Sunday Morning Meditation, March 22nd

Three Habits for a Healthier Life

David Oromith

Hello, good morning, everyone. Wonderful to see you all. I do hope you're all well. Thank you for choosing to spend this sunny Sunday morning with me. I hope it's sunny where you are. So I think we'll follow the usual format. We'll do our 20-minute meditation, then our talk, and then our discussion.

Meditation

So I invite you all to find a comfortable posture for our practice.

So just as we're settling and getting comfortable, why don't we begin by taking five slow, deep breaths: breathing in through the nose, filling the belly, filling the chest, and releasing gently out through the mouth with a sigh.

With each in breath feeling a sense of energy, vitality, and with each out breath a softening, a releasing, settling.

Letting the breathing return to its natural rhythm. As you start to pay attention to the experience of your body here and now: the many tactile sensations arising and passing; the experience of any mood or emotion that you're feeling or have been feeling recently, is there any resonance of that in your body?

Just welcoming everything in equally right now as part of your present experience.

While we give ourselves permission to be at ease, to come to rest after what may have been a busy week.

Now is the time to return to stillness.

For this morning's practice, turning ourselves towards the qualities of the heart which invite us to open up to our fellow sentient beings, to open up to ourselves and all others.

So we can begin by turning our attention to ourselves.

Maybe thinking about the recent days and weeks, in the ups and downs that we've experienced, the challenges as well as the joys, the positives.

Of course, the very simple fact that we have a preference, we would prefer to experience the pleasant: the joys, the love, the connection, happiness, comfort, safety.

There's a rightness and a beauty to that, an expression of our deep nature. To want to feel complete.

So just inviting in a sense of warmth, care, and tenderness for oneself. For oneself and our vision, our pursuit of happiness, connection, fulfilment.

Seeing that in a positive light, in a supportive light.

Then expressing it in words mentally, if that helps, ‘May I be well. May I find happiness in safety and comfort. May I find greater joy. May I find kindness and care’. Whatever it is you feel you most need, express that to yourself now. Make it unique, individual, fresh, real.

‘May I find the happiness I seek’.

‘May I find comfort and support through my challenges’.

'May I be kind to myself through my challenges’.

Also ‘May I notice and celebrate the good within me. My successes, my good fortune. Even the simple fact of doing my best. May I rejoice in these notices’.

Then let us turn our heart outwards to our loved ones. I invite you to bring to mind someone you love and care about. This isn't a competition about who you love most, just someone you deeply love and care about.

We can think about how they, in recent days and weeks, will have had ups and downs too. Perhaps you know of them. Perhaps there are some you don't know of.

‘Just like me, just like I want to be happy and free of pain, so too is the same for them. In my heart of hearts, that is what I want most for them. I want to see them happy, to flourish, to be well, to have all their heart desires, to not experience pain, hurt, loneliness’.

So let your heart yearn forth now unconditionally without restrictions, ties, or conditions for them to behave a certain way, ‘May you be well, may you be happy, may you experience joy like you have never known’.

Again, make it very alive and unique and individual to you. Wish them well.

You might like to bring in some other loved ones around them, bringing them to mind and expressing the same wish. This yearning of what we call loving kindness - metta… The wish that they may be well, have happiness, joy, connection, love, safety, all that is good, all that they desire.

That they may be genuinely well and genuinely happy.

Next, let us turn our heart towards someone we don't know as well. Someone we’re not as close to... This is often called the neutral categories. Or it could be perhaps a distant neighbour who you don't see very often: you're not really very close to them, but you do know them- you're aware of them. Some other acquaintance, colleague at work that you pass by. Someone you see at the bus stop. Someone you could quite happily walk past and not really be that invested or interested.

Now, in the space of this practice, let us connect with the very fact that they are a sentient being too. So, just like myself and my loved ones, they desire happiness and goodness as we've expressed it, they'll want to avoid any pain and suffering. Everything they do in their life will be for this pursuit of greater happiness and well-being, less suffering and pain. They’re the same...

So recognising that within you, how that feels within you. Knowing they feel the same. They're just as real as we are, just as real as our loved ones, and just as deserving of finding happiness and joy in their life.

Let your heart open up, yearning and expressing this loving kindness,

‘May you too find the well-being and happiness that you seek’.

‘May you find freedom from any pain, hurt, and loneliness you experience’. ‘May you experience such joy’.

Again, expressing it however you wish, whatever feels most alive.

Bringing to mind the difficult people in our lives: those who challenge us, those we don't see eye to eye with. Are they too not sentient beings who desire happiness and connection, joy and love? Who don't want to suffer.

We may not see eye to eye with them because of different beliefs, upbringings, ideas, and ways of behaving. But at their very core, they are the same - trying to find happiness.

The ways in which those wishes may be expressed in ways that we don't agree with. But the wish at their very core is still precious and pure.

So can we recognise how we're all lost in our own confusion, greed and hostility? Can we let our heart open up to this individual as well? See them too, as a victim of their mental afflictions, as we are victims of our mental afflictions.

‘May you too find well-being and happiness’.

'May you find greater joy in love and connection’.

‘May you find freedom from your pain and suffering and loneliness’.

So once again, expressing this, however, feels most fruitful for you.

But not from a place of superiority, judgment, but sentient beings speaking to sentient beings.

Really connecting with this compassionate, loving energy that we all naturally possess, as we expand this heartfelt yearning for the welfare of all sentient beings, as we expand it outward to all sentient beings everywhere, without exception.

‘May all sentient beings know happiness and well-being’.

‘May they find freedom from the pain and suffering they find themselves in’.

‘May they experience the good fortune I have experienced’.

Teachings

What I thought to speak about this morning is cultivating and training our attitude in daily life: that we want to be happier, we want to be kinder, we want to be calmer, whatever it is that brings us to these kinds of practices.

You know the sun comes out, and we may start to feel a bit brighter ourselves. As we come out of the months of darkness and clouds, we start to feel a bit more brighter, a bit more positive.

But then something bad can happen. Or it gets cold again or gets cloudy again, and we feel more miserable - like it's being imposed on us. But happiness and suffering come from the mind. It's an internal job, isn't it? And so what can we do with the mind to counteract the negativity that seems to come up, the negative thoughts and feelings that will come up naturally of how bad and worthless we are? Of how bad and worthless other people are. How bad the state of the world is. These kinds of thoughts that come up very naturally, they're very painful and they're very difficult. They can be very heavy. So what do we do about this negativity that comes up? How do we keep ourselves afloat? How do we keep our heart open? How do we keep ourselves positive even when the skies are grey, so to speak?

Well, one strategy first of all is we need to become aware of our mind, we need to get to know the mind. That’s, of course, very important: you need to get to know how the mind works - if you know how it works, then you can do something about it. It's very simple. It's very pragmatic. If you don't know how it works, how in the world are you going to be able to do anything with it? But as we often say: if you don't know where the leak is coming in the kitchen, you just know that it's wet, you just know there's water where there shouldn't be water. How are you going to be able to do anything about it? You need to know what's going on. So you get help, don't you? If there's a leak in the kitchen, if you don't know what to do with it, you get help from someone who can look and can know and can find out and then can fix it. It’s the same thing with the mind. But who can look? Who can look in your mind? Who can check your mind? Only us. Only we have direct access to our mind. We can get help from our teachers, our spiritual friends that can help point us in the right direction. But in the very end, we have to look, don't we? So it's very pragmatic. We have to look... We have to know our own mind. So we look, we investigate. We learn to spot the presence of the negative thoughts or pessimistic thoughts, jealousy and bitterness and pettiness and miserliness and we learn to counteract these.

This is the second strategy: the best strategy I think you can employ. It's honestly so simple. We may even think it's not even worth while, because it's so trivial. We expect that the solution to our mind to becoming happier and overcome our negativity is going to be some very deep esoteric work where we have to go off and meditate for years and uproot the self and do something very deep and powerful. But the answer really can be honestly so very simple: it is to actively cultivate the attitudes you want to have in daily life. I have a few suggestions for you.

If you find that you are more of maybe the negative miserly type or the judgmental type or always focusing on the negative. So, these negative thoughts, these negative attitudes, they come up. With this approach, you don't necessarily have to worry about them. You don't need to try and stop them - stop the negativity. You don't need to try and make it go away. You don't need to feel bad about it. Instead, we're going to actively cultivate more positive thoughts to go alongside them, to counteract them, to replace them. So we deliberately think other things, other more positive things. So if you want to completely change your day, I have three for you that are very, very effective. You don't have to believe me, you can test them.

The first one is what we've just done here: Loving kindness. So everyone you meet today, everyone you even think about today. The first thing you do is to wish them well. Wish that they may have joy, peace and love and everything their heart desires, everything that would make them truly happy. So your immediate response. You see someone, you think of someone, whether it's on the news or whether it's someone you see personally in the real world. Immediate response. You encounter someone: ‘May you be well, may you have joy’, and make it really personal, make it fresh, make it unique for each person.

So maybe not a set phrase that you repeat verbatim, just the words, but wish them various good fortunes. That's a wonderful thing to do. If you head out for a walk and you're just passing by people you know, just ‘May you have a wonderful day. May you experience good fortune’.

If you know your friend needs some kindness at the moment, ‘May you have more kindness in your life’.

If you see some out and about, 'May you have a wonderful day’ - just expressing that loving kindness.

You don't need to say it out loud. It's private practice. Changing our attitude. If you feel like saying, 'I hope you have a wonderful day’ to someone, great, very good. But we can express that internally.

And self-directed loving-kindness too. ‘May I be well’, ‘May I have joy today’, ‘May I be kinder to myself today’.

So here's one, another one I'm going to give you three. Seconds one is rejoicing or empathetic joy - part of the same family. So when you see people happy, you see people doing well. I went for a walk yesterday after a teaching day. I went across the Mumbles promenade - so across the coast - and it was a sunny day, a sunny Saturday. Lots of happy faces, people walking in the sun, kids getting to enjoy their bikes, scooters, and friends catching up. Just lots of people really enjoying themselves. It was very, very busy. But when you see this, you see anything like this, when you see people enjoying themselves, you see people doing good in the world - delight in it, and feel very happy that such joy, virtue, and good fortune exist in the world. Isn't it wonderful? There's so much negativity out there. We're told about so much negativity and so many problems and so many this… and you need to worry, be worried about this, and you need to be angry about this. To witness joy and success and good fortune is a beautiful and precious thing. So any pockets of joy and happiness, I think, are so beautiful and so precious.

But we're not just feeling happy for them. Isn't that great for them? Share in that joy, right? Empathetic joy is about letting that joy multiply within you. Joy is not locked within the individual who's doing well. If one of you here was to say, ‘David, I had a really good day yesterday. This happened to me and this... and I'm feeling really happy’. It's not just that I can feel happy for you. I can feel that same joy. If you're having a good time, I can feel it, too. So we rejoice. We feel joy for others' successes and their joy.

So let that be your immediate reaction. You see somebody doing well: even on social media, people post all sorts of things about how well their life seems. Sometimes we get very judgmental, we get very, ‘oh that looks fake’, but we see somebody doing well, somebody on holiday, somebody this or that. And we just say, ‘Isn't that great? I am glad that they are enjoying themselves. I'm glad that is a sentient being who is happy’.

Let that be our immediate reaction to someone who's doing well. And again rejoicing in our good fortune, this precious human life we have, full of leisure and full of opportunity, the good fortune we have that others don't. Let's rejoice in that. Any positive things that we do and any positive things we offer to the world. We rejoice in the fact that ‘I didn't get so angry today', that ‘Today I'm doing my best, that I still am still showing up’.

So loving kindness, rejoicing, harvesting joy, and the third one- sorry, this third one is harvesting joy - this is where you're actively seeking out even the smallest, most minor, trivial thing that is delightful or lovely to you in your immediate environment.

So maybe you've got a candle burning, or you can hear birdsong, or there's the sound of running water in the garden or something. Or maybe there's some flowers popping up, a favourite blanket, a nice drink. So these things maybe very small, maybe trivial. Maybe there's something big going on, but rather than just thinking, ‘It's just something small’ and just moving on. Readily stopping and pausing and being with it and really allowing yourself to just feel into that sense of delight and ‘harvest’ - this is what the ‘harvesting of that joy’ means. You're harvesting that loveliness that you're feeling in contact with these things, no matter how small or trivial they might seem. And I have to tell you, let's take it as an experiment. You don't have to believe me. It's an experiment. Maybe just for today, if you feel called to it. Maybe just for this week. This is the sole focus for the week because what have you got to lose, really? One week of trying to apply it right, just to see as an experiment.

These three things:

Loving kindness in which you're wishing every one you meet or every one you think about, you're wishing them well.

Rejoicing, empathetic joy where you're feeling joy at other people's successes and their joys and their good fortunes.

Harvesting joy where you're actively seeking out and savouring and appreciating the things that do delight you. That you can appreciate.

These three - what a difference they can make to your outlook\!

Because the negativity comes up so often, it's effortless, right? The negativity just comes up without our doing it. You don't have to think negative thoughts. Your mind just tends to notice and tends to be negative. If you're anything like I have been, and these thoughts have been so relentless for so long that we believe them... A negative thought comes up about the self, and we believe it. It comes up about other people, and we believe it. We find that we start to focus more and more upon the negative. It's so natural.

But if you train and bring up more positive thoughts, like these more positive feelings, not only does it feel good in the short term, but you'll actually start to believe it. You'll start to believe it, and you'll start to really feel it. ‘I am happy for them that they are doing well’. ‘I am happy for me that I am doing my best. I am doing well'. ‘There is goodness in the world’. You'll believe that there's goodness in the world because you're finding it and you're seeking it out and you're focussing on it. ‘There are pleasant things in my life.

It's not all negative, it's not all suffering’. This will start to come more naturally, and you'll start to seek out those things. If you train yourself in this way, low and behold, you'll start to become more positive.

But we have to put in the work. Only you have access to your mind, and you can choose to think one thing or something else. You can choose to think more positively when negative things come up. You can, it’s possible, but no one else can do it for us. So I think it's very practical, it's very simple, and yet so brilliant and empowering. Because the sun may be out today, and we might feel lighter, but it's not guaranteed, nothing is.

Life can be hard sometimes, problems and illness and dramas and politics. So we need to develop ourselves. We need to develop these qualities so that we have our own inner well-being, which makes us better able to navigate this world rather than being at the mercy of it.

So this is my invitation, my ‘call to action’ today. Still, let's take this as an experiment. Let's try it, see how we get on, and then perhaps if you feel called to it, those of you who are in the WhatsApp group, maybe we can share during the week what we have been delighting in. Have we noticed anything? Has there been any benefit, any effect? What am I rejoicing in today? That gives other people the opportunity to rejoice in that too, and we can share and multiply our practice together. So that's me. I think we can bring our session to a close then.

So I hope maybe this will have sparked something a bit of an experiment for us this week and maybe engaging in the WhatsApp group with this topic for those who feel called to it. But I thank you all very much for your presence, for your supportiveness. I hope something useful comes from it.

I look forward to seeing you again next week. So please take care. Much love to you all.