Starting A New Tradition – Send Some Lovingkindness on the Equinox!
I’ve had this woo-woo, new-agey idea kicking
around my head since early 2007. It first popped into my consciousness
during a weekend seminar on Energy Leadership, conducted by the amazing
teachers at the Institute of Professional Excellence in Coaching (IPEC), from
which I received my coaching instruction and certifications.
For the final project of our training that
weekend, we were encouraged to “think outside of the box” and come up with
original, radical ideas that would spread the concept of Energy Leadership.
(What is Energy Leadership? The mastery of one’s actions and reactions
through increased self-awareness. By acknowledging and accepting
responsibility for our thoughts and beliefs, and the emotions and behaviors we
allow them to produce, we can better choose our responses to the slings and
arrows of life. We can decide the grace - or lack thereof - with which we
navigate through our days, and better determine our own experience of life.
Yes, really.) And the top four ideas would win fabulous prizes!
It came to me on the morning of the 2nd
day of the seminar: Start a tsunami of metta* – loving kindness, compassion,
benevolence, fellowship, peace, goodwill, higher consciousness, positive energy
- that circumnavigates the entire globe, picking up power and participants as
it travels around the world. Literally. (Yes, sports fans – the very
same metta as in Metta World Peace, the moniker adopted by NBA champ formerly
known as Ron Artest.)
The hows were easy, made perfect sense: on a
day of significance shared by everyone on the planet such as the equinoxes or
solstices, starting at, say, the 1st heavily populated time zone in
the Western Hemisphere (called, believe it or not, Western Greenland Time and
includes Brazil), at noon, each and every one of us in that time zone would
dedicate one or five, fifteen, or however many minutes of their “lunch hour” to
sending positive thoughts, heartfelt and sincere, to someone, anyone.
Could be a neighbor in need. A sick friend. A struggling family
member. A dying stranger. A person in pain. A victim of war
or strife in a faraway land. Mother Earth herself. Anyone we feel
could use some kindness and consideration. A prayer. A dash of
hope. A little love.
This ripple of lovingkindess would flow into
the next time zone, where it would pick up momentum and power as residents
there would, beginning at noon, dedicate a few minutes of their busy day to
meditation or prayer for another in need. And as the world turns, the
ripple would grow into a wave into a veritable tsunami of peace, positivity and
pure potential as is flowed from time zone to time zone, across continents and
oceans and cultures and peoples, encircling the earth and uniting the world in
a warm embrace of hope and possibility.
Kooky, I know. Out there. But
when my idea won 2nd prize at the Energy Leadership seminar, I
assumed it wasn’t entirely insane. That year I sent it to a few entities
I thought might find it intriguing: Oprah, The Omega Institute, The Agape
International Spiritual Center, and such. No reply. Then, after the
March 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear meltdown that devastated
Japan, a more established voice than mine called for a similar practice.
You may remember Dr. Masaru Emoto, author of Messages of The Water, from the documentary “What The Bleep Do We
Know?” (His experiments, admittedly more metaphysics than physics, show
the influence of positive and negative thoughts on the structure of water
crystals.) In response to the tragedy, Dr. Emoto called for a Prayer for
Japan: on March 31, 2011, at noon in every time zone, he asked people to
say a prayer of thanks and healing for the waters of and around the damaged
Fukushima Power Plant. He, too, hoped to encourage a tsunami of
different, kinder, healing kind.
So this year, on the vernal equinox (which
takes place during the wee hours of Tuesday, March 20th), I propose
that we all dedicate a few minutes of our lunchtime to sending some metta to
someone, anyone, who might benefit from a little lovingkindness. It could
take the form of a quiet prayer, a brief (or lengthy!!!) meditation, a
dedication of a class or project. Just a moment when we put our own oh-so-important
needs and preoccupations and troubles and obligations aside, and focus our
attention on generating and sending some healing, helpful, hopeful energy to
another, somewhere, anywhere.
Some suggested practices:
1. Here is a classic, simple metta, or
lovingkindness, meditation you can do anywhere, any time, for any length of
time, for any one. (Including yourself.)
May
(name) be happy,
may
(name) be free of pain and suffering,
may
(name) be healthy,
may
(name) be fulfilled and joyful
may
(name) enjoy grace, peace and love
2. Try a very basic tonglen**, or “giving
and receiving” meditation, where you simply breathe in the pain and suffering
of another, and breath out lightness, blessings, grace, good health, love and/or joy in
its place. Offer the best of
yourself, your talents and strength; release it out into the universe in service
to those in need.
3. Dedicate your yoga class or morning
jog, the cake you’re baking, the housework (laundry, dishes, vacuuming, etc.)
you’re doing, the project you’re working on, to another. Notice how much
more of yourself you bring to the practice, how much quicker and lighter the burden
becomes, how much better you yourself feel as a result.
Trust that the person or people to whom you
dedicate and send your metta will receive the benefits of your practice.
And, in perfect paradox, with the giving, you
shall receive. You may
notice some important fringe benefits from the giving of metta : You’ll
feel more relaxed. Calmer. Lighter. At peace. You may
even smile. You might feel the impulse to do it again. And again.
And again. You may find that the more you give, the more you'll have to
give. The more you'll want to give.
So simple. So inexpensive.
So easy. Imagine if we were
to create and send this tsunami of compassion and lovingkindness each and every
equinox, each and every solstice. How
much better we all could feel, how much awareness, compassion and light we
could generate. How much we all
would get in the giving.
** For more on tonglen meditation, check out Awakening The Buddhist Heart by Lama
Surva Das and .
© 2012 Tess Quadrozzi,
A-Muse-In-Manhattan
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