We bring peace to the world one person, one moment and one word and action at a time. We do this with our smile, our generosity, our kindness, compassion, and in very inconspicuous ways throughout each day. The peace we make comes from our own internal peace.
Loving Kindness meditations and daily exercises are a helpful ways to take our practice into our everyday lives. If our practice is only sitting on a cushion it isn’t worth very much. Loving kindness is one of the “divine abodes” where our heart and mind can reside right here-right now. The other divine abodes are compassion, sympathetic joy (joy in the happiness of our self and others) and equanimity (a mind at peace balanced by wisdom and compassion). This week let’s make a more peaceful world by offering kindness to people we don’t know.
Exercise. Our exercise for this week is to bring peace to the world by interacting with people when we shop for groceries. In one of the Metta Practices of bringing loving kindness to others we practice offering Loving Kindness (Metta) to a neutral person. These are people we don’t know but may interact with from time to time. So this week we will do this practice with those neutral people we meet while grocery shopping (people who work in the grocery store and check out).
The idea of this practice is to interact with these people from an open heart. We make a heart connection with these people we don’t anything about. But think about that. We really do know a lot about them. We know they want happiness, peace, freedom, joy, safety and well being—just like us. When we interact with them this week, the love we have for them is not expressed overtly in any words or actions. We simply regard them as if they were our closest friend or brother, sister, aunt or uncle. When we say hello or converse we do this as if they were a dear friend, because with our heart connection they truly are! In short we make a genuine heart connection with these people during our brief encounter.What we often find with this exercise is that the heart connection we make (even though it’s not overt) is noticed by these people and returned to us as a heart connection offered by them (quite unconsciously). The gift of love and peace we offer is instantly returned to us. Try this and see if this isn’t true for you! May you be well, happy and peaceful, Floyd
