Loving-Kindness and Visualization...

Hello Everyone!!

There have been several exercises that we have done that were fun and interesting and there were some that I could not wrap my brain around and it made it difficult to really evaluate my response and what the benefits were. Well,  I found loving-kindess pretty interesting, I found it somewhat easy (at first) to picture and put myself into a position where I am projecting love and kindness to others, to strangers, giving the same amount of love and kindness as I would my family and friends, however, after a while my mind started wondering and I lost sight of what my train of thought was. The Subtle mind was a little different an I too found this one difficult to wrap my brain around and was not very successful at, it was hard controlling all the mindless chatter that goes on in my brain. With meditation, I think that this is a learned art, because just by doing it once or twice in this class was very hard, and I have done it in the past and I too found it hard then as well, it is really hard to concentrate on nothing and to clear your mind and think of nothing. So what ends up happening I start saying "think of nothing, think of nothing..." over and over in mind to help me think of "nothing" but it still is extremely hard. I think the most fun and the best exercise I got out of all them was the visualization exercise. I enjoyed this one because it helped me think of the love of my life, my boyfriend. Because he is the wisest person I know, a man who exudes loving-kindness and compassion, and has the drive to make himself and others better, he was the only person that came to mind when I was told to think of someone wise. So the two exercises that I found the most beneficials and most fun for me were the Loving-Kindness and Visualization, because it helped me visualize the love of my life and to bring to light all his greatest attributes, and the other exercise helped me find the love, compassion and kindness that is deep within me.