Day 2 UK Retreat (Sept 2023) Hindrances and Awakening Factors

Today is probably the first full day that you've had an opportunity to meditate. So it's what Bhante Vimalaramsi would call the first day blues. Because you might meet up with some challenges. You might have some sloth and torpor, where the mind is making adjustments to the schedule and is experiencing tiredness or dullness of mind. Or you might experience a lot of restlessness, where the mind experiences too much energy, too much outpouring of different kinds of thoughts. But that is the theme for today. We will be talking about hindrances and how to deal with hindrances. So what are hindrances? We use the word hindrances in English, but in Pali they are known as nivarana. Obstacles.

So what are the obstacles? There are essentially five different types of hindrances: sensual craving, aversion, restlessness, sloth and torpor, and doubt. So I'll talk about the hindrances, but I'll also talk about the, let's say, antidote to these hindrances, and how it is that these hindrances arise, the cause of these hindrances. So what is sensual craving? Sensual craving is essentially when you're sitting down for meditation and you hear, for example, some kind of ruffling, you know, movement. You might feel a bug crawling up your skin or you might hear birds. And now, since you are experiencing that through one of the physical sense bases, your attention goes to that. And as your attention goes there, your mind starts to think about what it is experiencing.

Your mind starts to create all kinds of projections and ideas and concepts, and then there's what's known as mental proliferation. So now you have sensual craving, craving in the sense that your attention has wavered from its object and gone towards something else. Sensual craving can arise just because of a sound. It can arise because of a sensation. If you're, let's say, meditating outside and it's a nice day out and you feel the breeze, your mind now gravitates towards the breeze or whatever it might be.

So how do you deal with sensual craving? You use right effort. What is right effort? The four R's: relax, re-smile, return. You might go into a loop of thoughts related to experiencing whatever that sensual craving is, and it might go on for some time. Maybe it goes on for a minute, maybe it goes on for two minutes, maybe it goes on for five or ten minutes. That's okay. But as soon as you notice your mind went somewhere, that's the first step. Recognize. Now your mindfulness has come back.

And then you relax. What does it mean to relax? You let go of that. Come back to mind and body. Soften any tension or tightness in the body or mind. Come back to your smile. And then come back to your object of meditation. So sensual craving can arise, as I said, in a multitude of ways. Aversion can arise in a multitude of ways. So what is aversion? It is sort of the umbrella term for anything, as small as getting irritated by the cushion that you are sitting on, to thinking about something that your ex-lover did to you 10 years ago and you want to beat them up, right? That could be irritation, anger, hatred, annoyance, frustration, any of these

experiences are within the scope of aversion. Now, sometimes there can be very strong aversion, and that strong aversion is in the form of, let's say, resentment. Resentment towards whoever it is, or towards whatever has happened in our lives. And because of that resentment, there's too much emotional gunk in the mind for you to experience loving kindness. It's difficult for you to feel any kind of joy or happiness that follows that loving kindness. It's difficult for you to focus on that. And if that happens, and we'll talk about that in your individual interviews, then I will prescribe you what is known as forgiveness practice. There is some, depending upon your experience with it and who has prescribed forgiveness to you before, some hesitation when it comes to forgiveness.

It almost feels like it's a punishment. You know, go stand in that corner until you can come back to loving kindness. That's not how it should be seen. Forgiveness is a very powerful tool, if required. So that process enables you to melt away the stronger resentments that you might have, so that you can experience greater degrees of loving-kindness. But let's say you have other kinds of aversion, right? Just minor annoyances, or you think about something, so how do you deal with that? Right after it again. gone through different kinds of thought loops. And as soon as you recognize that that's the case, those thought loops stop right there and then. The momentum of those thoughts stops right there and then.

As soon as you recognize, then you relax. You let go of any tightness and tension. You come back to your smile, and then you come back to your object of meditation. So that's aversion. And that's craving, and we have aversion. The next is restlessness. Restlessness can arise because of different causes and conditions. Primarily it will arise because there's too much effort going on in your practice.

Now when you bring up the feeling of loving-kindness, you don't have to keep bringing it up. If you use different kinds of statements like, may I be happy, may I be well, and so on, or you use certain kinds of imagery, or you use gratitude as a practice to bring up the feeling of loving kindness, it's like starting up a car. As soon as you turn the ignition, the car engine revs up and you're ready to roll. So you don't have to keep turning the ignition. In the same way, you don't need to keep going back to the imagery. You don't need to keep going back to the gratitude practice.

Once you have the feeling of loving kindness, you let that go. So if somebody is doing that, then what's going to happen? There's going to be restlessness, a lot more energy in the mind, because you keep doing something rather than doing something, letting it go and just sailing with whatever is happening, much effort into it. What does that mean? You become too focused with your attention on the feeling of loving-kindness. I must stay with the feeling of loving-kindness, right? If you create these requirements in your mind, you are going to be met with resistance, and that can come in the form of restlessness. So what does restlessness feel like?

Restlessness can feel like agitation in the mind. It can feel like worry. Maybe you're thinking about the future. Your mind goes into things like, what am I going to do once I get off of retreat? Or what time is lunch? And all of these things. Different kinds of mundane thoughts that will arise. Or it can come in the form of anxiety. And so how do you deal with anxiety when it comes up?

You just come back to the present moment. Soften the mind, relax, let go, let things slow down. Anxiety or restlessness or worry comes about because there's too much energy in the mind. You might experience this when you have too much caffeine and you drink a lot of coffee. What happens? You sit down from practice and it's like 45 minutes to an hour of just out the trash, just dealing with this thought and that thought, this thought, until finally things start to settle down and then you can start to meditate. But by then your legs are paining and you want to get up. So how do you deal with restlessness? It's to bring more tranquility and spaciousness into the mind. So when you feel a lot of energy, back away from the meditation object.

Take a step back in your mind. Allow things to become more spacious. The flip side of restlessness is what's known as sloth and torpor. So sloth and torpor is essentially when you are meditating and you might not have had enough sleep, let's say, or you're adjusting to the schedule, and you notice that you are meditating, and then all of a sudden your head starts to bob up and down. When that happens, it's because there's a lack of attention, a lack of energy in the body. So you might think that you're feeling the loving-kindness, and then there are little holes in your awareness, in your attention, and little gaps that come up. And before you know it, you're no longer on your object and your mind is just blank and you're not thinking about anything in particular.

And when you come back, you're like, I went somewhere, something happened, but your mind is very dull. This is sloth and torpor. It's essentially a lack of proper attention, or inattention. So the analogy I would use is the aperture of a camera, right? If you put too much focus, you're going to have restlessness. Your head will literally pain. You'll find a ring of tension around your head and you push and you try too hard. And followed by that will be all kinds of thoughts, all kinds of agitation. If there's not enough focus and the aperture is too loose, then what's going to happen? what it is that you're seeing. Your mind will dart from this to that and start to go towards dullness instead of staying with the object of meditation.

So you have to find the right balance. You have to be able to understand what the right effort is. Being able to stay with the feeling to the point that there's a sweet spot where there's just an awareness of the feeling and nothing else is required. If you're trying too hard, back away a little bit. If the feeling is out of focus, you can't really see it, bring a little bit more interest. Put a little bit more focus on the object of meditation. And finally, we have what's known as doubt. But doubt can also be understood as confusion. It's not necessarily just doubt in oneself, between what is wholesome and unwholesome. In a sense, being confused about what states of mind are present.

So you might not realize that actually there is aversion present. You might not realize actually there is restlessness present. You might not realize that actually there is loving kindness present. There's, again, lack of proper attention. So this confusion about states of mind is what's known as doubt. Now, there are antidotes to each of these five hindrances. How do you deal with each of these hindrances? Primarily, you will deal with them using right effort, the four Rs. Every time you notice your mind is not on its object of meditation, now that object of meditation for the beginners will be the feeling of loving kindness. For those who've done the six directions, it will be the six directions.

Those who are in quiet mind, it will be the quiet mind, whatever the object is. Now your mind is on the object, and then for a little while it starts to drift away and go somewhere else. Whatever that hindrance is, is whatever that hindrance is. There's no need to be too bothered about trying to figure out what the hindrance is. The fact that you are distracted, the fact that your mind is no longer on its object, is enough for you to know or to recognize. Once you recognize, you relax. Once you relax, come back to the smile. Once you re-smile, come back to the object of meditation. So what does that mean for the beginners? Let's say you bring up a feeling of loving-kindness to yourself, and then you're sending it to your spiritual friend, and then you're staying there maybe

10, 15 seconds, 20 seconds, maybe a couple of minutes, and then all of a sudden your mind is somewhere else. Because there's haziness in your mindfulness, you're not able to recognize immediately that you went somewhere. And then you recognize, I got distracted. Then you relax. Come back to your smile, and then you return. Now, when you return, what does that mean? Does it mean you have to start all over again and bring up loving kindness towards yourself? No, it means wherever you left off, whether it was love and kindness towards yourself or whether it was love and kindness towards a spiritual friend. If you're radiating in the six directions, let's say you're radiating in the first direction and everything is fine.

You radiate in the second direction, everything's fine. The third direction, everything is fine. The fourth direction, now your mind starts to waver, goes somewhere. What do you do? You notice or you recognize you got distracted. You relax, you re-smile, and then return back to the object. Now, does that mean you start over again in the first direction? No. Just go to wherever it is that you left off, right? Go into the fourth direction, and then continue from there. If you are in quiet mind, for those of you who start to go into quiet mind, and you get distracted, what do you do? Do you go back to quiet mind?

always not necessarily so for those of you who are in quiet mind what you would do is you might radiate equanimity again for a little while until the mind starts to drift back into quiet mind that's the way to do it so these five hindrances are there and there are subcategories of these hindrances different variations of these hindrances it's not required to know all of them all you have to know is how do you deal with them when they arise and when you recognize them. There are what is known as enlightenment factors or factors of awakening, the seven factors of awakening. They are mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquility, collectedness, and equanimity. So what is mindfulness?

We talked about this yesterday. What is mindfulness? Mindfulness is remembering to observe how mind's attention moves from one object to the other. In other words, having... So there are two folds to this. There's the mindfulness in recognizing where your mind is and how it moves. And then there's what's known as sampajanna, which means comprehension or to understand. In other words, being able to know when you're walking, you're walking. When you're standing, you're standing. When you're sitting, you're sitting. When you're eating, you're eating. When you're meditating, you're meditating. So what you can try when you are sitting down for meditation is not to be the meditator, but to observe the meditation.

happening. Right, you are not the meditator here. It's like you are sitting down and ready to watch a show, and the show is your mind and whatever is happening in the mind. So this is actually what's known as metacognition, right? The awareness of the mind, the awareness of how mind is doing whatever it is doing. Sit down and you start from that perspective. You will notice that things flow very smoothly, because now you have taken the self out of the picture and now it is just a process of meditation going on, and you're just observing, mind is doing this. Okay, mind is with loving kindness. Oh, mind is back. That's that process of mindfulness. This mindfulness then leads into what's known as dhamma vichaya, which is translated usually as investigation of states.

But investigation here implies, or can imply, a process of analysis, a process of reflection, a process of figuring things out and trying to find out about things. That's not what I would say that process actually is. What that process actually is, is being able to discern what state of mind the mind is in. So mindfulness is knowing the mind has moved, and investigation, or understanding, or perception, or whatever you want to call it, is understanding what state of mind the mind is in. Is no longer on its object. You're doing two things already: you have brought up your mindfulness, realizing your mind went somewhere or the attention of the mind moved, and you're doing the second part, which is the mind is no longer on the object of meditation. That's it. That's as simple as that. If you do any further analysis of oh, what kind of hindrance is this, how did it move, what happened here, what's going on, now you're not meditating. Now you are reflecting.

Now you're analyzing. Now you're contemplating. And that's not the process here. The process is to know you got distracted. That's it. To that extent, now you have mindfulness and you have investigation. That investigation then leads to energy or effort. Virya. Virya in Pali or Sanskrit really means strength. But here it's related to a balanced effort. And so that balanced effort is the effort of abandoning unwholesome states of mind, letting go of unwholesome states of mind. Right? And as a result of relaxing, you're balancing the energy in the mind, and you're bringing up what's known as passaddhi in Pali, which is tranquility. That's another enlightenment factor.

When you relax, you are tranquilizing the body. You're tranquilizing the mind. You're bringing in relaxation. So now you have mindfulness and investigation through recognizing, and you have balanced energy and tranquility through relaxing. The next step is to bring up joy, right? When we talk about joy, it's just the feeling of being a little uplifted. Degrees of joy that you will experience as you continue the meditation. It can be joy in the form of heat in the body, in the form of heat in the hands, in the form of elation, an emotional experience, all kinds of ways. But the joy we're talking about is a mind that's very spacious, alert, and uplifted. And that arises as a result of relaxing.

Remember when I said, when you relax, there's a certain spaciousness that happens in the mind. That spaciousness is a mundane form of nirvana, or nibbana in Pali. It's a mundane form in the sense that you can identify that the mind is free of all conditions in that moment. And then as a result of which you come back to the smile. When you come back to the smile, you uplift the mind. And so now you have joy. If I say that mindfulness leads to investigation, investigation leads to balanced effort, then that balanced effort will lead to joy and then lead to tranquility. But here, joy and tranquility are interdependent. When the mind is joyful, it is also relaxed.

It's tranquil. When a mind is serene, it is generally happy and uplifted, has some level of joy. Now this joy and tranquility will then lead to Samadhi, which is collectedness. So what is Samadhi? In different traditions, Samadhi means different kinds of things. But in this context, when we're talking about the practice of meditation, Samadhi is a form of mental composure, a certain level of collectedness, where the attention of your mind is not dispersed in different directions, right? The analogy would be, you put a light through a prism, it disperses, it refracts into different colors. But if you have a mind that is non-refractive, a mind that is stable and composed, then you are in samadhi.

Even or equal, balanced. And dhi, samadhi, dhi means mind. So the mind is even, the mind is balanced, the mind is composed. So the attention remains non-dispersed. But it is not one-pointed with the object of meditation. It means that it is aware of the object of meditation. It's not trying to become the object of meditation. It's just aware of it. So another analogy I like to use is imagine the object of meditation as the planet. And your attention is the satellite that orbits this planet. Now if that satellite gets too close to the planet, what will happen? It will crash into the Earth. If that satellite is out of orbit, what will happen? It will no longer be in orbit.

It will start to drift away. This is what happens with your attention. So your job, so to speak, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to keep the satellite in orbit as best as you can. If the satellite is too close to the planet, if the attention becomes too close to the object, what happens? You're not able to see the full picture. So that means you need to bring it into balance. You need to use right effort. You need to use the four Rs: space, and allow the orbit to normalize. If the satellite goes away and starts to drift away again, you will recognize that's happened, and now you bring it back into orbit. It's all you have to do. So when I talk about metacognition, it's a process of sitting down and just observing what's going on in the mind. You just bring in a little intention. Okay, bring up loving kindness. Okay, now loving kindness is the main feature. It's the main show that your mind is going to watch for the duration of this practice.

But if you get too close to it, you won't be able to see the entire picture. So you need a level of openness in your awareness. Allow the mind to be open so that even if hindrances come up, you can start to see them from the corner of your eye, so to speak. And as soon as you recognize and let go of them and come back, you're doing okay. And so that's how you sharpen your mindfulness. By being able to have that open awareness. So that if a hindrance pops up, as soon as the hindrance pops up, you notice it, you let go of it, and then you come back. And now you're just watching the show again.

The moment you take away the self from the practice, things start to become much smoother. There's very little resistance that you will find in the meditation practice. So the seven enlightenment factors, as I said, or the awakening factors, are in some sense antidotes to the hindrances. When you talk about mindfulness, mindfulness is the beginning of that. It's the key for everything. You can never have too much mindfulness. Investigation, which allows you to know what states of mind are present and what states of mind are not present. And so that is an antidote for doubt or for confusion. You don't know what state of mind you're in. You recognize and just pay attention. Now you're investigating to that extent.

That's it. Energy, bringing up the balanced energy is the antidote for sloth and torpor. Bringing up a little bit more energy, a little bit more interest, a little bit more focus, starts to grind away at that sloth and torpor. Now, here's another antidote for sloth and torpor. It's understood from the suttas that Buddha has given a few different steps to deal with sloth and torpor. You have sloth and torpor, because once you have a little bit more light, your mind becomes a little bit less closed down. It opens up a little bit more. It's a little bit more radiant. So there's the external light, and then there's the internal light.

The external light is the light of just daylight, natural light, or bringing up a little bit more light in the room. Or there is the internal light, which is the radiance of your mind, which is dependent upon having enough attention to your object of meditation. You can't do that? Go for a walk. See if that helps. You can't do that? Walk backwards. Because the moment you start walking backwards, what happens? You pay more attention to your steps. If you're walking in the forward direction, you can be thinking about a million different things, and somehow you got to your destination without realizing what route you took. When you walk backwards, what happens? Your attention starts to become more focused.

So when you do that, maybe do it for about 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes, and then come back to your sitting and see how you feel. That doesn't work? Take a cold shower. That doesn't work, go for a nap. And when I mean a nap, I mean only 20 minutes at the most. There was one individual at Dhammasuka in Missouri who took my advice about taking naps. And when he came in for the interview, he said everything is great. I said, how's your sloth and torpor? Oh, it's gone away. It's really good. I'm taking these naps. How long are you meditating now? Oh, about 45 minutes. Oh, good. And your naps? Three and a half hours.

So the nap should be 15 to 20 minutes at most, because it's getting you into what's known as non-deep sleep rest. You're getting enough rest in the mind where there's nothing going on, and after 20 minutes, your mind starts to become more uplifted, more attentive, more energized, without any of the grogginess of sleeping for an hour or an hour and a half, whatever it might be. So that's how you deal with sloth and torpor. So that energy or effort is an antidote to that. The joy that you experience is traditionally understood as an antidote to sensual craving. In the coming days we will talk about jhanas, which are levels of meditation. We'll talk about that later.

What the Buddha has said is essentially that there are different kinds of pleasure, different levels of joy. There is the pleasure that is dependent upon the five physical sense bases. The pleasure of eating, the pleasure of watching a movie, the pleasure of sex, the pleasure of whatever it might be. But these are all very temporary pleasures. These pleasures come and go. They're not as stable as we would like them to be, let's say. But there is another kind of pleasure that arises through meditation, through letting go. And so this is the joy that is understood in the Enlightenment Factors. It's called piti in Pali. Piti means there's a vibrancy in the mind. There's a level of being joyful and elated in the mind.

Accessing those levels of joy, the sensual pleasures become less and less interesting naturally. You don't need to suppress them. You don't need to repress them. Just replace them with a higher kind of joy, and then everything else becomes less interesting. So when you start to experience mental joy, the sensual craving becomes less and less interesting. So then from that joy, there's tranquility. What is tranquility? Having a mind that is serene, having a mind that is non-agitated. So whenever you relax the mind, whenever you relax the body, there's tranquility. And that tranquility is a direct antidote for any kind of restlessness, worry, anxiety, or agitation in the mind. So that leads to samadhi, collectedness, as we talked about.

So every time you relax, you let go. And now you have tranquility. You have the balanced effort, you have tranquility. Every time you come back to your re-smile, you have a little bit of that joy. And now when you return back to your object, it's not agitated. It's not sticky. It's not brittle. It's malleable. It flows. So when it flows, now there is proper attention on your object. Now you have mental composure. Now you have samadhi when you return back to your object. As a result of which there is a level of equanimity. So this equanimity, which we will discuss in a few days, is essentially being able to see things as they actually are without getting affected one way or the other.

What does that mean? If your mind is agitated, no big deal. If your mind has sensual craving, that's okay. If your mind is in loving kindness, great, that's good too. If your mind is feeling compassion, great, that's good too. So your mind remains even. That's part of the samadhi, and as a result it's just seeing things as they are, almost like a scientist just taking notes, not having any judgments about what it is experiencing, not having any investment into this. It's just, okay, this is what's going on. So that equanimity is built into the right effort every time you use these four right efforts, every time you do the four R's.

Things up, what you should understand is any of the hindrances that you deal with can be dealt with with just these four R's. Because every time you use the four R's, you bring into balance the seven awakening factors, which are antidotes for these hindrances. So whatever you're doing in terms of the four R's is built into the practice for bringing up these different factors. You don't need to do anything extra. Now, before I ask, open it up for questions, I will give you some instructions for tomorrow's interviews. So, just be mindful of the time.

You have about 10 minutes. So, in those 10 minutes, I'll ask you very simple questions. Three basic questions. What was your object of meditation? sitting and did anything interesting happen, because it used to be five questions, but I'm trying to reduce things bit by bit now, because I would assume that you guys would be using right effort to let go, because one of the questions would have been how did you come back to your object of meditation. So I'm assuming that you all will be using right effort to let go and come back, so I won't be asking that. And the other thing I would ask is how long were you able to stay with your object before it got distracted?

In other words, were you able to stay with the feeling of loving-kindness for 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, on average? It doesn't have to be exact, but you get a sense of it. Your intuition will serve you and say, okay, it was probably, on average, a couple of seconds, or on average, maybe a couple of minutes, or whatever it might be. So I might ask you that or I might not ask you that. It doesn't matter. But these three main questions I'll ask you. What was your object of meditation? What was your longest sitting? Did you sit for an hour? Did you sit for an hour and a half? Did you sit for three hours?

Did you sit for the whole day? Did you sit for 30 minutes? I do not want to hear you sat for 25 minutes or 29 minutes. 30 minutes is the minimum. Okay. Did anything interesting happen when I'm asking you this? I just want to know, what were you doing? Did anything come up? Did you feel joy? Did you feel expansion? Did you feel nothing? Whatever it was, just tell me. So let's keep the interviews to just about the meditation, and you are welcome to ask questions. That's fine, but I am not your therapist. I don't need to hear about what happened to you in the past that you have to deal with.

In essence, you are your own teacher. Your mind is your own teacher. It will guide you. It will show you what is the path. I'm just a facilitator who says, maybe you should try this, or maybe you should try that. Different trails and shortcuts, and things like that. So I'll show you along the way what you might have to do, but ultimately you have to walk the path. Any questions? Everything I talked about for the instruction, whatever it is, just speaking to the mic please. Said once you let go of the self, the meditation becomes so much easier. Yeah. I don't think I know how to drop the self. What is the self? Is it the person?

So you don't need to know how to drop the self. You don't need to know what the self is. All you need to know is you just bring some space in the meditation. Instead of trying to meditate, you're just observing how the mind is meditating, sitting in a back seat, and you've put in the ingredients for the show. You said, okay, I brought up the verbalizing, or I brought up the gratitude practice, or I brought up the imagery, and now the feeling of loving-kindness is there, and now I'm just watching the mind experiencing loving-kindness. If the mind gets distracted, okay, mind is distracted, 6R's or 4R's, and then come back. That's it. The rest of it will take care of itself.

Yeah. I've got a couple of questions, I think. Maybe these are both for meditation interview, but if so, just tell me. One of them was, I mean, today I was very tired. And one of the things I was experiencing was the, energy of the meta, it kind of almost just wanted to be by itself in like a ball of energy. It didn't really particularly want to, I mean, it was very, it didn't particularly want to go out. It was almost, so when it's like that, should I be endeavoring to radiate it out or should I just stay with it? What was your object? Well, it was, either myself or it was a spiritual friend. Okay, then don't do anything.

Just stay with it. It'll do its own thing. You're just there to kind of observe. That's it. Yeah. Okay. And the other question was a bit more conceptual, but I was noticing a lot of things popping into my head, and I was thinking, oh, is that a hindrance? There were certainly distractions, right? And I just wondered, is every distraction a hindrance, or do you get a whole bunch of... So remember what I said yesterday. A distraction is, rather, anytime your attention is fully away from the feeling of loving kindness, which means now you're going down a path of different kinds of thoughts consciously. But if there's a myriad of thoughts in the background and you're still aware of the feeling of loving kindness, then that's not a distraction.

Your mind is just a little bit more open. It's aware of all these things. But as soon as it starts to divert its attention away, you're distracted. Right. Some of these were taking me away, and I'd realized when I came back, but is that... but I didn't analyze it. I wasn't trying to jump in and analyze it, but I was just wondering, popped up. It was like, oh, are all those distractions that take me away, are they one way or another? If I was to analyze them, would they fall into a category of a hindrance? Or can you get distractions that are not particularly hindrances, but they just distract you?

Yeah, that is a good question. I think you would say that they would fall under some kind of category of hindrance. Because even if you can't really decide what the distraction is, it might be just restlessness, right? Or whatever it might be. I wouldn't get too hung up on distraction versus hindrance. I would use those interchangeably. If I'm experiencing a flow of love and kindness, and then I come back to meditate, can I just meditate on the loving kindness without necessarily thinking about a spiritual friend? The spiritual friend is just where the loving kindness is directed towards. If you're feeling loving kindness towards yourself, that's a great start. But now you want to have the loving kindness towards another being.

That's your spiritual friend. And as I said, you could either think of them in front of you and you're connecting heart to heart. The friend is in your heart and you're feeling the loving kindness and they're basking in it. Whatever seems easier for you, you do that. But the idea here is that the loving kindness is not just about yourself, but now it's starting to be about other beings as well. And what happens if the other person drops away and there's just a feeling of loving kindness? Can that be okay as well? You want to always have somebody there. Okay. And by the way, the spiritual friend doesn't change. It's the same spiritual friend.

So choose wisely. If we're still with a wholesome state of mind and a smile on our face, but we're lost in a pleasant daydream, is this just then a simple release? Or is there still a relax required? Still some relaxing required. Yeah. Okay. No more questions? Okay. Good. Let's share some merit. May suffering once be suffering free and the fear struck fearless be. May the grieving shed all grief and may all beings find relief. May all beings share this merit that we have thus acquired for the acquisition of all kinds of happiness. May beings inhabiting space and earth, devas and nagas of mighty power share this merit of ours. May they long protect the Buddha's dispensation. Thank you.