Guided compassion meditation (karuna bhavana)
Guided compassion meditation (karuna bhavana) |
- Guided compassion meditation (karuna bhavana)
- The Little Book of Contentment
- On being detached
- Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 5/23/2013
- Compassion is not superiority
- Compassion is not superiority
- Brain can be trained in compassion, study shows
- 7 Limiting Beliefs of Unhappy People
| Guided compassion meditation (karuna bhavana) Posted: 23 May 2013 01:00 PM PDT Here's a recording of a guided meditation that I led in a Google+ Hangout, for people who are part of Wildmind's Google+ community. The meditation is the Karuna Bhavana (Cultivating Compassion) in five stages, where we cultivate compassion for:
Enjoy! Read More @ Source | |||
| The Little Book of Contentment Posted: 23 May 2013 09:00 AM PDT
By Leo BabautaOne of the most important things I've learned in the last 7 years has been how to find contentment. It's been a long journey, but I've enjoyed it. I struggled with feeling bad about my body, feeling insecure about myself, doubting my abilities to make it without an employer, doubting myself as a writer, not believing I had discipline or the ability to change my habits. And all this led to other problems: I sought happiness and pleasure in food, beer, shopping, distraction, TV. I procrastinated, I let my health get bad, I smoked, I was deeply in debt, unhappy with my work, never exercised, and ate lots of junk food. Not a pretty picture. But if I'd never been in that place, I wouldn't understand how to get out of it. And so I'm grateful I was there. I've learned a lot, about myself and about how to find happiness in who I am, what I have, who I'm with, what I do, and all that's around me. And now, I'd like to share that with you. I've written a free book called The Little Book of Contentment: A guide to becoming happy with life & who you are, while getting things done. I share it with you today, in hopes that it will help a few of you, or maybe many, who struggle with being happy with yourselves and your lives. It's a more common problem than you might imagine, and if I can help just a little, that would be amazing. I hope you like the book. Table of Contents
The book is uncopyrighted. Download the BookYou can download the book for free in several formats:
Please note that you shouldn't download this book unless you plan to:
Questions & AnswersQ: How much does the book cost? Q: Can I read it on my iPad or iPhone? Q: When can I get it on my Kindle? Q: What if I don't want to commit to an hour of undistracted reading time, or putting it into action? Q: Who designed the book? It's brilliant! | |||
| Posted: 23 May 2013 07:00 AM PDT Our original nature is not attached to phenomena. Just as clay and gold are not attached to forms made of clay and gold, our original nature has never been attached to a single phenomenon. When we directly discover this nature for ourselves, we realize, for the first time, what non-attachment means. We reflect that since beginningless time, our original nature has never been reborn into a single psychophysical body. Given this fact, by discovering this nature, we also become detached in an instant. This is what real non-attachment means. Nobody can claim to be detached who as not directly apperceived their original nature. If we fail to realize our original nature what does this mean for us? It can only mean that we are still firmly attached to this psychophysical body of ours even though we might deny being attached to it a thousand times. It also means that we are attached to the conditioned world since our original nature is unconditioned. Being thus attached to the psychophysical body and the conditioned world we are always reborn into it. This is samsara. | |||
| Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 5/23/2013 Posted: 23 May 2013 06:00 AM PDT  "It is ignorance that smothers, and it is carelessness that makes it invisible. The hunger of craving pollutes the world, and the pain of suffering causes the greatest fear." ~The Buddha      Read More @ Source | |||
| Posted: 22 May 2013 10:02 PM PDT
In Buddhist Spirituality terms this is "seeking status," which is one pair of the eight lokadhammas, which could be translated as "ways of the world," although it's often poetically rendered as the "eight worldly winds." The eight ways of the world are pairs of preoccupations corresponding to four ways of seeking security in our insecure world. They are:
We tend to chase after one item in each pair, but with status our biological conditioning is usually not to seek the highest status, but to find a comfortable position in the hierarchy and to maintain it. We can be comfortable playing the victim, or feeling superior, depending on our individual inclinations. But we gain comfort from knowing where we are in a pecking order. Of course we can never find true security within the eight ways of the world, and spiritual maturity means becoming less and less invested in the pursuit of any of these ways of being. As we mature, gain, loss, status, approval, and pleasure-seeking should become less and less meaningful to us. We see that these are all impermanent, and that we can seek status, but never hold onto it. And inherent in trying to hold on to status is a sense of fear that we'll lose what we think we've gained. So what we initially pursue as a source of security turns out, in the end, to be a source of insecurity. In all spiritual practice there's something going on that I call "unselfing." This takes various forms, including less selfishness and grasping, less self-preoccupation and an increased ability to empathize with others, greater kindness and compassion, an ability to mindfully and joyfully lose ourselves (although not our awareness) in the "flow" of our experience, whether that's in meditation or elsewhere, and a "seeing through" of the concept that we actually have a thing called a self.  If you benefit from this work, please consider supporting Wildmind. Click here to make a one-time or recurring donation.
In fact, from a Buddhist Spirituality point of view "conceit" is regarded as thinking of oneself as higher, lower, or equal to others. So what does that leave? It means basically that we don't think in terms of status at all. We just be, with no obsession about who we are. We just live in the moment, acting spontaneously with no thought of self or other. The Buddha said of those who are awakened:
But this should start to happen well before awakening, even though the process isn't complete until then. Even right now, we can have more of a sense that we're all in it together — you suffer, I suffer — and a loss of any assumption that "I'm OK, you're not." If you do start feeling that you're "looking down" on people when you're cultivating compassion for them, see if you can simply let go of the tightness of self-clinging, and relax into the experience. Go with the flow. Ultimately there is no you, no other. There is simply suffering and a response to suffering. Read More @ Source | |||
| Posted: 22 May 2013 10:00 PM PDT
In Buddhist Spirituality terms this is "seeking status," which is one pair of the eight lokadhammas, which could be translated as "ways of the world," although it's often poetically rendered as the "eight worldly winds." The eight ways of the world are pairs of preoccupations corresponding to four ways of seeking security in our insecure world. They are:
We tend to chase after one item in each pair, but with status our biological conditioning is usually not to seek the highest status, but to find a comfortable position in the hierarchy and to maintain it. We can be comfortable playing the victim, or feeling superior, depending on our individual inclinations. But we gain comfort from knowing where we are in a pecking order. Of course we can never find true security within the eight ways of the world, and spiritual maturity means becoming less and less invested in the pursuit of any of these ways of being. As we mature, gain, loss, status, approval, and pleasure-seeking should become less and less meaningful to us. We see that these are all impermanent, and that we can seek status, but never hold onto it. And inherent in trying to hold on to status is a sense of fear that we'll lose what we think we've gained. So what we initially pursue as a source of security turns out, in the end, to be a source of insecurity. In all spiritual practice there's something going on that I call "unselfing." This takes various forms, including less selfishness and grasping, less self-preoccupation and an increased ability to empathize with others, greater kindness and compassion, an ability to mindfully and joyfully lose ourselves (although not our awareness) in the "flow" of our experience, whether that's in meditation or elsewhere, and a "seeing through" of the concept that we actually have a thing called a self. If you benefit from this work, please consider supporting Wildmind. Click here to make a one-time or recurring donation.
In fact, from a Buddhist Spirituality point of view "conceit" is regarded as thinking of oneself as higher, lower, or equal to others. So what does that leave? It means basically that we don't think in terms of status at all. We just be, with no obsession about who we are. We just live in the moment, acting spontaneously with no thought of self or other. The Buddha said of those who are awakened:
But this should start to happen well before awakening, even though the process isn't complete until then. Even right now, we can have more of a sense that we're all in it together — you suffer, I suffer — and a loss of any assumption that "I'm OK, you're not." If you do start feeling that you're "looking down" on people when you're cultivating compassion for them, see if you can simply let go of the tightness of self-clinging, and relax into the experience. Go with the flow. Ultimately there is no you, no other. There is simply suffering and a response to suffering. Read More @ Source | |||
| Brain can be trained in compassion, study shows Posted: 22 May 2013 06:00 PM PDT
A new study by researchers at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that adults can be trained to be more compassionate. The report, published Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, investigates whether training adults in compassion can result in greater altruistic behavior and related changes in neural systems underlying compassion. "Our fundamental question was, 'Can compassion be trained and learned in adults? Can we become more caring if we practice that mindset?'" says Helen Weng, lead author of the study and a graduate student in clinical psychology. "Our evidence points to yes." In the study, the investigators trained young adults to engage in compassion meditation, an ancient Buddhist technique to increase caring feelings for people who are suffering. In the meditation, participants envisioned a time when someone has suffered and then practiced wishing that his or her suffering was relieved. They repeated phrases to help them focus on compassion such as, "May you be free from suffering. May you have joy and ease." Participants practiced with different categories of people, first starting with a loved one, someone whom they easily felt compassion for, like a friend or family member. Then, they practiced compassion for themselves and, then, a stranger. Finally, they practiced compassion for someone they actively had conflict with called the "difficult person," such as a troublesome coworker or roommate. "It's kind of like weight training," Weng says. "Using this systematic approach, we found that people can actually build up their compassion 'muscle' and respond to others' suffering with care and a desire to help." Compassion training was compared to a control group that learned cognitive reappraisal, a technique where people learn to reframe their thoughts to feel less negative. Both groups listened to guided audio instructions over the Internet for 30 minutes per day for two weeks. "We wanted to investigate whether people could begin to change their emotional habits in a relatively short period of time," says Weng. The real test of whether compassion could be trained was to see if people would be willing to be more altruistic — even helping people they had never met. The research tested this by asking the participants to play a game in which they were given the opportunity to spend their own money to respond to someone in need (called the "Redistribution Game"). They played the game over the Internet with two anonymous players, the "Dictator" and the "Victim." They watched as the Dictator shared an unfair amount of money (only $ 1 out of $ 10) with the Victim. They then decided how much of their own money to spend (out of $ 5) in order to equalize the unfair split and redistribute funds from the Dictator to the Victim. "We found that people trained in compassion were more likely to spend their own money altruistically to help someone who was treated unfairly than those who were trained in cognitive reappraisal," Weng says. "We wanted to see what changed inside the brains of people who gave more to someone in need. How are they responding to suffering differently now?" asks Weng. The study measured changes in brain responses using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before and after training. In the MRI scanner, participants viewed images depicting human suffering, such as a crying child or a burn victim, and generated feelings of compassion towards the people using their practiced skills. The control group was exposed to the same images, and asked to recast them in a more positive light as in reappraisal. The researchers measured how much brain activity had changed from the beginning to the end of the training, and found that the people who were the most altruistic after compassion training were the ones who showed the most brain changes when viewing human suffering. They found that activity was increased in the inferior parietal cortex, a region involved in empathy and understanding others. Compassion training also increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the extent to which it communicated with the nucleus accumbens, brain regions involved in emotion regulation and positive emotions. "People seem to become more sensitive to other people's suffering, but this is challenging emotionally. They learn to regulate their emotions so that they approach people's suffering with caring and wanting to help rather than turning away," explains Weng. Compassion, like physical and academic skills, appears to be something that is not fixed, but rather can be enhanced with training and practice. "The fact that alterations in brain function were observed after just a total of seven hours of training is remarkable," explains UW-Madison psychology and psychiatry professor Richard J. Davidson, founder and chair of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and senior author of the article. "There are many possible applications of this type of training," Davidson says. "Compassion and kindness training in schools can help children learn to be attuned to their own emotions as well as those of others, which may decrease bullying. Compassion training also may benefit people who have social challenges such as social anxiety or antisocial behavior." Weng is also excited about how compassion training can help the general population. "We studied the effects of this training with healthy participants, which demonstrated that this can help the average person. I would love for more people to access the training and try it for a week or two — what changes do they see in their own lives?" Both compassion and reappraisal trainings are available on the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds' website. "I think we are only scratching the surface of how compassion can transform people's lives," says Weng. Read More @ Source | |||
| 7 Limiting Beliefs of Unhappy People Posted: 22 May 2013 02:00 PM PDT  Trust me, I know that life can be hard. Really, really hard. But how you see the world is ultimately responsible for whether you are overall a happy person, or whether you end up feeling bitter and unhappy most days. Negative beliefs act like a filter. They change the way you experience people and events, and over time, they chip away at your sense of self. The good news is, once you recognize negative beliefs in yourself, they begin to lose their power over you. And like a ray of sunlight peeking through dark clouds, your inner capacity for joy will begin peeking through, brightening up your life once again. Here are the most common negative beliefs that can limit your potential for happiness: 1. "People are either good or bad"If you tend to see the world as either black or white, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. No one is always good (or bad). Inside every person, including you and me, are good thoughts and bad thoughts, things we are proud of having done and things we wish we could change. Someone may be a great father but a poor husband. Another person may act out of love at home but feel bitter when she is at work. Many of us wouldn't harm a living thing consciously, but enjoy eating meat. Contradictions are a part of life. Here's the solution:
2. "Anyone different/unknown is weird"To a conservative, being liberal is weird. To a vegetarian, all meat eaters seem weird. Rich folks look at poor neighborhoods with fear and mis-trust; and vice versa. When we don't know or understand something, it scares us. The solution? When you have this reaction to something or someone, challenge yourself to learn more about it. For example. let's say your religion is very important to you and your daughter is dating someone of a different faith. Rather than jump to the conclusion that you will never be able to "get" him, challenge yourself to be curious. Ask open, gentle questions about his faith and his upbringing. You don't have to agree, but you can still try to understand. Whenever ignorance is replaced by understanding, there is hope and possibility for joy. 3. "Believing in myself requires me to block out other opinions"We are often told to "Stand tall", "Believe in yourself" and "Drown out the voices that disagree." While it's important to stand behind your beliefs, it's also essential to know how to react to differing opinions. Truly successful people welcome other people's opinions, even if they contradict their own. Why? Because they understand that each person has a unique perspective. And that there is often more than one right answer to a problem. So how do you deal with this limiting belief? Whenever I'm tempted to think my opinion is THE right one, I recall the story of the four blind men: Four men were arguing about religion and God, each insisting that their God was the "real" one. Unable to convince one another, the! y went to! Buddha. Buddha brought the four blind men to an elephant and asked them to tell him what they "see". One man was near the trunk and thus said it is a cylinder, the next was near the stomach and so insisted it was a wall, the third was near the leg and felt sure it was a pillar and the fourth man got the tail and was adamant it was a rope. Buddha asked "So who is right?" Every problem or situation has many sides to it. While yours may be true for you, other opinions can also be true. Perspective changes everything. 4. "I have to feel whatever my thoughts tell me to"Thoughts are extremely powerful and we've all felt their power at one time or another. But unhappy people are constantly overwhelmed by their thoughts and believe that if they have a sad thought, they have to feel sad. Genuinely happy people know that thoughts are temporary, like clouds in the sky, and they often come and go randomly. Just because you have an angry thought, you don't have to end up feeling angry. You can choose what to do with that thought. You can either let it pass and focus on other thoughts, or you can obsess over it, making it stronger and more powerful. The solution? Try this out: Next time you have an unhappy thought, just acknowledge it and bring your attention to your body and the present moment. For example, if you are at a meeting, focus on the feeling of the chair against your back or your shoes on the floor. If you are drinking something, fill your awareness with the sense of taste and smell. Then, bring your mind back to what you want to learn or take away from the meeting. As you do this, the angry thoughts will linger for a while, and then float away, to be replaced by other thoughts. "I have to act out whatever I'm feeling." This is part 2 of the "thoughts-feelings-actions" loop. For example: If you feel! the urge! to skip your morning work out, it doesn't mean you need to act on that feeling. You may choose to consciously skip it, because maybe it's a saturday morning and you decide to snuggle with your kids instead. But you can also choose to work out, in spite of what you feel. Feelings too are temporary, like thoughts. The feelings you pay attention to will stay and expand, whereas the ones you choose to let go of, will float away. 5. "Control is a part of love"True love is freeing and unconditional. It does not seek to control, intimidate or change. When you try to control your loved ones, you will slowly but surely lose them. Real love is about open listening, positive regard, and encouraging autonomy, while being available to protect and support. It's a delicate balance. And people who know how to do it well are rewarded with loyalty and trust. Unhappy people try to control others. They worry that without the control, the other person will leave them. The solution? Learn to love others freely. But before you can love others, you have to love yourself. If this is a struggle for you, I highly recommend reading this article for some powerful ways to begin the journey. 6. "More is better"Many of us have almost unlimited choices in many areas of our life, from politics and education to fashion, so why then are we unhappier than ever before? I spent much of my 20's chasing after things and achievements. Yes, they gave me some happiness, but it was always be temporary. When the happiness wore off, I chased after something else, hoping this new thing would finally lead to lasting happiness. It took me a few years to really understand that I could not buy my way to true joy. Happiness is internal, a way of thinking. So, what's the solution to "more is better"? If you think that you can achieve happiness by acquiring more or having more choices, please do yourself a favor and watch this ! short TED! talk by psychologist Barry Schwartz. It will blow your mind. 7. "The worst things always happen to me"Do you often feel like you are singled out for life's miseries? Do you feel like you always seem to get the short end of the stick? If you do, check out this true story: One day, the son of a wealthy merchant fell into a well and was saved by a passing farmer who heard his cries for help. The merchant came to thank the farmer for saving his son's life, and offered him money as a reward. The farmer declined to take money but agreed to the merchant's offer to educate the poor farmer's son for free. The boy was brilliant and loved to learn and eventually grew up to be Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin. A few decades later, the rich merchant's son caught pneumonia. This usually meant death in those times, but he was saved by the penicillin that Alexander had just discovered. The boy had a full recovery, and grew up to be Winston Churchill. In every situation, there is a silver lining. What seems like the worst luck today, may indeed save your life tomorrow. And as Carl Sagan said, "We are all star dust." Every living thing is connected and each of us have our share of suffering. So remember to look for the silver lining in your difficulties. Your life is a garden and these negative beliefs are like weeds. If you allow it, they will take over and destroy your life. So begin weeding them out of your mind today and make room for joy to take root and grow. Because you deserve it.
Have a bucket list? Create yours today with this list of 101 things to do before you die! Grab your free pdf e-book in the next second by signing up for the free newsletter.     Read More @ Source |
It's very easy for us to assume that the one who feels compassion is in some way superior to the one he or she feels compassion for. This is partly rooted, I presume, in the assumption that it's weak to suffer, but that assumption in turn grows from our biological conditioning. We're social animals, and one of the things a social animal has as part of its genetic makeup is a propensity to establish where it stands in a social hierarchy. 
Until now, little was scientifically known about the human potential to cultivate compassion — the emotional state of caring for people who are suffering in a way that motivates altruistic behavior.
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