42 Imagining Loving-Kindness for Oneself

Alan Wallace guides us through the immeasurable of
loving-kindness, leading us to imagine our own happiness both on
a hedonic and a deeper level.


The guided meditation begins at 9:50 in the recording.


He then answers the following questions from the group:


1. Can you elaborate on the use of imagery to stabilize
meditation?


2. Almost every evening you say "Let your awareness descend into
the body as your first act of loving-kindness." My question is,
where is the awareness, and is it a cultural dysfunction that it
isn't with us?


3. When doing the stretching exercise in awareness of awareness,
we go in many directions (left, right, up, down) but not forwards
and backwards. Why?


4. In the same practice, why, when we come back after stretching
in one direction, does our awareness "release" instead of
returning the way it came?


5. I'm always flummoxed when we do a loving-kindness meditation
like today, and you ask us to ask for what we want and need. I
feel I have everything I want and need, and I see how others live
with so much less, so I don't want to ask for more.


6. Is our dreaming awareness different from our waking awareness?