Feelings, pt. III

¡Hola! Everybody...
I promise! After today no more about feelings! LOL!

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-[ Angels with Dirty Faces ]=-

It’s scary as hell to make our self be known, the parts that are unlovable, the parts we don’t love, that no one else will love, that are just too messy, that are unworthy. Yet we’re dying inside to be completely loved and received and forgiven.

-- Jennifer Garcia

I operate under the assumption that almost everything you have been taught about finding happiness is inaccurate, misleading, and false. Furthermore, I believe those very beliefs are making you miserable. My challenge is thus: what if you discovered that your very efforts to find happiness were actually preventing you from achieving it? What if almost everyone you knew turned out to be in the same boat -- including all the “experts” and self-help gurus who claim to have answers?

In part, this series on feelings is my answer to that challenge...

Recap time, girls and boys! First, I tried to explain how feelings are different from emotions. Feelings are based in the body, waves of energy, that we experience. Emotions are the stories we attach to these waves: “I am angry,” “She makes me sad,” etc. So, there was this discussion around feelings and emotions and what happens if we practice experiencing the waves as they are, rather than attaching the stories (what I called the “personal novelas” -- soap operas). Next, I discussed what that does to feelings -- how being fully present with feelings act as a liberating force from the drama of our lives. I consider this something of a miracle, or at least an awakening.

There is a second awakening, or miracle: the realization that our feelings are our children. As with real children, some are well behaved, clean, polite, and socially acceptable. Others are little monsters -- little diablitos. The issue here is we tend to nurture the children we like, give them food, dress them really nice, and pose them for our family “Christmas Card,” and trot them out when our neighbors come to visit.

The ones we don’t like, we push out into the yard, into the doghouse, with no nourishment and barely protected against the elements, in the cold. Occasionally, we might see them, their dirty and hungry faces pressed against the windows, the early stages of malicious intent reflected in their haunted eyes. Sometimes there is a mutiny and a few of them break in through the windows. Or, we might let a pleasant feeling out to play and a few of the juvenile delinquent feelings rush in uninvited. Our abandoned feelings haunt our dreams and make horrible noises in the night. One thing is for sure: they will completely sabotage our every attempt to look good or socially acceptable to the neighbors.

This is true no matter how hard you fight. The more fences and barbed wire you erect, the more they will plan schemes to disrupt your neat little life.

Once we begin to awaken to who we really are, into our natural state, we are no longer threatened by our feelings and we slowly begin to invite our abandoned children back inside. This is a slow, gradual process, as you open the door of your heart to your exiled children, one by one.

Invite Grief inside and sooner or later, you are sitting down to dinner with Anger, having a “Blockbuster night,” enjoying yourselves. “I’m sorry,” you say. “This was a misunderstanding. I realize now you are my child. I gave birth to you. Come inside, sit by the fire, and have something to eat. Look. Your bed is right over there and you can stay here.”

Initially, your abandoned, bleary-eyed children will not believe what’s going on. Hey! They might even be a little bit pissed off, burning holes in the couch and insulting people on the phone.

They will need reassurance. You assure them that they can stay forever, as long as they want. We might say to Anger, “I’m sorry I pushed you away, and I’m really sorry that my father did before me, and my grandfather before that. I’m sorry my entire culture has made you feel that you don’t belong. But now, you are welcome, come on in.”

As soon as you welcome the banished, they are transformed. This is a lesson almost every parent knows. I learned it with my own son. It seemed that as a young boy whenever I was busy with work, or on the phone, my son would suddenly decide he wanted me to get him something or to play with him. If I pushed him away, he would become more demanding. But then I learned that if brought him close to me, his apparent need would quickly disappear. His real longing was for attention, and once that need was fulfilled, all else receded to the background.

And so it is with “emotions.” When we are fully present with them as they arise, and draw them close to us when they seek our attention, their agenda is upset, and the cycle of drama is thwarted. Here’s an even better recap on this series on feelings:

Feelings arise

They are embraced

They pass again

… and we are free o be spacious and empty, and to be available to life and connected to the world.

Evolving people embrace this process over and over again. It is an awakening and it is our birthright as human beings. The miracle is that by welcoming feelings, we can transform them. For example, Anger, when welcomed, embraced, given a good meal, and clean clothes becomes authority and power. Sexual desire, when all moral charges are dropped and the fingers of accusation have stopped wagging, becomes our basic life energy, our chi. Having a friendly relationship with Grief lets us uncover our depth, the very core of our selves. Fear reveals excitement and energy, Boredom uncovers our desire for meaning. By consciously dropping the “personal novela” -- dropping the drama and returning to pure feeling -- we discover a great truth: there is no such thing as negative energy. Even the most catastrophic emotional tsunamis, abandoned for lifetimes, which seem capable of destroying us and other people, are transformed when accepted and given as gifts.

Let me use anger as an example. At first, I was a little hesitant to let anger out of its cage. I was afraid of what might happen. But this was when I was confusing feeling with reactivity. Anger thrown onto another person without first being deeply felt (embraced) can have disastrous consequences. I am learning, with practice, to breathe deeply into the belly and allow it to be just as it is, that I can experiment with anger, a little bit at a time. Once I felt the raw, savage beauty of anger, I felt a deeper connection to the earth; my body opened and came to life. I learned and experienced that I could feel my anger repeatedly, each time more deeply. The more I allowed it, the deeper the anger took me into myself. Now it can be given as a gift to others and myself. The gift of authority, of waking up, of integrity, of speaking truth to power in the face of social injustice.

When Anger is felt and given, free of resistance, it can be received by others as a gift, as a blessing.

When I experience anger in this way, I am truly conscious when I am pissed off. There’s no “personal novela.” It happens

BAM!

And then it’s finished, and then I’m back. I give myself permission to get pissed, I ride that wave of anger, and then it becomes a gift for whomever I’m pissed at. Once we become willing to disengage the feeling from the drama, there is an immediate liberation. Without a story, of victimhood or a wound (sometimes we become our wounds), there is nothing left to defend, nothing to resist, and we are liberated from the addictive bitterness or niceness a response to all that we have repressed.

Real love can be ferocious, it can be deeply honest, and it can be a gift in a million different flavors.

When we feel fully, and free ourselves of the shadows of our past, every feeling fully felt, without resistance and freely given, then we express true love. Anything else is just candy.

I hope you, the reader, has found something useful in these three different posts on feelings. I hope that it may have somehow touched something within you to question the everyday, knee-jerk, manner we are conditioned to respond to feelings. I f we become like an ocean, then a wave is merely a ripple on the surface of things. If we choose to remain stuck to a narrowly defined sense of self, then our emotional lives will be forever doomed to resemble natural catastrophes.

Love,

Eddie

The Doritos Factor

¡Hola! Everybody...
I simply no longer have what little patience I had to begin with... I don’t want to change your mind; I don’t care if you “agree” with facts or not; I don’t care what it is you believe in, all I care about is telling the truth.

Period.

A few people have asked that I post something along the lines of "Neoconservativism for Dummies" and I just might attempt it. LOL!

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-=[ Healthcare and Racism in the US ]=-

... minorities... eat more Doritos...

-- Glenn Beck

On the July 23^rd edition of his show on Fox News’, Glenn Beck said, in reference to Obama’s healthcare reform efforts that the “Office of Minority Health” could allow for “litigation against Doritos” since “minorities” may “eat more Doritos.” In the video clip, he offers up Latina racial conservative, Linda Chavez, as a talking head basically supporting the idea that Blacks and other people of color have lower standards of health because, well, they’re stupid and lack impulse control. They eat too many Doritos, as Glenn Beck would have it. Chavez is a prime example what Latino/as call a come mierda -- a shit eater. I will be posting more about her (and her crusade against Latino/as in general and Puerto Ricans specifically) and other conservative minorities at a later date.

For now, it would be safe to say that the prevailing opinion among many conservatives is that blacks and Latino/as suffer from low health outcomes because they choose to participate in high-risk behaviors. I think Linda “Come Mierda” Chavez and Glenn Beck, as well as the millions that watch/ listen to his show would agree with this form of reasoning.

Because it extends beyond individual attitudes and is embedded in our social structures and organizations, race is a strong determining factor in the way Americans are treated and how they fare. White Americans, whether they admit it or not, benefit as individuals and as a group from the current way the social hierarchy is set up. These benefits, running the gamut from educational, economic to political advantages encourage white Americans to invest in whiteness as if it were a form of capital (Lipsitz, 1998). The possessive investment in whiteness is like property. And as a kind of property, its value lies in the right to exclude, or deny, communities of color the opportunity to accumulate assets. Therefore, racism is a dialectic (a dance?) between accumulation on the one hand, and exclusion on the other.

What the Glenn Beck’s of our society deny (with the encouragement of their black and brown enablers) is the fact that white privilege exists and is pervasive. Though discussions of racial inequality often tend to focus almost exclusively on black and brown behavior, something as simple as shopping can be problematic for people of color. Clerks in retail stores are more frequently concerned with the color of shoppers’ skin than with their ability to pay. One clothing franchise, Cignal Clothing, for example, stamped an information form on the backs of personal checks. The form included a section marked “race,” and shoppers were classified “W” for white, “H” for Hispanic, and “07” for black (don’t ask!). After conducting an extensive qualitative study, sociologist Joe Feagin reported, “No matter how affluent and influential, a black person cannot escape the stigma of being black even while relaxing or shopping” (Feagin & Sikes, 1994).

Health care is another realm where significant disparities exist between blacks and whites -- disparities that often literally mean the difference between life and death. The wide gaps in mortality rates and access to primary care between blacks and whites have been noted in newspaper accounts and, more extensively, in the academic literature.

However, similar disparities cut across every aspect of health and health care, and few of these differences can be fully blamed on social status and genetics. For example, The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has reported that that cancer deaths are increasing much faster for blacks than for whites, sometimes by as much as twenty to hundred times as fast. Black women are more likely than white women to die of breast cancer, even though the incidence of the disease is lower among blacks (McBarnette, 1995).

According to the same NCI report, “Black men have a cancer-death rate about 44 percent higher than that for white men” (Squires, 1990). In fact, African American men between the ages of fifty and seventy are nearly three times as likely to die from prostate cancer as white men, and their prostate cancer rate is more than double that of whites.

Now, some of you are probably thinking that these disparities fall under the heading of “Fucked Up Choices Black & Brown People Make,” right?

You would be wrong.

Higher death rates for blacks diagnosed with cancer, for example, are a recent development. In the 1930s, blacks were only half as likely as whites to die of lung cancer. Since 1950, however, the rate of lung cancer deaths among black men has increased at three times the rate for white men. Increases in smoking rates are not the likely cause behind the change. Exposure to environmental toxins and carcinogens, which are disproportionately located in poor and minority communities, is one of the most important reasons for racial differences in cancer death rates (Cooper & Simmons, 1985).

Unequal access to screening, prevention, and treatment are other reasons for the health disparities. One of the chief reasons black women are more likely to die of breast cancer is that they are not diagnosed until the disease has reached an advanced stage (Yood et al., 1999). Even when access is to health care is equal, African Americans are diagnosed at a later stage and are almost twice as likely to die of breast cancer as whites. A study of operable lung cancer found that the rate of surgery for black patients was 12.7 percent lower than that for whites with the same diagnosis. This goes beyond social class or the issue of access to health care. The researchers of this study concluded that the “lower survival rate among black patients... is largely explained by the lower rate of surgical treatment among blacks” (Bach, Cramer, Warren, & Begg, 1999). Similarly, racial differences in mortality rates for cervical cancer remain significant even after controlling for age and economic status, and are more likely attributable to differences in screening and diagnosis (McBarnette, 1995).

Racial differences in hypertension have been well documented and much has been written about its prevalence among low income African Americans. One study, however, rejected the conventional wisdom that hypertension among blacks is genetic, concluding that socioenvironmental factors like the stresses of low job status and income are the chief culprits for the different rates of hypertension (Klag, Whelton, Coresh, Grim, & Kuller, 1991).

Access to advanced diagnostic and treatment procedures for coronary heart disease and related ailments also accounts for the significant differences between blacks and whites. Once differences in age, sex, health care payer, income, and diagnoses for all admissions for circulatory disease or chest pains to Massachusetts hospitals had been controlled for, a 1985 study found that whites underwent significantly more angiography and coronary bypass grafting than blacks (Wenneker & Epstein, 1989). More recent studies confirm these results. One study found that that after controlling for differences in age, gender, severity of disease, comorbidity, geography, and availability of facilities, blacks were 60 percent less likely to have thrombolytic therapy.

However, the most glaring issue in health and race is that of racial bias. Evidence suggests that racial stereotyping and discrimination influence the medical decisions made by doctors. One study (whose findings proved controversial), asked doctors to respond to videotaped interviews with “patients” who were in actuality actors with identical medical histories and symptoms. Only the race and gender of the actors were different (Schulman et al., 1999). It turned out that doctors were significantly less likely to refer black women for aggressive treatment of cardiac symptoms than other categories of patients with the same symptoms. Doctors were also asked about their perceptions of patients’ character traits. Black male actor/ patients, whose symptoms and comments were identical to white male actor/ patients, were perceived to be less intelligent, less likely to participate in treatment decisions, and more likely to miss appointments. Doctors in the study thought that both black men and women would be less likely to benefit from invasive procedures than their white counterparts, less likely to comply with doctors’ instructions, and more likely to come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Put simply, where actor/ patients were identical except for race, black patients were usually seen as low-income members of an inferior group.

Although I am sure most doctors would deny being racist, and probably aren’t intentionally racist, they are not immune to America’s racial history and the resulting cognitive bias. In a groundbreaking article on unconscious racism, Charles Lawrence III observed, “racism is part of our common historical experience and... culture. It arises from the assumptions we have learned to make about the world, ourselves, and others as well as from the patterns of fundamental social activities” (1987)

Discretion is inseparable from the practice of medicine, and combined with other sources of racial bias, it causes the differences in treatment and health care. This pattern of racially biased discretion is similar to patterns found in education and criminal justice.

On the other hand, maybe it’s just the fuckin’ Doritos...

Eddie

References

Bach, P. B., Cramer, L. D., Warren, J. L., & Begg, C. B. (1999). Racial differences in the treatment of early-stage lung cancer. New England Journal of Medicine, 341(16), 1198-1205.

Cooper, R., & Simmons, B. E. (1985). Cigarette smoking and ill health among black Americans. New York State Journal of Medicine, 85, 344-349.

Feagin, J. R., & Sikes, M. P. (1994). Living with racism: The black middle-class experience. Boston: Beacon Press.

Klag, M. J., Whelton, P. K., Coresh, J., Grim, C. E., & Kuller, L. H. (1991). The association of skin color with blood pressure in US blacks with low socioeconomic status. Journal of the American Medical Association, 265(5), 599-602.

Lawrence III, C. R. (1987). The id, the ego, and equal protection: Reckoning with unconscious racism. Stanford Law Review, 39(2), 317-388.

Lipsitz, G. (1998). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

McBarnette, L. S. (1995). African American women. In M. Bayne-Smith (Ed.), Race, gender and health (pp. 51-52). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Schulman, K. A., Berlin, J. A., Harless, W., Kerner, J. F., Sistrunk, S., Gersh, B. J., et al. (1999). The effect of race and sex on physicians' recommendations for cardiac catheterization. New England Journal of Medicine, 340(8), 618-626.

Squires, S. (1990, January 20). Cancer death rate higher for blacks. Chicago Sun-Times p. A5.

Wenneker, M. B., & Epstein, A. M. (1989). Racial inequalities in the use of procedures for patients with ischemic heart disease in Massachusetts. Journal of the American Medical Association, 261(2), 253-257.

Yood, M. U., Johnson, C. C., Blount, A., Abrams, J., Wolman, E., McCarthy, B. D., et al. (1999). Race and differences in breast cancer survival in a managed care population. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 91(17), 1487-1491.

The TGIF Sex Blog [Awakening Female Sexual Energy]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Well, it’s the last weekend of the summer and I’m planning to get away -- going to the Boston area for some much-needed R&R. This past week has been hell at work and the lull of summer will become the hectic, fast paced, helter-skelter of fall once next week rolls around.

I was going to write something on revolution and sex, but didn’t get the chance to finish it. Instead, here’s the last of the Summer Reruns series...

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Ovarian Kung-Fu

As many of my readers know, I do not believe sex is incompatible with spirituality. For centuries, we have been indoctrinated to believe that sexuality and spirituality are mutually exclusive. For me, this stereotype has destroyed untold millions of lives, and continues to do so. The truth is that if we want to grow spiritually, we cannot deny the existence of our genitals. We must instead work to integrate our sexual urges into our spiritual lives. In fact, I contend that sex is a valid spiritual path -- a bridge to a deeper relationship to your Higher Power.

Sex can be so much more than a mere release valve for our stress or our neurotic need to feel good/ validated, or be loved. It can be joyous and illuminating. It can be a genuinely transformative force in our lives. Not only can it uncover for us a depth of pleasure that transcends the nerve spasms of genitally focused sex, it can also yield a radical intimacy that obliterates our false sense of separateness, obliterating our ego-boundaries until we recognize in one another the Universal Principle of existence itself. Whew!

::gets off soap box::

As for the title? Yeah, you read that right: Ovarian Kung-Fu -- there are women can do some Hidden Crotch/ Flying Poosie shit on you and you’re whupped!

WEPA! LOL!

I’m making fun, but I’m very serious about this. This is an actual internal system of kung-fu that involves cultivating female sexual energy. The original Taoist sexual exercises were called Ovarian Kung Fu. Some students feels this sounds too violent or too much like a martial arts. However, keep in mind that the term kung fu means discipline or intensive work, an expression of power and mastery, of the ability to take control of one’s body and sexual life.

The following was adapted from the book, Healing Love Through the Tao: Cultivating Female Sexual Energy (Chia & Chia, 2005). I can’t possibly convey enough of this teaching through one-page MS Word document, but I have tried to give a brief synopsis. I found this totally engrossing.

The Taoist masters believe that the principle energy of a woman (called jing) is largely accumulated in the ovaries and that conscious breathing releases that energy and makes it available for spiritual growth as well as the rejuvenation of the body.

Similarly, the principle energy of a man is found in the testes and is used by a similar discipline of controlled breath and concentration. Both Taoism and Tantra emphasize the importance in taking command of one’s psychosomatic energies. Taoists believe that ordinary sexual activity squanders this all-important energy, mostly through orgasm. Through sexual practices, this waste can be prevented and the life-force can be used to intensify our awareness and ultimately reach a state of spiritual realization.

An interview with a female practitioner yields some interesting insights. For one, she stated that the exercises were easy and that there were no negative side effects for her or anyone else she knows. She states that the exercises empowered her with her control of her own sexual energy and a rediscovery of sexuality as a resource for personal cultivation.

Taoists speak of cultivating one’s nature, refining energy for personal and spiritual development, with sexual energy being one of the raw materials for that process. Practitioners of Taoist sexual exercises speak of being able to direct their sexual energy throughout their body, watching it transform them. Using Taoist techniques and practices, a transformation occurs which causes a basic grounding and harmony. Sexual pleasure becomes more intense and exquisite -- pleasure becoming ecstasy and ecstasy growing into bliss.

Some of the other benefits of Taoist sexual cultivation are relief of menstrual cramps, a shorter flow, and fewer pre-menstrual symptoms.

With Ovarian Breathing, the practitioner learns to move their sexual energy from their genitals to their whole body. Over time, it becomes possible to refine it to the point that it can be shared with other people in their daily experiences. Some practitioners report becoming more attractive to people in general and men in particular. Not merely in a sexual sense, but in the sense of people being interested in their whole person.

What I found most interesting is the description of what is called a Valley of Orgasm, as opposed to a peak orgasm. The practitioner first experiences a slow wave of energy rising within her, leading to a prolonged phase of peak excitement. Then by deeply relaxing in the valley for period, the cycle is repeated with each successive cycle becoming more deeply relaxing and more intense. Eventually the whole body/ mind is at the same time aroused and deeply surrendering.

The Valley Orgasm occurs spontaneously in the state of deep relaxation, and it is a very powerful experience that is felt in every cell and every particle of the practitioner’s being as an ecstatic, exquisite universal integration with all creation.

Now put that in your pipe and smoke it! LOL

My name is Eddie and I'm in  recovery from civilization...

Resources

Chia, M., & Chia, M. 2005). Healing love through the Tao: Cultivating female sexual energy. New York: Destiny Books.

Health

¡Hola! Everybody...
Another cycle of meetings, budget mods, and strategic planning. Not all of my work is that exciting! LOL

Repost!

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-=[ Health ]=-

“And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.”

-- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

I’m truly blessed...

Really

My doctor, an attractive young woman, calls me “her miracle.” Of course, this doesn’t help me in terms of my trying to date her, but she loves me in her own special way. Indeed, I am a miracle: most people who have lived as I have -- who have been to the hells I have visited -- are not here to talk about it.

Most are dead, or dying…

My doctor finds it hard to believe that I fought the drug wars on the frontline of suffering. The fact is this: if you would look at suffering as a war, then I was on the frontlines!

LOL!!

Really

Though she’s been my primary doctor for some years now, my doctor finds it hard to believe that I abused myself in the way that I say I did. I mean, I have to let my doctor know about my past lifestyle because she needs to know what to look for. Despite my past transgressions, however, all she finds is a man who possesses the cardiovascular of a person 10 years younger, she sees a man free of usual suspects of diseases that plague people like me: HIV, hepatitis, and various STDs.

I am blessed, but for a reason… or at least I like to think so.

However, my blessing comes with a responsibility and I see myself as a messenger. The responsibility is to embody a message of hope -- to live my life as a power of example for those would despair otherwise. For a while, I used to feel guilty about my “health” -- call it “survivor's guilt.” I didn't understand it at first, until I realized it didn’t matter why. What really matters is that I’m here and what do I do about it. Therefore, there’s a mission in my life. I guess if I had to put it simply, I would say my mission is to make this world a better place than I found it.

I have also come to accept my health as my birthright as a human being. I understand that health is not merely the absence of disease. Furthermore, there’s no need to worry about my health, eventually it will go away.

LOL!

Health is also a matter of perception and attitude. Suppose you stub your toe. What kinds of energy have you been conditioned to send to that throbbing discomfort? Most of us are taught to send fear and anger, even hatred, to our pain. My question to you then is this: which is the unhealed -- the throbbing toe or the hateful response to the unpleasant sensation?

It’s obvious that both factors are involved in our suffering. So true healing, healing that addresses the whole problem rather than the parts of it, involves meeting suffering with love and kindness, awareness, mercy, and balance, instead of trying to drive it away with fear, distrust, anger, and loathing.

I have seen people struggle tremendously at trying to find healing or wholeness. The reality is that grasping at healing, like grasping at enlightenment, results in more suffering, for all grasping results in distress. On the other hand, to allow ourselves to lighten, to allow ourselves to heal, to trust the process and enter into it without models or preconceptions of how we’re supposed to be or who we’re supposed to be, seems to me the very road that healing travels. When we remember that we are the path and the we must walk it ourselves -- lightly, mercifully, and consciously -- then we can begin to claim our birthright as human beings, the healing that goes beyond healing, and we truly discover ourselves.

It’s cold outside today, and the wind calls harshly, beckoning to me. It’s the Earth’s way of reminding me that she delights in me and feeling me, playing her hands through my hair, reminding me that I’m truly alive.

EXERCISE: A MEDITATION ON LOVING-KINDNESS

(Adapted from “A Path With Heart,” by Jack Kornfield)

The quality of loving-kindness is the ground out of which an integrated whole life can grow. With a loving heart as the background, all that we attempt, all that we encounter, will open and flow more easily. While loving-kindness can arise naturally in us in many circumstances, it can also be cultivated.

The following meditation is a 2,500 year-old practice that uses repeated phrases, images, and feelings to evoke loving-kindness and friendliness toward oneself and others. You can experiment with this practice to see if it is useful for you. It is best to begin by repeating it over and over for fifteen or twenty minutes once or twice daily in a quiet place for several months.

At first this meditation may feel mechanical or awkward or even bring up its opposite, feelings of irritation and anger. If this happens, it is especially important to be patient and kind toward yourself, allowing whatever arises to be received in a spirit of friendliness and kind affection.

In its own time, even in the face of inner difficulties, loving-kindness will develop. Sit in a comfortable fashion. Let your body relax and be at rest. As best you can, let your mind be quiet, letting go of plans and preoccupations. Then begin to recite inwardly the following phrases directed to yourself. You begin with yourself because without loving yourself it is almost impossible to love others.

May I be filled with loving-kindness.

May I be well.

May I be peaceful and at ease.

May I be happy.

As you say the phrases, you may also wish to use the following imagery: picture yourself as a young and beloved child, or sense yourself as you are now, held in a heart of loving- kindness. Let the feelings arise with the words. Adjust the words and images so that you find the exact phrases that best open your heart of kindness. Repeat the phrases again and again, letting the feelings permeate your body and mind.

Practice this meditation repeatedly for a number of weeks until the sense of loving-kindness for yourself grows. When you feel ready, in the same meditation period you can gradually expand the focus of your loving-kindness to include others. However, it is important that you work on yourself first, you can’t love others until you love yourself.

After yourself, choose someone in your life who has truly cared for you. Picture them and carefully recite the same phrases, May he/ she be filled with loving-kindness, and so forth. When loving-kindness for your benefactor has developed, begin to include other people you love in the meditation, picturing them and reciting the same phrases, evoking a sense of loving‑kindness for them.

After this, you can gradually begin to include others: friends, community members, neighbors, people everywhere, animals, the whole earth, and all beings. Then you can even experiment with including the most difficult people in your life, wishing that they, too, be filled with loving-kindness and peace.

With some practice a steady sense of loving-kindness can develop and in the course of fifteen or twenty minutes you will be able to include many beings in your meditation, moving from yourself, to a benefactor and loved ones, to all beings everywhere.

Then you can learn to practice it anywhere. You can use this meditation in traffic jams, in buses and airplanes, in doctors' waiting rooms, and in a thousand other circumstances. As you silently practice this loving-kindness meditation among people, you will immediately feel a wonderful connection with them -- the power of loving-kindness. It will calm your life and keep you connected to your heart

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Love,

Eddie