Loving Kindness

The Bhuddist practice of metta meditation, or loving kindness meditation, is a great way to comfort yourself. It is a mindfulness meditation practice. I use this form of meditation to obtain comfort when I'm in a lot of pain. I especially like this technique because it enables me to bring comfort to myself when external forms of comfort are not available. It may be used to seek comfort for any form of misery - and it may also help with growing compassion for others in the world.

The Technique

You begin with meditation focused on loving and being kind to yourself. For example, I say "may I feel loved, may I be healthy, may I be strong." I may need to do this for days or weeks where the meditation is focused on comforting myself. This focus on feeling loved will lead to a sense of comfort. When I am comforted, then I continue to the loving kindness meditation to grow my compassion. I ask that my family be loved, healthy and strong. Then when I am even feeling stronger and ready I grow the circle to neighbors and community until finally I am able to make my circle the world. When the pain grows again I may focus the circle on myself again. Remember you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of others. If you don't feel comfort and you are not at ease, focus the loving kindness meditation on yourself until you are ready to try to spread the love and compassion again to others.

Let Go Of Expectation

We have expectations of how events will go. How often, when you interact with someone, do you build up an expectation of how things are going to go, what they are going to do or say? You then tell yourself, if these expectations are met the encounter will be a success. But, what happens when these expectations are not met? When things don't go as expected, it often leads to stress and sometimes disappointment. If not handled properly, this added stress can cause a significant pain flare. So let go of expectation.

By focusing on expectation we are ruining the chance of living in the moment and honoring what is in front of us. Expectations can pull you out of the moment. Let go of expectation and rest in the moment.

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This weekend my son is coming home from Washington D.C.. My other son and his girlfriend will be over. I am very excited about having my entire family together. We are going to celebrate my sons birthday, make dumplings as a family and play games. I need to remember to keep my expectations in check and savor the moments. I need to remember that I will have pain while they are here. I won’t be able to do everything they are doing, everything I want to do. My expectations will NOT be met, yet I need to not allow that to negatively impact my family time. I will achieve this by letting go of expectations.

Failure Is Not Fatal

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal it is the courage to continue that counts." Winston Churchill

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That is one of my son’s favorite quotes.

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Since I feel like my resiliency skills have been kicking in I have been getting really excited about trying new things. I’ve had great success, and that has lead me to want to do more and try more, but yesterday I was hit with a big fat failure. It was a soul crushing failure! I was conked on the head with it. FAILURE!

I kept replaying it in my head. "Why did you leave your comfort zone? Why are you even trying new things?" As you can imagine, it spiraled from "why are you even doing any of this resiliency stuff?" to "you can’t do anything!" I think it took me the whole day to finally remember that failure isn’t fatal. Maybe there was something I could even learn from the experience. Maybe I could grow from it. Maybe it was even positive. I learned I needed to let the failure go!

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