Thursday, January 01, 2015

metta bhavana - full lead-through' by kamalashila

free buddhist audio : : 'metta bhavana - full lead-through' by kamalashila

Forgive me if I'm a little precious about my experience, that happens at the beginning of a retreat, as I tune in.

Anandi wanted to do a lead meditation (link above) because it's been a while, so we played the full lead through by Kamalashila. Unfortunately the computer went to sleep and we probably did more than we were supposed to in the final stage, but that's not bad.

I started to get that head feeling that is hard to describe, when you're meditating a bit for the first time in a while. Someone once called it the feeling of coming out of warp speed, a reference perhaps to Star Trek. I also go hot, which sometimes happens when I meditate. I feel like I'm burning off the impurities.

I used to think about myself sledding as a child to evoke metta, and I recently went sledding and had a weirdly full feeling of metta while doing it, the sledding was infused with metta because I connect that as a time when I was happy as a child, simple happiness. Passing that on to my sons, there was a kind of fatherly love involved. There was sympathetic joy in others joy. There was compassion when people got into problems. And all the while I was not overwhelmed, just right.

We went grocery shopping. We got some flowers for the shrine.


You can see my main rupa, with Kwan Yin on the left and Manjushri on the right, and some butterflies for color and beauty. The Buddha wears the awesome mala Anandi bought me, that I wear sometimes.

We made pizza dough for our pizza tonight.


It looks a little crumbly, but we put more water in it, and she didn't think we should put any more in. My first pizza dough.

I cut up some onions and got a good cathartic onion cry. I was glad to spend time in the kitchen with Anandi, she really is fun to be with in the kitchen.

She made a ginger drink with orange juice, lime juice and lemon juice. She's so creative!


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