stillpoint

simple buddhist practice

a very simple loving-kindness meditation

awareness of breathing

the air that I breathe....

You can add these practices to Monday Metta or use for a few minutes at any time. Click on the links above.

New practices will be added regularly

A very simple loving-kindness meditation

To start the practice, and at times when you feel you can only manage a little....perhaps as you light your candle, here is a simple loving-kindness meditation:

As you breathe in – cherish yourself


As you breathe out – cherish all beings

If you find it difficult to feel that you are cherishing yourself, just lay a hand gently on your heart region as you think or say these phrases. You can use them when you sit for dedicated times of meditation, but you can also use them as a 'post it note' practice. Maybe you'd like to write them and stick them up somewhere you can see them.

Can I join Stillpoint?

Unfortunately not, because Stillpoint is no longer a postal membership organisation.

However, you are very welcome to join the Breathing Space e-group which acts as a virtual newsletter.

You can also join our ‘virtual’ meditation group, the Monday Metta group, by joining us in meditation wherever you are on a Monday.

Stillpoint began life as a membership organisation, but this generated too much work. All those involved with Stillpoint were suffering from ME/CFS and had little energy to spare! This web site was created to make available existing Stillpoint material, which many people had found helpful, and which draws on the experiences shared by our members, available to a wider audience.

The information shared on the web site came from the period when we had postal membership, which is why the word ‘members' appears often. Almost all the articles were written by members.

Monday Metta

by Antoinette, Jane and Joelle

‘Every time one of us truly rests, the world rests a little, so intimately connected are we with one another.’ Dolores Leckey

The 'Monday metta' practice is what connects the Stillpoint virtual community.

We’re all living with chronic illness that fluctuates, so you never know if you'll be able to practice or not on any particular day. Monday metta is for everyone who is prevented by ill health from physically attending a meditation group, especially those who feel isolated.

Every Monday at no specific time, some of us are at some stage during the day dedicating our meditation to other Stillpoint users. Depending on our state of health at the time - it could take the form of anything from a meditation to just lighting a candle - we are in each other’s minds and hearts. We hope that it will be a comfort for everyone to know that they are not alone and that powerful loving light is being sent, bringing courage, strength and peace of mind. So if you're feeling isolated or low or just want to feel connected and feel up to sending and receiving love and positive thoughts, please join our virtual meditation group on Mondays.

Light a candle at any time on a Monday and know you are not alone

Whether or not we can meditate - even if we are lying in bed - we can send loving-kindness to ourselves, and to everyone in our community. “The spirit of metta is unconditional: open and unobstructed. Like water poured from one vessel to another, metta flows freely, taking the shape of each situation without changing its essence.” Sharon Salzberg. Loving-Kindness: the Revolutionary art of Happiness. Shambhala, 1995.

What is Metta?

The Pali word 'Metta' ('Maitri' in Sanskrit) is commonly translated in English as 'loving-kindness.' Metta signifies friendship and non-violence as well as "a strong wish for the happiness of others."  More on metta from Prairie Sangha

Read an outline of the loving kindness practice, as described by Jack Kornfeld: ‘With a loving heart as the background, all that we attempt, all that we encounter, will open and flow more easily. The power of loving-kindness… will calm your life and keep you connected to your heart.'

How it began:

Antoinette sent an email saying,

“I have been able to meditate a bit just lately I am going to dedicate every Monday session to everyone who uses Stillpoint. If I can't get to meditate I'll definitely be lighting a candle and saying prayers for everyone, wishing you courage, equanimity, faith and love. If anyone would like to join me it would be really good to know that someone else is doing the same thing.”

Update: Here is a very short practice you can add, as you light your candle

Please print this page off if you know someone who is bedbound /housebound without a computer, who would like to share our virtual meditation community.

Participants say:

“I have enjoyed 'doing' metta as a way to feel connected to everyone. It's lovely to know that you are being thought of, when you are going through a bad patch or feeling lonely.” Nicola, Northants

“Thank you for bringing people together, sharing makes us stronger.” Rosie, Edinburgh

“It feels much better knowing I am not meditating alone.” John, Essex

Meditation as a Healing Attitude (II)

by Joelle Marlow

Kindness

"You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection." Buddha

His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said: ‘my religion is simple. My religion is kindness’. If there is one stumbling block Westerners most frequently come up against, it’s this one. A connectedness to spirituality necessarily involves compassion. This core factor in our wellbeing becomes depleted when our society is driven mainly by materialist values.

Meditation is a means of training the mind which works best when compassion is part of the package. A common analogy for training the mind is that of training an animal: when you teach it with harshness, it’s not effective. It doesn’t learn flexibility, and responds to what it has been taught out of fear.

Chris Dooks, artist and former Stillpoint audio reviewer coined the term ‘kind concentration’. When we meditate, we concentrate kindly. It’s natural to discover things we aren’t proud of or don’t like when we look inward. The attitude we cultivate is that emotions, pain, and other sensations in the body are worthy of kind attention and ourselves worthy of care.

You may hate your life, and hate your illness. You don’t have to like the situation you’re in, but start by accepting yourself within it. Acceptance requires a spirit of self love. Only by starting with exactly this mess we’re in (and you can be sure we're all are in some mess or other) can we reduce how much we suffer. We stop taking suffering personally. Katy’s experience is typical. She noticed that meditation ‘helped shift my attitude towards ME from "why me" to a sort of "why not me".

In Buddhism, there are profoundly transformative practices in which one learns to cultivate positive feelings of love for oneself and others. These include Loving kindness meditation (Metta Bhavana), and Tonglen Meditation in Tibetan Buddhist practice. Marie found this transformed her life with ME which renders her mostly housebound. ‘Yesterday was the first day back alone in my flat after 2 weeks with my family. The transition was hard. In the morning I was crying with loneliness and self-pity. Then I did a Metta Bhavana meditation (which involved visualising various people in your life and wishing them well) and my mood was transformed. I had made connections with my friends (and enemies) and although I wasn’t with them physically, I no longer felt isolated. I felt loved and loving. I felt grateful that my situation was not worse, as so many people’s are.”

Recommended:

• Pema Chodron, Good Medicine: How to Turn Pain into Compassion with Tonglen Meditation. 180 min, published by Sounds True (more information and a 5 minute audio clip), as a cassette (1999, ISBN: 1564557049) CD (2001 ISBN: 1564558460) and video. Also available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
• Jack Kornfield, A Path with a Heart, 1993. E.g. Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. (Try this Loving kindness meditation, taken from A Path with a Heart.

Letting go

“I have arrived, I am home
In the here, in the now.” Thich Naht Hanh

Don’t try too hard. Mindfulness is really about discovering how to be with oneself. Letting go is intrinsic to this attitude, as the ego clings to ideas that aren’t useful to our wellbeing.

Resistance takes a great deal more energy out of us than we realise; we unconsciously resist much of what life throws at us - and our reactions to it. We use a great deal of unnecessary energy trying… trying to make things different to how they are.

Once we have noticed our thoughts, we let go of the stories that grip our attention and cause us suffering. An image used by some meditation teachers is that of standing by a roadside with traffic passing by, the cars representing our thoughts coming and going incessantly. When a car passes, do we remain by the roadside passively, or do we flag it down and get inside for the ride? We eventually learn not to get hooked into the scenarios our thinking mind constructs and return to base - the present moment.

When many of us are falling ill as a result of over-filled lives, the last thing we need is an achievement orientation in meditation, too; but it’s hardly surprising this happens. Beginners are frequently blocked by what it means to be a meditator, or that there is ‘real’ meditation (as opposed to whatever they are doing!). Let go such ideas, as this isn’t just another thing to ‘succeed’ or ‘fail’ at. You can’t go wrong, as all you need is a body and a mind. The learning is itself the process.

Helen felt hindered for a long time by ideas of what ‘meditation’ was. “The term was alien to me - inaccessible - for ages it didn’t feel like something I could possibly manage to learn on my own. Funnily enough, the breakthrough came when I let go and stopped trying to ‘meditate’. I gave it a different description of my own, and just thought of it as sitting still, or ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’. It made it natural and not imposed from outside. Every time I try to describe the calm that meditation has brought into my life I give up - and I think that’s because you can’t. You can only experience it from the inside.”

Patience

Adjusting to the new skills of meditation and making it part of your life is a slow process. Our consumerist, fast paced society has set up a habitual expectation of instant gratification but patience is needed when establishing a practice. We cannot expect immediate results and it’s not helpful to expect big, dramatic experiences. It’s like building muscles when you go to the gym - it takes a long time to see a difference. Celebrate the most subtle changes. The most important, lasting changes in us are necessarily made slowly as old habits are replaced by new ones.

“I often feel ‘wired’ and wish I could find calm - it feels like my nervous system is a broken machine’, complained one Stillpoint contributor. “I never expected meditation to be so hard!’ added another. We have seen that the autonomic nervous system is affected by conditions such as ME, so its inevitable that it requires more time for agitation in body and mind to subside in this case - and depending on the way your symptoms are on a particular day. Watch the agitation, the restlessness, whatever else is happening too. Be with the process without expecting your notion of meditation to suddenly ‘happen’.

If you have trouble finding calm, a popular meditation image which you may find helpful is that of a glass of muddy water that has been shaken, and has now been put down onto a firm surface. The contents settle very slowly. Eventually the mud sinks to the bottom when it is still.

Enjoyment

Pleasure is an important part of life, one which is easily neglected when you are preoccupied with the conditions imposed by ill health. It can be lost in the distress of finding ourselves dependent on care, the struggle with finding medical treatment or the frustration of being unable to fulfil our usual responsibilities.
“You have to balance the boring everyday with things that feed your emotional self too - things you enjoy,” advises Joan. “I’ve done silly things I haven’t done for years, like build sand castles on the beach, buying photography books to enjoy in bed, and painting again which I love. I don’t enjoy feeling so powerless and sick, but when I can, I focus my mind on what few pleasures I have.”

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Ringu Tulku had a wide grin on his face at a Dharma lecture recently. He expressed delight at a new English concept he had discovered. “In Tibet we don’t have a word for this - ‘hobby’. Something that you do just for the enjoyment. It is a wonderful thing! This is how we should approach our practice!”

Try approaching some aspects of your daily life (start with whichever you find easiest) in a spirit of playfulness. Cultivate an attitude of humour, pleasure, playfulness and openness - characteristic of right brain experience as opposed to left brain which is more closed in and analytical - and your meditation will flourish. As adults, we lose our spontaneity as we become cynical and closed to joy.

Exercise: adopt the playful spirit of 3 year old child for a short while. When doing ordinary things small children don’t stick to a timetable. Everything is a game. Whatever objects come in their way are sources of wonder, fun and sensual exploration.

Exercise: make space for something frivolous in your day which has no useful purpose. Notice how it affects your mind /body afterwards. Spend time staying with any physical sensations that come from enjoyment afterwards.

A meditation on Loving Kindness

The following is an excerpt from Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart: a guide through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life. He says:

'The quality of living-kindness is the fertile soil out of which an integrated spiritual 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 or anger. If this happens, it is especially important to be patient and kind towards 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 [or lie down] 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 image from the Buddha's instructions: 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. After yourself, choose a benefactor, someone in your life who has truly cared for you. Picture them and carefully recite the same phrases, May s/he 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, neighbours, 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.'

Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart: a guide through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life is available from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and others.