WHEN TO USE: Particularly beneficial when you feel lonely or alienated from someone you care about.
PURPOSE: To bring your awareness to the real connection that you share with others, restore a sense of oneness and belonging, dissolve notions about others that you are projecting onto them rather than actually seeing, and enable you to respond with greater sensitivity to the needs of others.
INSTRUCTIONS:
- Relax and enter a place of stillness and inner silence.*
- Bring your mind slowly to the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, judgments, desires, and perceptions you experience for someone you know or someone you feel estranged from.
- From a place of calm, cool clarity, simply look at the thoughts and feelings and perceptions you have for this person. Notice them. This is who they are to you right now. You have proceeded as though these thoughts and feelings and perceptions ARE that person.
- As you exhale, breath out these thoughts and feelings and perceptions. Imagine setting them aside. Feel them move aside, and know that they are not the essence of that person.
- Spend a moment simply allowing the thoughts and feelings to rest on the side. What is left? Don’t answer that question yet. You don’t really know. You have chipped away the stone encasing the true being inside. Rather than immediately looking to see what remains, savor this moment, and gently sweep the dust away. Savor the openness.
- When you feel the moment is right, invite the true core or essence of the person into your awareness. Ask with deep respect, “May I behold the real you? May I listen to your heart?”
- If you feel a resistance, return to step 5 and stop there.
- If you feel permitted, imagine that the person is truly in your presence. Suspend disbelief and really feel as if they are present.
- Imagine that they are speaking or they are about to speak from their heart. Listen. Keep your mind open. Listen with the same intensity and reverence as you would if you asked a guru on a mountain to describe the path to bliss in five words or less, and the words are about to leave her mouth. Listen with your whole body. Feel the words of their heart vibrate your whole being. Commit to receiving whatever they express.
- As a variation, you can also ask, at this point, “How can I best love you now?”
* This meditation works particularly well following the Stillness Meditation.
“mindjob” Heh!
I love this: “The more confused you are, the better.” Than I’m doing great
Thanks for giving us another way to view love relationships. I struggle a lot like your sociology student did, wanting something tangible, but when I can drop that love just becomes a field we swim in, with no reason to attach to anything. Another lovely post!
-M
Haha, yes, I went with the non-obscene synonym. There seem to be some situations for which profanity says it all just right.
mindfudgesomething that messes with your head a lotstupid thesaurus *!#^@You are the most beautiful person I have ever had the honor to know. thank you for the gifts you give to us all every day.
scott
Aw Scott, thank you, but go look in a mirror. And, can you send me your address again? ;-D
“when I choose to love, that love is divine”
LOVE that. ok, i don’t think in terms of divinity, but i get it.
my emphasis is always on the quality of the love. i had never thought of the moment, that nanosecond of choosing love, as the perfection.