Virtual Metta Retreat: Teatime (1) with Ajahn Sona

welcome back everybody it's a new day and i hope you have cultivated loving kindness since the retreat began and in fact it would be nice if you had started early before the retreat and uh we're continuing our uh opportunity for questions and answers and this is traditionally what we do during retreats and we do it all year round when we have guests in retreat and we have a what's called a tea time at birkin and this is a good situation which uh didn't necessarily always occur in uh in the monasteries that i was in and i thought it would be it's a good opportunity for more or less casual uh questions especially about the the talks and so i invite any questions around the topic that we've chosen this loving kindness and we will explore the full details of it and all the strategies tricks of the trade and anything that helps you develop this cultivate this emotion of true well-being and health so i invite any questions and we probably have some yes ajan our first question is live from rob b in portsmouth england rob please ask ajahn your question yes thank you um and yeah so my question is relating to obviously meta and what i wanted to ask was what is the relationship between meta and the seven factors of enlightenment in terms of where it fits in meta and the seven factors of enlightenment aha it sounds like snow white and the seven dwarfs are uh so uh in fact of the seven factors are entwined uh with meta but they are a larger strat structure than meta meta has some of the qualities of the seven factors of enlightenment but not all of the qualities of the seven factors of enlightenment and not everybody knows what the seven factors of enlightenment are but i and i won't go into an encyclopedic uh discourse on that if i want to tell the audience that if at another time you want to review these seven factors of enlightenment and they're very very important i have uh done a number of very exhaustive uh talks on this on the youtube channel so i've given whole retreats on the seven factors but because we're on the loving kindness topic i want to stay fairly close to that loving kindness fulfills a couple of things one it participates in uh energy which is the third factor of the seven factors it participates in joy which is the fourth fact fourth factor and it participates in serenity passati in uh the six the fifth factor of the seven factors so it's not particularly an investigation of dhamma that's the second second factor but it's um it allows the mind to be calm collected and without the hindrance of hostility and anger and also without greed so it a lot leaves the mind in this kind of situation that it's very workable very capable of focusing on pertinent dharma topics so this uh question could have a whole you know there could be an entire uh an hour of talk on the seven factors etc but i i don't want to drift too far away from from meta but certainly meta assists the seven factors of enlightenment and the seven factors of enlightenment not only assist loving-kindness but also swallows loving-kindness includes loving-kindness at times loving-kindness is not exclusively the contents of the seven factors but uh it's certainly one uh very useful and a beneficial factor of these seven factors so that's a little a reply and brief and i say i think we want to set the tone for the retreat that we don't want to get too wide um with the field of the questions so we will stay with uh would try to center around loving kindness next question ajahn our next question is live from ranga j in homdel in the united states ranga please ask ajahn your question thank you can can you hear me yes we can are you able to hear me okay great uh thank you stewards for facilitating it and thank you ajahn my question is around metha as it relates to the body so as metha arises or deepens does it tend to bring about any sensations in the body is it accompanied by sukkah or pt if you could expand on that that would be great thank you yes it is uh and this is the only way you're going to know that meta is present it's not an intel it's not an idea and it is known because it has both a emotional um effect and it has a physical uh it affects the physical feelings as well so both the emotional feelings in english we get very confused about this because we we refer to sensations in the body as feelings and then we also refer to what we call emotions as feelings so i'm talking about both the the bodily feeling and the emotional feeling so loving-kindness one of the benefits of loving kindness is that it reduces pain in the body and in fact can replace that with even positive flushes of of uh what is called sukkah and suka so not everybody in our audience knows what sukkah is but sukha is a a condition of bodily happiness and pt which ranga mentioned is a condition of emotional joy these are two factors which rise if you can absorb into a loving kindness then those two factors will arise joy in the mind joy emotional joy and the body is suffused with a sense of well-being this uh this pervades the whole body and uh some of the other side effects are that one that pain in the body uh diminishes and by the way this is really very very interesting and important as a kind of a treatment for chronic pain meta if you can talk yourself into meta if you can generate meta and also if if you happen to be a persuasive personality i would even suggest that you might be able to assist others that have a condition of chronic pain and there's lots of people in the world with chronic pain that's almost inaccessible to some types of medications so if you can either recommend the practice of of being talked into loving kindness for people who you know they they have chronic pains in their necks and their spines uh knees and various types of things that actually loving kindness has enough potency to reduce that physical pain and i actually know of some hospitals where the pain specialists use give a course or a class or an induction in loving kindness because the potent painkillers that they use are not effective on every on all patients and so some of them have just because they have gone off to meditation retreats and so forth and encountered loving kindness they realize this is a very viable strategy for the reduction and elimination of pain so uh that is a pleasure pleasurable experience i just want to talk a little bit about three three kinds of feelings pleasant neutral and painful or unpleasant now if you have physical pain and then you um take a an aspirin get rid of a headache and so forth that absence of the pain you experience that as pleasurable it comes to you as very positive after having the negative experience of pain just the absence of pain can be experienced as pleasurable if though after a very pleasant experience very pleasurable experience you go down into neutral neutral uh experience and then it will be felt as kind of dull or boring so you experience these this neutral feeling in two different ways so loving kindness is always a positive uh experience it's never just neutral but if you manage through loving-kindness to relieve the sensations of pain in the body then you you will you will experience that as a very pleasurable experience and and if you don't have any physical um pain in the body you will still experience uh the true quality of loving kindness as sweeping through the body now i would say that uh it's people describe this as in various ways and when we use the word love we we get all confused with romantic love and all this kind of stuff so it is a matter of the heart but it's not to be confused with uh kind of a overwhelming uh feeling of the heart it's just a very healthy feeling of the heart and that that when i say the heart i mean the emotions the emotional structure what's your what does your head feel like with loving-kindness actually it feels cool your loving-kindness true loving-kindness does not participate in uh any negative emotions and the negative emotions often occur in the head uh confusion um sorrow grief anger you know it the flares up in the you feel it in the forehead you can see people's face flush with heat when they're in anger etc so the experience of loving kindness feels and i've i have this little phrase it feels like you have a cool head and a warm heart so think of uh getting into an on a cool evening getting into bed with a nice down duvet uh and pulling it up to your neck but leaving the window open a crack for fresh air so that your head is cool and you have fresh air coming in but you feel warm throughout your body and as notice that in ordinary english we speak of the warmth of human friendship a warm friendship so so that's that's appropriate to to look at that the other thing is uh relaxed so meta relaxes you it is also you can you feel very secure now this is now we're going into the emotions so you feel very secure you don't feel threatened because there's no fear in in loving kindness so you can deal with people's criticisms uh if you are an insecure type a personality person with inferiority complex or any of these things what is the cure for this i must say probably not psychotherapy it's just pure loving kindness you don't have to go into the reasons why you feel this way why it started in what your family life and all this if you can get to this condition of loving kindness you will simply feel secure and you won't feel threatened um or a sense of shyness or concern in in the presence of others so also if you're shy nervous loving kindness is a very good practice and so you tell yourself that you are uh you are well and uh then you are not uh threatened by uh the the social social pressures so this is very very good uh that feels good it feels wonderful actually a lot of people walk through almost their entire life with afflictive emotions you know nervous concerned shy self-doubt uh self-criticism uh can over-concern with the opinions of others etc this is a grinding experience so with meta none of those happen and so you're you immediately feel a relief emotional relief so that's the what ha the heart the emotion of of even just neutral emotion after painful emotion is also experienced as very pleasurable so your emotional quality is very pleasurable the body is swept with a similar kind of dampening of physical pain and in the case where you don't have pain it's swept with a physical sense of of uh of of well-being this can be very extreme actually it can you can actually have tears you can actually have kind of uplifting feelings if you want to know the secret of levitation wink wink it is uh that it physicists are right there is no such thing but there is in the human realm in the actual experience of life how your perception of the weight and density of your body is purely held in the mind your body is in your mind it's not the opposite your mind's not in your body your body is in your mind when your mind changes and when i say your mind i mean your heart and the thinking processes and everything the emotions that transforms your entire perception of your body it's very very powerful and so look to your mind uh first and your body will be swept up in in this so those are a few of the uh so um think of a nice uh down comforter but your head is uh not covered with it second uh getting into a nice hot tub that's also keep your head above the water the body's in the water the heads out in the nice cool air so these are these are the balance with loving kindness it's a full warm relaxed pain-free experience with lucidity of of the mind and you feel that in your head lucid spacious airy un uh unconcerned uh with with uh danger you feel safe as well okay so that's some of the descriptions and i will get into this in in future talks i will get into the the details of this because that's very important to understand this is a whole body experience a whole emotional experience as well so thank you for that question ranga our next live question is coming from georg b in lethbridge canada yes thank you pierre dassey hello diagen in the first verses of the meta sutra that you chanted so beautifully at the beginning of the meditation we heard that one should develop good good ethical conduct for example being straightforward and gentle in speech is it right to say that the development of good ethics sila is the foundation for generating loving kindness and the condition for remaining on board the canoe called mata very good question georg and uh i appreciate your your appreciation of my chanting i think we still need some uh pitch control on that chanting there we we uh you can you can work on that for me georg is a musician so but considering it's it's acapella solo in the middle of a of a of a salah uh it's close enough anyway we will move on to the uh to the question ethics as a framework for loving kindness yes indeed one of the it's just a a way of helping you the buddha makes you understand you cannot separate the way you behave in life the way you speak and the way you act in life from your emotional life you cannot possibly hope to walk around full of loving kindness and live a life that is threatening to other people that threatening to their possessions threatening to their well-being uh full of harsh speech or deceptive speech how can you possibly hope to have the emotional well-being of loving-kindness which is both towards yourself and towards the other beings in the world and at the same time live a non-ethical life a non-moral life so the buddha is saying you can think of it in in one of two ways you can start with ethics so by the way i think this is the way uh uh we teach piano as well uh you uh you don't start with music usually with the piano you start with notes and notes are the ethics of our ethics you you have to play the right note at the right time and this requires certain physical positioning but if you don't do that you won't play you will not produce the music in the end uh so the this important to play the notes but merely the notes are not the music the music is something else which appears if the notes are ordered in the right way and loving kindness is the music ethics are the notes and so now some people are very as in the music area that some people are very musical but they have not learned how to place their fingers on the notes and everything this is the case where a person has a basically a good heart they they have the friendliness the good will and they naturally seem to be ethical and this is the case if you really have loving kindness it is the source from which all ethics are drawn so the good heart what is the good heart it is the recognition of yourself in others and others in yourself you can see that how it would feel to be threatened how it would feel to have things taken from you how to how it feels to be deceived and since you do not want that then you also see that others do not want that so that feeling that that's a breakthrough in human psychology not everybody can do this and when it's completely absent we call that person when it's completely absent a sociopath or psychopath and when it's fully present we call them a saint perhaps or a great person there you cannot be agreed there are no such things as great people who do not have the capacity to recognize themselves in others and to recognize others in themselves so this is the stirs the heart and you put down your weapons and when you do this you are rewarded this is uh you are kissed on the forehead uh the moment you do this your system your internal system is flooded with feelings that confirm that you are you have uh found your way into a special dimension of human existence the doors open and you walk through and um there's an kind of indisputable rightness about the feeling you you feel at this there's no questioning of this you know when i when i was uh well i still read philosophy and so forth you know again and philosophers endlessly argue about the nature of what is morality what is what are ethics what are virtue and so forth if they're if the answer is disconnected from this primary feeling of of friendliness good will then it makes no sense they cannot develop an our reason for behaving in an ethical way but once you have this feeling then you realize the root the roots of all ethics and all morality all speech and action follow from this this feeling so in uh philosophies and religions that that do not have any cause for behaving yourself other than it's god's commandments or something like that then they they haven't got the right cause for it so the buddha doesn't look for any other cause then it it registers in your throughout your body and mind as as having encountered the divine and that changes everything you say and do but at first we just take you through the motions be until you feel that experience we tell you here's how this will help you along the way don't do don't kill don't steal don't commit sexual misconduct don't lie stay away from the intoxicants and then you have a a good beginning to possibly experience this emotion so that's this very important relationship and see you see how extensive the inquiry uh the the examination of this is in the metasuta and i'll be talking tonight i believe i will start talking about these qualities this very night um uh with the metasuta and you will see that i stay on it for quite some time because these preliminary qualities are very important to the production of this uh loving kindness so thank you georg georg for the question our next question is from mudita h in kamloops canada i know i'm going on this cruise in my canoe but is it okay if i wanted to be in a yacht as well or just concentrate on my canoe yes uh dear um modita uh the canoe simile is is that sometimes you're by yourself and by the way a lot of monks and nuns spend a good deal of their lives by themselves so they have given up the intimacies of family life and married life and all this and uh i think ordinary people think well that would be very lonely wouldn't it but then the buddha says but some of these uh people who live alone uh dwell in loving kindness not just for a day but day and night not just for a week not just for a month but year after year the whole life immersed in that so this uh if you are in a canoe situation where you're basically on your own there is no excuse for to feel lonely or um not connected you the connection to other beings is through your heart and through your mind it is not how close you are physically to somebody you not not whether you're three feet away or 30 feet away or whether you can see them or hear them it's uh developed in your mind and quite often the best place to develop loving kindness is alone now we will go back to the music situation where most musicians have to go to a practice room all alone and that's where you practice for hours and now you don't walk out on the stage sometimes if you're not a musician you think everybody just get up on stage and start playing no no especially if you're a classical musician or something then you you most of your life is alone in a practice room making the music and the music has to be made very beautifully and once you have the skills then you can play in public so it's actually easier to develop loving kindness alone undisturbed by the realities of people i mean once you immerse with people the challenge of maintaining loving kindness is increased if you if you're amongst great people who have great capacities for loving kindness then it's easy but not a lot of people are not skillful like that so there's two types of uh vehicles for it one is the the canoe vehicle where you're paddling alone is a beautiful vehicle and the other one is where you're on the cruise ship you're on the yacht with other people and that's also a beautiful experience if you have the loving kindness and it's up to you you can be around very loving people and if you don't have loving kindness it will be a not a you want to have a good time you want to have a good good experience but if you have loving kindness you can be around even difficult people difficult animals as well um there are these beautiful people who you know they go to the pound and uh bring home a stray dog or a an abandoned dog and that dog is maybe has been abused and not not well behaved and so forth and then they but they they have great good will to that dog and then slowly over time the dog understands and sometimes dogs and cats and so forth you understand even better than human they know when somebody's not going to hurt them so this is this is the case so we live everybody has a different yacht that they're on sometimes it's a big family yacht sometimes it's a it's even bigger than that a national yacht a sangha yacht a monastery yacht and sometimes you live alone in a cabin you live alone in an apartment you live alone in a house that's also absolutely you have access to loving kindness in all situations there is no situation where you don't and so you can go freely also from that isolation if you develop loving kindness into the larger community and that's your job is to is to develop the skills and carry the skills in so i will be talking in some of these talks about you know as well maybe not during the pandemic but taking a loving kindness tour through walmart particularly go through walmart through the bleak rainy dark parking lot into the sterile environment and and embracing all beings in there including the greeter with loving kindness everybody in walmart with loving kindness don't hug them please you're liable to get the cops called on you but you you have uh this is your interior state now you have such a rich possibilities now you can go everywhere any place with a heart full of loving kindness and you can enjoy this and it's playful as well you can practice and play at this so this is a little bit about two vehicles the canoe and the yacht our next question is a combined question there were several anonymous questions that were on a similar theme so here is that question i noticed while listening to the first talk that my mind resisted going into a state of meta it's as if it doesn't want to experience friendliness and warmth to everyone as there is a feeling of being vulnerable and weak in such a state it got worse when kids came along how can i work to become a more loving kind and patient person to my children and everyone i encounter yeah very touching question a very touching question because you know i i've been a monk 32 years now 30 31 years 32 years is it i forget 32 years and and i'm kind of a hermit before that so in that time i've talked to a lot of people and i've talked to a lot of mothers and being a mother can be a quite a demanding job and uh at a certain period of your life suddenly it you can have a lot of changes uh you're now you have children dependent on you you have jobs your time has taken up and then sometimes your children just they they're messy and um you're kind of at the end of your patients and they they're messing up your everything it can get you can get depressed and so forth and so this is why and i have i've had this conversation so many times and uh sometimes uh these mothers have unnecessarily experienced depression and all kinds of things and i i just know that it's totally unnecessary to get brought down by this and i also maybe regret not having cheered them up more and given them more of a pep talk sometimes because later on they have difficulties so i want to make sure that you don't have difficulties and any mothers that are listening to this you have to take it more lightly the the behavior and demands of your children and so forth this and i wanna one of the recommendations is like you know when i get to be 16 or 17 or 18 and that's that that will go by quick dear it really will trust me uh if if it's been messy and hard and they haven't been uh keeping the place nice and so forth buy yourself new furniture at the end just throw the stuff out it's it's not it's not about uh being tidy and all of that at that at that stage it's not about that it's more about being relaxed and you're going to get a fairly long portion of your life especially in modern times in general people live a lot longer and the time when there are mothers and raising their kids is a very small much smaller portion of their their total life you're gonna have to figure out what to do with your life after your kids are raised you're just gonna you have a huge amount of time after that to figure out and be free etc to er go on your uh your journeys and your explore all kinds of things in life so you make sure you understand this is a very small period of time and you will regret having taken it too seriously so you need to not take it so seriously much less serious and that and just trust that because that will lighten you up so loving kindness has a lot in common with a sense of humor as well it's funny um and don't take it too seriously lighten up and make sure you stay you you might be incompetent as a mother but you you will be a jolly incompetent mother and it's much better if you have a choice between competence and being jolly take the jolly every time [Laughter] uh it's it's that's what's important and that it's a very those those few years will go by quickly and uh the only regrets you'll ever have was not about whether you made a perfect cheese sandwich or whether you whether your kid spilled something on your coffee table or not it's not about that it's that uh you you enjoyed them now you're in it by the way and whether you have regrets about that or not you're in it and there's a saying when you can't get out of it get into it and so don't be thinking i could be just rambling around freely right now but i am i'm married i have kids and under i'm trapped etc don't think that way do not think that way do not think i could be free you can't be free but you can be free in having kids so get into it don't be thinking i could be somewhere else you can't be somewhere else you're here with those kids now be free how how do you feel when when you feel free what is the feeling of being free you love being there so if you love being there you'll feel free so you gotta you gotta turn towards the situation and get into it and and you tell yourself even though you may not even believe the words you say i there's no other place i'd rather be this is the place i want to be i've chosen to be i love to be and i'm going to enjoy it to the maximum and i'm going to enjoy these kids going through these stages to the maximum and i don't care about the furniture and when i get finished with this i'm going to buy just what i want wear just what i want and go anywhere i want and that'll be your option but you you really need to work on this and then your heart will be lighter and loving kindness will come to you and kiss you on the forehead right on the forehead there yes so and that's for all mothers it if you don't get this kind of advice and follow this kind of vice it can be totally unnecessarily hard and it doesn't have to be that way you have to understand the tactics here next question our next question is from katherine j in kamloops canada ajan in your domitoc you stated that metta is the absence of fear anxiety depression frustration etc how do i make them be quote absent i assume by elimination through practicing meta or are there other ways to deal with these emotions to diminish their influence in our lives yes there are systems and this is the essence of right effort and i want to make a little and i'll talk about it later and i've talked about it many times by the way i want to recommend also that not during this retreat necessarily but go and watch my talks on right effort i gave a whole i don't know how many a dozen talks on right effort and i think that's going to be my next book right effort because it's one of the least understood factors of the path and it it requires that your mindfulness is harnessed for the purpose of relieving you of these negative emotional states mindfulness is not simply the watching or mere awareness or no noting that you feel bad or depressed or anything it's not that mindfulness is under the previous contract with right effort and right effort is very clear in the contract you sign your name to this contract those negative mental states called the five hindrances are not to be allowed to persist they are to be eliminated as soon as possible and now your job is to find out all the skillful ways to to get that done and loving-kindness happens to be one of them and it's when loving-kindness is present those other negative things are not present they are mutually exclusive you do not have two things going on at once you're not having i'm full of loving kindness but i also hate my neighbor it it's not that way you either have these positive emotional structures or you don't and it's not mixed it's just a matter of proportion so you need to understand the techniques for the removal of these negative emotions and they can be this can be done by just dismissing them it can be done by replacing them and loving kindness would be one of the things that you replace it by you fill yourself with this loving kindness and there is no room for any of these other negative things now how one way of doing that if you can't generate that yourself is the voice of another so i'm talking to you right now i'm talking to you listen to me and invite yourself into the the field of loving kindness you are the door is open you're welcome and if you step into that room right now all of those things are gone and if you have to listen to a hundred talks on loving kindness if if you're if you're having uh issue meant you know emotional issues during the day or in the night so forth uh put on the headphones listen let the voice of another pull you into another dimension of being uh be with people or other beings that pull you that way sometimes children can do this sometimes your mother can do this maybe your dog can do this and who knows even a monk might be able to help you if your dog can't pull it off maybe a monk can um so you you utilize these things as replacements and then there are other strategies as well and uh so go into my talks and look at for five methods for removing negative emotions look for that those talks and i i give this talk frequently and in great detail because it's one of the worst understood structures for mind it's in conflict with many the way people teach mindfulness often because this is this is um what the way the buddha is talking about this he's talking about the elimination of these negative emotions he's not talking about watching these negative emotions he's not talking about understanding these negative emotions he's not under not interested in the story behind the negative emotions psychotherapy is not invented by that at that time and it it is the elimination the removal by by various strategies and the replacement with these these wholesome things and this is why i'm focusing on just loving kindness for 10 days so get that thing going and the other things will disappear they cannot subsist with this they they cannot coexist with loving kindness so that is in brief but please check out i've given lots of talks on this the strategies for removing those negative emotions how to replace them with these positive structures and that's called right effort our next question is from cindy b in cochise united states why in the eighth precept do we take a vow to refrain from lying on a high or luxurious sleeping place if this was mainly relevant to a past time in history when the buddha lived how do we practice this precept in modern times oh thank you that's an easy question well dear uh if you're at home uh just sleep in your bed uh it's when you go to a monastery um it's inappropriate to bring a king-size bed along or a fancy couch because the monks and nuns have don't have those things so it's not so important but i think if you also want to [Music] bring simplicity into your life a little less indulgence and you have the it doesn't conflict with the rest of your family structures you might want to simplify your your your king-size bed it's called a king-sized bed for a reason it used to be only kings had beds like that now when everybody has more wealth everybody wants to be a king so they buy a bed the size of a soccer stadium you know really not necessary uh so if you want to be more monkish or nunish you can maybe have a single bed maybe with a modest low frame and aspire to what it symbolizes what it symbolizes is not non-indulgence non-luxury who needs indulgence and luxury uh you're you're after higher things than a king-sized bed and every time you go to that bed you it reminds you say i've chosen simplicity and humility rather than grandiosity and luxury i've chosen that i've made my choice i prefer simplicity and humility rather than grandiosity and luxury i've just made the choice and life just got easier because it's actually quite easy to get simplicity it's not so easy to get luxury uh so this is uh this is that the bed is a kind of a symbol and but when you go to the monastery the the bad is is not to be brought uh you can imagine if they didn't have these precepts that people from who are from wealth and uh raised like this might in fact bring along furnitures and stuff because monasteries are tend to be austere they don't have comfortable chairs and so forth so they this is heading it off at the past it's to conform with the monastic life but if you want to be a spiritual practitioner a very devoted spiritual practitioner out there in the world you will incline to simplicity and some of the kings of the time of the buddha also became spiritual practitioners and they also stopped with the big the king's bed and so forth and they started to uh use simple furnishings simple clothes as well and so you'll see this tendency in people as they change towards more spiritual values they tend to declutter and uh just treat the the furnishings of their houses as the background just to provide shelter from and uh they start stop being obsessed by these kind of the glitter of things so that's kind of what this talk about the bed is all about our next question is from will kaye in oberlin united states ajahn i could really relate to those people you spoke of who find this meta feeling and then lose it forget about it over this past year i have quote found this feeling on multiple retreats only to lose track of it within a couple of weeks do you have any advice for not forgetting the primacy of this feeling in the midst of the stress of work and daily life thank you yes it's a regular report i i give retreats here people come to the monastery for a week or ten days and then i have an interview with them and the thing that they ask me quite often as they're about to leave they say i feel so peaceful how am i gonna how do i keep this peace and i said to them i'll i won't tell you how to keep it but i'll tell you how you're gonna lose it and it won't be because of cars it won't be because of the weather it won't be even because of cats it'll be for one reason people and which people the ones close to you you those who are close to you are the ones that push your buttons the most so the in the human realm the most strongest stimulus are people of course a human has to be high as heightened awareness about people their motives etc and which ones are are you most connected to not remote strangers not people from the past and or people from the future but the people who are around you and who are close to you so this is your main job is to first of all say it's the people that are close to me and i know them well i know their habits i know their speech patterns they didn't go on the loving-kindness retreat i did i don't expect them to understand this idea of loving-kindness why would i do that i don't have any expectations of them my only expectation is of me i'm the only one that can generate this feeling and i'm the only one that can keep it and i'm the only one that can give it away as well they will ask me time and again to give it away to lose my loving kindness but i am not i got it myself it's my loving kindness and i ain't giving it away so they can't take it away from you and so but you have to prepare realistically and to prepare yourself to that the demand the most the strongest demand on the maintenance of this is people who are close to you your your close relatives your your your husband your wife your children your parents your coworkers those are the ones who have the strongest demand and so you get that clear and straight and say yes that's fine they haven't made this decision i have and that makes me different from who i was before and i am comfortably going to remain that way i am going to sustain that and i'm not going to re-normalize so people around you will actually try to trap you in who you were rather than who you are so that expect that they're looking at the wrong person they're looking at who you were and not who you are don't get it frustrated with that that's to be expected they they're referring to that your history not to who you are now so that's your preparation for this and that's how you sustain it and it's best to start very early in the morning the first thing in the morning is is the time to generate the loving kindness with full expectation that people um will not skillfully cooperate with you so once you get that out of the way then the surprise i call it surprise meditation take don't be surprised when people say the wrong thing they they're they're crude or they're obnoxious or they're impatient why would that surprise you so you say okay i i know i'm i'm past the age of eight now and i know the kind of things that happen in the world the kind of things that people do to each other i think i'm just going to stop being surprised about that i'm going to generate love and kindness and not ask everybody to behave themselves i know they won't but i am nevertheless going to keep the loving kindness going yes our next question is anonymous from the united states what is the relationship between lovingkindness and the four noble truths uh loving kindness can do a lot for the reduction of suffering so there's two two uh side effects which are the explicit suffering that is greed and hatred so when the buddhist summarizes its greed hatred and delusion are the problem what's the solution to greed hatred and delusion the solution to greed is generosity the solution to hatred is loving kindness the solution to to delusion is wisdom and clarity so if you have loving kindness actually you will naturally be generous and you will not have hate so basically your the pain is gone and the only thing left to do is eliminate the the delusion and the delusion centers around the nature of the self and so forth but loving kindness is one of the best ways to transform the self to recognize the self in others to to weaken the sense of ego and these kind of things so it's it's naturally proceeding along the path insight though is not just doesn't occur naturally from loving kindness you still need the final information about the the fantasy of self the essence that the self is is not a thing there is no thing called self and so lovingkindness will help you move towards that and will weaken your preconceptions about that and then it'll be make make it very easy for insight to arise uh so it will eliminate a lot of the impediments to insight but a lot of the the course and uh symptomatic suffering that occurs in life can be eliminated by just loving-kindness and this is the buddha is very encouraging towards this so there is a connection between loving-kindness and the poor noble truths john our final question today is again from anonymous from finland bathing in goodwill sounds wonderful but it also sounds a little dangerous is there too much good will which would put one at risk of for example being scammed yeah this is a question that i'm asked a lot and it's very very good question very important to understand loving kindness does not make you a foot mad you you are not a loving kindness does not make you uh weak or vulnerable it makes you the opposite because loving kindness is also about yourself and if you if as a mother protects her child now her mother is if somebody is harassing her child she becomes a lion right and people think oh if i have loving kindness i ignore my needs i i'm very easy with everybody they can take advantage but i i don't say anything back because that would make me harsh or anything no no no no having kindness does not tolerate injustice it does not tolerate injustice towards you it does not tolerate dishonesty towards you it does not let anybody manipulate you it doesn't do any of those things because that wouldn't be loving kindness would it that's not very kind to yourself you wouldn't want do that to anybody else you would object for anybody else to do that to anybody else especially somebody you cared about so you will also object nobody scams you when you have loving kindness that would you would be neglectful of yourself and that wouldn't you'd be missing loving kindness nobody manipulates you nobody cheats you nobody gets away with anything because loving-kindness so that you must understand the nature of loving-kindness is very strong very clear very protective doesn't let any manipulation happen that's not the nature of loving-kindness that's confusion that's mere delusion loving-kindness is very clear doesn't let bad things happen to you yeah so that's very very very important

Channel: Ajahn Sona

Views: 2,520

Rating: 4.8961039 out of 5

Keywords: Ajahn Sona, Birken Forest Monastery, Sitavana, Theravada, Thai Forest Tradition, Dhamma, Metta, Loving-kindness

Id: 6GZol-6qF-c

Length: 58min 49sec (3529 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 03 2021