Beginning Meditation Class: Week 4

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Teacher: Rodney Smith Date: 2008-05-12 Venue: Seattle Insight Meditation Center

Series

• Introduction to Insight Meditation 2008-04-21

This is the fourth class in a series of 6 classes meant to introduce the basics of Insight Meditation to beginners.  In each session Rodney Smith provides guided meditation instruction, homework to be done daily for a week, answers questions from students and introduces new concepts and techniques that build from previous sessions.

1. Continue practicing the compassion meditation for at least 10 minutes a day. Include sending compassion to the indifferent person, as well as to the person you know who is suffering the most, yourself, your benefactor and the loved one, or dear friend.
2. Reflect on how you put compassion into action in your life. At the end of each day, spend a few minutes reflecting on what you have done today that was compassionate, both towards yourself and for another. Remember that even very small acts count. Mother Theresa said, “In life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.”
3. Sometime this week, go outside, on your own in the evening, preferably around sunset, as the day is passing away. Find somewhere to sit and stop and allow yourself simply to be very open without holding onto anything whatsoever. Don’t bring anything back from the past through memory, or plan anything in the future. Don’t even hold on to anything in the present. Simply let experience take place, very freely, so that your empty, open heart can be suffused with the tenderness of true compassion. (This meditation allows compassion to arise without a specific object (person or situation) that you are relating to. It can allow us to experience the potential compassion that is always available to us.)
4. How do we create a world based on race, nationality, age, sex, ideology, and religion? All of these concepts, if taken to be objective reality, create the sense of separation. Look at yourself and see who is “us” and who is “them. Who is your “us”?

Link to view on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/3657175

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