October 23, 2018 Group Meditation Part 2 of 2
This talk happened October 23, 2018 at the Boundless Love Project’s Group Meditation. Before listening to the talk, we suggest you listen to this balancing compassion meditation, which preceded the talk. This talk is the forth talk in the series, Being Medicine: How to Heal Yourself and the World.
Loving Intentions Carry You to Unconditional Love
Loving intentions are the wind in the sails that will move us from the sea of delusion to the ocean of unconditional love, peace, joy, and freedom.
However, just like with our thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations, we do not have full control over our intentions. They operate according to natural laws that we do not control. Thus, we let go of needing or expecting to control our intentions and accept them as they are, without suppressing them or acting them out unskillfully.
What we do have control over is what can be called pre-intentions or intentional intentions. These are a choice, decision, or strong resolve for how you want to show up in life. Loving intentions are pre-intentions in that it is a commitment to show up with love, even when we don’t feel like it. We commit to love, then we do the best we can to follow through with this commitment. These loving intentions fuel our whole spiritual evolution.
Try working with these three powerful loving intentions. If you commit to these loving intentions, they will hasten your spiritual evolution. Be sure to review them daily if not more.
I resolve to treat myself with unconditional love. (Or I resolve to be peaceful and happy in every moment.)
I resolve to treat all people, beings, and life forms with unconditional love.
I resolve to be continuously mindful and note what supports and sabotages my efforts to treat myself and others with unconditional love and maintain continual mindfulness.
Of course, intentional love does not work alone. Intentional love needs concentration and mindfulness. Concentration and mindfulness allow us to calmly observe our intentions, thoughts, emotions, and sensations so we can notice which ones aid us in living our loving intentions, and which ones do not. By mindfully observing our experience, we see how delusional thoughts create our suffering and inspire unskillful actions when these thoughts are mistaken to be the truth. We cultivate the skills of concentration and mindfulness through daily meditation and by trying to mindfully live in the present moment at all times.
In addition to concentration and mindfulness, loving intentions need inquiry. Inquiry provides the ability to investigate, challenge, and refute our delusional thoughts so we can see the falsehood and lie in them. Only when we clearly see how these thoughts are not true, do we stop believing them.
When we see a lie in a delusional thought, we “deactivate” it. Deactivated thoughts have no power over us. Because delusional thoughts are the root cause of our emotional and psychological suffering, when we stop believing them, our suffering goes away, and we remain connected to our true self which is the source of our inner love, peace, compassion, and joy. The more we mindfully deactivate delusional thoughts in this way, the less frequently such delusional thoughts arise, and the less frequently unskillful intentions arise too.
Thus through intentional love, concentration, mindfulness, and inquiry, we live with more and more love, peace, compassion, and joy. These factors, working together, help purify our intentions, purify our thoughts, and purify our actions. Everything we do becomes more loving and more skillful. And the more skillful we are, the more able we are to heal ourselves and our world.