Day Six (Written on Day Seven)

This is how Day Six went::

I woke up too early for a Sunday morning and decided that I would do an hour of Holosync brain entrainment based meditative practice lying in bed. This isn't recommended by the Centerpointe folk as often people fall asleep when Horizontal.

Anyway, I didn't fall asleep and it was quite unusual to not have the pain in my legs, although equally I wonder if working in this way is as powerful a practice.

Then I decided to do 45mins of silent still half-lotus meditation with nothing but a meditation bell and some body scanning and breath work. This went all quite smoothly.

As my day was afterwards blown up a bit in that what I had planned to do did not happen. So I decided to go to Quaker meeting for an hour and sit in silence. Again this was smooth and without much thought arising though I felt a strong connection from my heart to god (for want of another word I am going to use god but for reference:

(god, being, universal energy are all the same thing to me)

It was interesting that a friend said to me in Quaker meeting that she felt a lot of suffering in the room. I am not so sure I am as attuned to other people's suffering as some folk I know but one thing that I did in Quaker meeting was repeat the words:

"May All Beings Be Happy
May All Beings Be Peaceful"

These words seem to arise naturally for me at times and at Quaker Meeting this was one such time so I wonder if in this way I also keyed into the suffering that was potentially in the room.

These two simple sentences can bring about quite a profound change and in Vipassana as taught by SN Goenka, teachers say that this Metta Bhavana is always good to give out after taking in so much through the practise of Vipassana itself.

From my own view, these sentences or anything else that one can say which contribute towrds extending loving kindness and compassion to others can only make for a nicer place to be for all of us.