Psychology Department

Some great sources and resources:

Neff, Kristin. Self-compassion: Stop Beating Yourself up and Leave Insecurity behind. New York: William Morrow, 2011. Print.

Loving-Kindness. The Revolutionary Art of Happiness by Sharon Salzberg (1995). Boston: Shambhala.

Richo, David. How to Be an Adult in Relationships: the Five Keys to Mindful Loving. Boston: Shambhala, 2002. Print.

http://info.med.yale.edu/psych/3s/metta.html

 

Fourth Week wrap-up

Yes, holding perfectly still for 10-15 minutes at a time is woefully easy for me. It’s one of those skillsets that I’m grateful to have now, but sad that I developed it the way I did. It falls under ‘lemonade from lemons’. I don’t have much to say about the week past, except that it was a good one, and I am reasonably content with the work I did.

Fourth week of meditation starts tomorrow – Mental Training / Stillness

For this week’s upcoming practice, I’m going to do a practice taught by the incomparable John Michael Greer, in his book, ‘Learning Ritual Magic: Fundamental Theory and Practice for the Solitary Apprentice‘. I am actually fairly successful with this practice. I like it. It’s the practice of holding oneself completely and perfectly still for a period of time. The only thing I allow myself to do is blink and swallow. I can maintain this, in certain postures only, for up to 20 minutes at a time. I plan on experimenting with different postures and time limits during the course of the upcoming week.

You know, on reflection, it’s kind of sad how I developed this skill – holding myself completely frozen for long periods of time – but it comes in handy now!

Source:
http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Ritual-Magic-Fundamental-Apprentice/dp/1578633184/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1310922144&sr=8-7
actually need to cite the book correctly!!!

Recap of the Journeying week

I had some very interesting experiences, one of which was a surprise encounter with what others would tend to think of as an ‘imaginary’ character from a TV series. I’ve had these sorts of experiences before, and I don’t discount them. TV and movie characters tend to be real in certain ways, especially the more talented and gifted the ‘writer’ is. Some of them, I believe, are channeled entities who use creative individuals to open a portal to our own realm. TV and movies are our modern myth systems. Of course they’re coming through this medium. The energy we give this medium is irresistible. Mythology is the great cultural standard bearer and teacher, and even this civilization has to have some mythology!

But, anyway. This character – he’s a vampire in a TV series – was interested in an opinion I had regarding his interaction with someone. To make this clearer, it was  Nick Knight, from the Forever Knight series. Now, people who know me, know I don’t ‘do the dead’. I’m not really a vampire fan much. They aren’t my idea of a sexy lover, and I don’t really like them. I tolerate certain fictional ones; that’s about it. They are parasitic, and have very abusive and negative qualities. They’re also, quite frankly, gross. This goes for psychic and energy vampires, too. Absolute power corrupts, etc.  I, however, like Nick; as a vampire goes, he’s a decent one, with genuine compassion, etc., etc. I didn’t like how some woman was using him in the series; I didn’t like her motives, and I didn’t like her and I pretty much stated that fact, aloud, to my spirit mate. I couldn’t believe it when Nick Knight showed up on the border of my Sacred Grove when I was journeying that night, wanted to hear about why I felt that way.

Anyway, that is the only journey I’m willing to share; most of them are never for public consumption, but, I did find it easier to maintain this practice on a daily basis than the other types of meditation I’ve attempted so far. And oh yes, technically, journeying isn’t meditation, but it does seem ‘allowable’ for the 23 week qualification, so, I included a week of it. I needed it.

Posting the highlights of the Annual Drinking Water Quality Report for my area

Wow! In big, gigantic text, my water company says ‘Our drinking water meets or exceeds all federal (EPA) drinking water requirements’. These sources include, in the study, tap and BOTTLED water!, rivers, lakes, streams, ponds, reservoirs, springs and wells. The water in the city comes from one source, a surface water source – Lake Belton.

In the report, there are 4 unregulated contaminants – Chloroform, Bromoform, Bromaodichloromethane, and Dibromochloromethane. According to the report, these and other contaminants are sourced byproducts of drinking water disinfection.

First of all, we’re going through a screaming drought, with extreme heat lasting months longer than usual, and these reports are for 2010, so, I’m interested in seeing what next year’s figures will look like.

I’m very grateful for abundant Lake Belton, and the clean water I have when so many others have no access to safe, healthy water.