1)Introduction: what to expect.
2)Some little steps towards limitless love, limitless compassion, limitless appreciation of others' happiness, Limitless impartiality.
Some introductory remarks:
Although the mindfulness practices we encounter nowadays are usually based on the original teachings of the Buddha, very often they are mostly a way to simply feel better, to be less stressed, and essentially to make your comfort zone more comfortable. I think we can even say that the kind of approach that we are embarking on here may initially make you less comfortable, because you challenge your usual way of seeing things things and it shakes you up a little bit. We don't want to shake too hard or too violently, so we will just gently, gently shake a little bit.
In the Buddhist way of seeing things, the goal is complete liberation from the kind of suffering which is inevitably part of everybody's life, because of our emotional reactions, because of the way we understand what is happening, because of our notions of ourselves and others. The whole way we see things is full of ignorance. There's no solution without tackling that.
I'm particularly interested in what in our tradition we call mind training. Of course, in a sense, many things we do are kinds of mind training, aren’t they? For instance, going to school is mind training. But in the Tibetan tradition mind training has a particular sense: training the mind in love and compassion and developing an altruistic mindset, in a very down to earth. simple way. Letting go of one's preoccupations with oneself and one's own comfort zone, and directing one’s attention to others, others’ needs, and caring about others’ happiness.
It may seem paradoxical, but when you do that, your own happiness inevitably increases. You feel more relaxed. You have a clearer vision of your life, and everything becomes much more coherent. This may not be apparent in the beginning. We need to train progressively. Matthieu Ricard emphasizes that our practice of mindfulness needs to be “caring mindfulness.” That mindfulness shouldn't just be an exercise to be better at things, or to feel more comfortable, but should always be linked to developing a loving, altruistic mindset at the same time.
Of course, we would love to be kind, compassionate people. Maybe we even see ourselves as being like that, but the difficulty, in practice, is that to be kind and compassionate in a systematic way, you have to have some mental stability, otherwise your emotions take over straight away. You want to help and be nice. Then people don't receive it as you'd imagined. Things don't go as you want it, and then you feel frustrated. You feel upset and then you may give up and feel angry.
So in fact, when we have these turbulent emotions churning around the whole time, we have no basis of mental stability, and it's very difficult to give a coherent direction to what we do.
So that's why the first thing that we do when we meditate is just to allow the mind to calm down. At first our mind can seem surprisingly agitated. Instead of discovering a delicious state of calm right away, we will probably become more aware of our own confusion. This is an important step. Gradually the turbulence subsides. We start to have some stability and a new sense of clarity. This is the beginning of a journey to discover a hidden treasure: our own mind’s innate qualities.
