This is an effective meditation. Like building any muscle, exercising it daily gives the quickest result. You want quick results to develop understanding so that you aren’t letting unconscious or emotional stuff from the past prevent you from moving forward into a better tomorrow.  Practice this twice daily and you will soon find yourself with less stress and less emotional pain, with deeper compassion and understanding.   Continue reading →

The Compassion Exercise by Harry Palmer.
Honesty with one’s self leads to compassion for others.

OBJECTIVE: To increase the amount of compassion in the world.
EXPECTED RESULT: A personal sense of peace.

INSTRUCTIONS: This exercise can be done anywhere that people congregate (airports, malls, parks, beaches, etc). It should be done on strangers, unobtrusively, from some distance. Try to do all five steps on the same person.   Continue reading →

The practice of loving kindness or goodwill meditation is an excellent tool for breaking down barriers as well as restoring humanity and kindness when your mind feels like a battlefield. The benefits are also that you re-train your mind to let go of stress far more easily when the mind is more calm and happy and come up with mutually beneficial solutions to challenges you may be facing.  The relevance of the practice of goodwill meditation is simply that it can tame our emotions and develop the mind to being more humane and more wise.   Continue reading →

The original name of this practice is metta bhavana, which comes from the Pali language. Metta means love, friendliness, or kindness: hence ‘loving-kindness’ for short. It is an emotion, something you feel in your heart. Bhavana means development or cultivation. The commonest form of the practice is in five stages, each of which should last about five minutes for a beginner. here are the stages:

In the first stage, you feel metta for yourself. You start by becoming aware of yourself, and focusing on feelings of peace, calm, and tranquillity. Then you let these grow in to feelings of strength and confidence, and then develop into love within your heart. You can use an image, like golden light flooding your body, or a phrase such as ‘may I be well and happy’, which you can repeat to yourself. These are ways of stimulating the feeling of metta for yourself.   Continue reading →

We’ve heard for years, meditation teachers saying “close your eyes and go to your happy place” but we don’t realize the huge significance of doing that. In creative visualization we talk about going within and remembering a place of feeling extreme love, of supreme happiness and replaying that emotion and that feeling over and over in your mind for as long as you can — hopefully for 5 maybe 10 minutes a day twice a day as a meditation practice. What this does is it changes how we perceive the world. How we perceive the world is how we experience the world.  In every day society, the news we watch does the work of exercising our emotional muscles to increase our capacity for psychological stress and pain. For some people, that’s hours every day. We become desensitized and often don’t notice the stress until there’s a blow up.  This meditation is a release valve for that stress. This meditation is an antidote for the violent, cruel actions we witness every day — on tv, online or in real life. This meditation does the work of exercising our emotional muscles to increase our capacity for joy. It practices stretching that space like you’d expand a balloon. Once it’s stretched, it has greater capacity. The emotions are like any muscle, they have memory and they can be strengthened and programmed with daily practice.   Continue reading →

A fun and busy day yesterday, as a friend helped me update the master shower. We’d taken the free-standing tub out two days ago and the first job today was to create additional support behind the shower handle and head by cutting pieces of 2×4 to screw in between the studs. He had to replace some of the existing supports as they’d managed to move forward with the former water damage, and stuck out beyond where the wall would go. That part of the wall bowed out a bit when the wall of tiles was there. I can see now exactly what caused my shower head leak. I formerly used a hand held shower head, and would at every shower take it down from the holder and put it back in. Over the years, since there was no support behind the shower head, the pipe moved and weakened, springing a leak. I love seeing the interior workings of things and learning how they work. It took awhile to measure and cut the support pieces to size and screw them down. Then he measured and cut the hole for the shower control handle and the shower head and put the concrete board up and caulked.   Continue reading →

I just received a Facebook message: “Do you remember you did a reading for me at Book and Bead Outlet back in January. You said then that a person that I was having conflict with was going to sort of fade away, not those exact words but that is how I received it. In the meantime we have had less and less interaction and today she told me she had submitted her resignation and was going back to her old job, all because of her conflict with someone else. At any rate I just wanted to let you know that I am blown away by how something you told me then has played out.”

This morning I filled the garden tub early to give the sun time to warm up the water. We removed the tub from the master bath yesterday and set it in the garden. I figured I can let the water sit for a day or overnight at a time.  I am planning my afternoon exercise to be out on the patio, after which I can jump into my tub and cool off and watch the squirrels jump around in the trees. It took me just 7 minutes to fill, it will drain off into the giant bird of paradise outside the main suite.  This is a fun project but I know me — anything that takes upkeep will soon lose its appeal.  Plus I’d have to rig misquito netting from the branch overhead…..  We’ll see.

Yesterday a friend and I hit the floor running at dawn to tackle my master bath. I’d seen water leaking through the wall after a shower and Tod said he’d take a look at it. By the time he got here, I’d decided to remove the tub I installed in 1988 and go back to the original tiled shower stall. I removed the tile and wallboard that had water damage, as well as the little wall I’d built around the tub, then tiled. Most of the tiles were salvageable. I hauled load after load of tiles and drywall out of the bathroom. I cut the caulk around the tub to begin loosening it. I did all this last week. So, by the time Tod and I went to work on it this morning, we had a clear working space. The first thing we did was pull the tub out and set it on the patio outside the master suite, where I’ll create an outdoor spa. Tod took on the task of cleaning up the shower stall using bleach and then Lime Away. Even with the fans on, the chemical smell was strong. I was stunned at how spotless he got the tiles using a scrub brush and a Paul Bunyan sized arm of elbow grease.  Continue reading →

Updated some legal work for friends today, powers of attorney, last will and testament. Is your will current? Does it name who you currently want to have named to receive your stuff? Make sure it does.