Just find your seat,
Let the body be relatively upright,
Comfortable,
And just give yourself permission to be here,
To be in this present moment.
Try to let what's going to happen in 10 minutes go.
And the heart practices are about looking inward and they all have an underlying aspect of care.
One of my favorite Pali words is anukampa,
Caring.
It doesn't necessarily carry some of the baggage of loving kindness or compassion,
Empathy,
Which can sometimes feel a little heavy in certain situations,
But caring is a little softer,
A little gentler.
Let's try to work with caring and just first try to feel what offering care to yourself,
What sensation arises in you when you say to yourself,
I care about you.
I really care about you.
Just try to generate the sensation of caring.
Just try to imagine now turning it towards someone that you don't know.
Maybe being at a grocery store or seeing someone on the side of the road with the sign,
I'm cold and hungry.
Can you just care about that person without having to fix the situation or can you care about the person of the supermarket without even having to talk to them?
Can you generate that sensation?
Now let's turn it again towards someone in our family,
Someone that we have deep love for,
But also there might be some difficulty.
That's okay.
What does it feel like to care for them and how does that feel different than caring for yourself or a stranger?
And that's the mindfulness aspect.
Noticing what arises,
Noticing how it feels to offer care to yourself,
To a stranger,
To a loved one.
Then we'll move on to someone that's difficult.
Someone that maybe we had a relationship with and we no longer do.
Or someone out in the world that we don't know personally but we don't care for.
That kind of gets us maybe even angry.
But they're just a person with likes and dislikes.
Hopefully there's people that they care about and love.
And even though we may not like them,
We may disagree with them,
How does it feel to offer them care?
Can you?
Or is it too much aversion to them to really legitimately offer the same type of care you would to your family or yourself or a stranger?
How does that feel?
Is there aversion?
Resistance?
Is there an outright no way?
And then last,
Open our arms wide.
We're going to offer this sensation,
This quality of heart,
Of caring towards everybody and everything.
Every person,
Every mosquito,
Bird,
Wombat,
You name it.
The heavens,
The depth,
The oceans,
The mountains,
All the little creepy crawlies in the compost pile.
Everybody.
How would it be?
How does it feel?
What arises when you're willing to just care about it all?
And the idea is that we work with these practices on a regular basis.
So we see where our aversion is.
We see where our grasping is.
And we temper them over time.
There's no way that we've got it down in the beginning.
Even after a little while,
It takes some time.
But being willing to open our hearts on the cushion allows us to open our hearts off the cushion.
