Positive Philosophy

• Meditation as a Tool

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• OLLI
• May 2024
• Day 4

Breathe.

Agenda

• Review
• Meditation: RAIN
• Discussion
• Cultivating equanimity and peace.
• The 4 Divine Abodes: loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.
• Practice: Metta meditation.
• The Big Picture

REVIEW

STRATEGIES

Focus on sensations

Notice your thoughts

Take it moment by moment; notice changes

Move to a different area of the body that is at ease

Anchor in a easy place, just touch the edge of pain, go back and forth between pain and ease

STRATEGIES

Put the discomfort in the context of the whole body

Offer compassion and validation

Connect to the breath, use breathing strategies

SELF-COMPASSION

Self-kindness vs. self-judgment

Common humanity vs. Isolation

Mindfulness vs. Over-identification

THOUGHTS

Cultivate awareness of:

• Common Cognitive Distortions
• Deeper Patterns of Thinking and Behaving

Label our thoughts, acknowledge them, thank them for their help, allow them, let them go.

Reality Checking: The Steps

1. Awareness – catch yourself in your biased thinking
2. Feel it in your body, feel your emotions
3. Reality Check/Argue with yourself
• Challenge questions list
4. Create a new, more helpful thought

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Reality Checking: Common Challenge Questions

1. What evidence do I have for this conclusion?
2. Do I have all of the information?
3. How likely is this really?
4. Is it objectively true or is it a story I’m telling myself?

We’re not denying how we feel. We recognize our feelings and the distorted thoughts that drive those feelings. We work to change the thoughts.

Places for Escape

• Consider your Window of Tolerance and stay inside of that window.
• We’re regulated.
• Not necessarily comfortable, but not at all shut down.
• We feel we can tolerate what is happening.

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• Hand model of the brain: notice when we’re going to flip our lids.

Places for Escape

• Open your eyes.
• Feel your body in the chair/on the floor.
• Think about a loving and peaceful person or place where you are at ease and safe.
• Get up and walk around.
• Hand on your heart. Soothe.
• Stick with what’s manageable.

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MEDITATION: R.A.I.N.

RAIN PRACTICE

DISCUSSION

Guidelines

• Speak about yourself only.
• Don’t give each other advice. Practice mindful listening.
• Recognize there are only a few people in the room, but many more online. Further, the recording of this session will be available in a library.
• Take home learning, but don’t identify anyone when you talk about it later. Observe the confidentiality of our space.
• We are all growing. Celebrate the victories.

Discussion

• How’d it go?
• Say something about your practice, comment, question, thoughts that occurred to you…anything.

THE 4 DIVINE ABODES

The Brahmaviharas

• Vihara – word for home or house, where one abides
• Brahma – name of the king of the gods
• The Divine Abodes
• The Four Immeasurables
• Qualities or virtues we can cultivate through specific practices.
• We all have these qualities.

Image credit: Flow Collective Yoga

The Brahmaviharas

• We’re connecting with countless beings who have taken as their aspiration in life to cultivate a wise heart.
• We can connect with them and all beings through these practices.
• After all of the hard stuff we’ve done to become aware of our minds, then what? How can we use these skills for good?

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Interrelated…

Out of the soil of loving-kindness

Grows the beautiful bloom of compassion

To be watered by tears of joy

Under the cool shade of the tree of equanimity.

Longchenpa

The Brahmaviharas

• Interrelated.
• Each one has an “occupational hazard” – a near enemy.
• Each one gets balanced out by the other three.
• “Compassion fatigue” among health care workers can be remedied by joy. (Donald Rothberg)

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Near Enemies

• Ways we get it wrong.
• Let’s look at the idea with something we already know: self-compassion/ compassion.

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Maitri/Metta: �Loving-Kindness

• A basic orientation toward warmth and goodwill that we bring to all beings.
• It is the foundation of everything else.
• When it meets/it becomes:
• Pain/compassion
• Beautiful/joy
• As we practice and are able to maintain loving-kindness in all situations, it’s equanimity.
• Equanimity integrates all three.

Metta: Loving-Kindness

• Cultivate unconditional friendliness – to yourself and others.
• Heartfelt yearning and vision for yourself and others to experience happiness and causes of happiness.
• Opposite: ill-will, hate, schadenfreude
• Near Enemy: a pushover, nicey-nice, self-centeredness
• Remedy: equanimity

Metta: Loving-Kindness

• Set an intention to do so, over time, we become more inclined this way.
• All others – even those we loathe…
• “This first step … begins to dissolve any sense of a separate self….”
• All “bad behavior” comes from suffering – let’s send loving-kindness to all people, even ourselves, giving everyone the benefit of the doubt.

Metta: Loving-Kindness from Pema…

“It might feel like stretching into make-believe to say, ’May this person who is driving me crazy enjoy happiness and be free of suffering.’

Probably what we genuinely feel is anger. This practice is like a workout that stretches the heart beyond its current capabilities.

We can expect to encounter resistance. We discover that we have our limits: we can stay open to some people, but we remain closed to others. We see both our clarity and our confusion.

We are learning firsthand what everyone who has ever set out on this path has learned: we are all a paradoxical bundle of rich potential that consists of both neurosis and wisdom.”

Metta: Loving-Kindness

May I be loving, open, and aware in this moment;�If I cannot be loving, open, and aware in this moment, may I be kind;�If I cannot be kind, may I be nonjudgmental;�If I cannot be nonjudgmental, may I not cause harm;�If I cannot not cause harm, may I cause the least harm possible.

Thus, even in my imperfections, even in my failures, I can still incline my heart toward freedom.

Larry Yang

Metta: Loving-Kindness

• Practice consists of repeating phrases.
• Spend some time choosing the phrases that work for you.

May you be safe.

May you be happy.

May you be healthy.

May you live with ease.

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Metta: Loving-Kindness

Practices

• As I’m walking out in the world, I look at people at send the phrases to them.
• Pay attention to our hands – what our hands are doing – are we opening doors for people? Did we wave at our neighbor? Are we handling things carefully? Small kindnesses often happen with our hands.

Karuna: Compassion

• Heartfelt yearning that all be free of suffering and the causes of suffering.
• When empathy meets suffering, when loving-kindness encounters what’s difficult, there is compassion: we want to do something to help.
• Opposite: contempt or cruelty
• Near Enemy: grief, sorrow, depression – we take on too much.
• Empathy is related but not a synonym.
• Remedy: sympathetic joy

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Karuna: Compassion

• Practices
• 3 possibilities practice opens us up and dissolves our biases
• Be present with the difficulty of another – not caretaking or “doing”, but just being. We rush people out of their pain due to our discomfort. Can we stay with it until they are ready? (grief)
• Actions: volunteering, trying to work toward repairing something in your community

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Karuna: Compassion

• We resist our societal conditioning to immediately move away from pain and go toward the pleasant.
• We train in staying with pain – staying with it while it’s workable – and we stretch the boundary of what’s workable.
• We open to our own difficulties as we develop compassion for others.

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Mudita: Sympathetic Joy

• Delight in other’s success and happiness.
• When loving-kindness meets the beautiful, wonderful, joyful, it becomes sympathetic joy.
• Opposite: envy and cynicism
• Near Enemy: frivolous joy – temporary high; attachment, self-centeredness
• Foreboding Joy: fear that arises when we feel joy
• Remedy: Loving Kindness – an abiding wish for the joy to continue.

Mudita: Sympathetic Joy

• Practices
• Gratitude – appreciating what’s going well, challenging our negativity bias
• Awe – put yourself in nature or other places where we feel awe
• Adjust your phrases to promote joy: May your beauty continue; May your wealth multiply…
• Savoring

Upekkha: Equanimity

• Even-heartedness, temperance, impartiality, balanced with whatever comes up
• An increasing ability to keep our loving-kindness in any situation.
• An ability to abide with what is
• Opposite: craving, attachment, aversion
• Near Enemy: indifference, aloofness, overly intellectual
• Remedy: compassion

Upekkha: Equanimity

• Practices
• Daily meditation, cultivating the observer, knowing our minds
• Breathing for emotional regulation, understanding our emotions

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MEDITATION: METTA

IN SUM…

In Sum…

• The 4 divine abodes are practices and intentions that cultivate peace and happiness, that allow us to be more present to our own lives and the lives of others.
• We train in them. Little by little. Over time, we find our capacity grows.

The Big Picture

• We have done a WHOLE LOT this month!
• The list of strategies is LOOONG…
• But your willingness to put these practices to use in such a short amount of time???
• Award-winning.
• So, at this very end of our time together, I want to put this all in perspective. What is the big picture of this whole endeavor?

Vision for the Future

• Positive Psychologists envision a world in which “widespread mental fitness deeply alters society for the better.”
• “Together, we can make schools the happiest places on earth where we learn and grow while pursuing our own goals. We can turn workplaces into meaning factories. We can raise healthy, happy families.”

Freedom exists within your mind.

“A mind free from disturbance has value in lessening human suffering, a goal shared by science and meditative paths alike. But apart from lofty heights of being, there’s a more practical potential within reach of every one of us: a life best described as flourishing.”

(Altered Traits, p. 53)

We cannot control our feelings, but we can control our reactions and how we deal with those feelings.

We can also clean up our own minds, deal with our own issues, so we are less reactive and bothered by those who try to hurt us, and those who hurt us without meaning to do so.

Notes from Altered Traits

• “Practicing meditation can pay off quickly in some ways, even if you have just started.”
• Amygdala is less reactive.
• Increase in empathy and positive feeling outside the meditative state.
• Increased attention, better focus and working memory. (Improved GRE score after 2 weeks of practice.)
• Better physical health: improvement in molecular markers for aging.

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“The things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.”

MEDITATION RX

1. Keep breathing!
2. Treat yourself with kindness and compassion.
3. As much as possible, treat others with kindness and compassion.
4. Keep in touch!
• saltwater4breakfast.com
• batenburgann@yahoo.com
5. Fall course expands on what we did today! See you in the fall!