Meditation Compassion and Lovingkindness (An Approach To Vipassana Practice)

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Vipassana Meditation is not something that we only do a little of each day it becomes the way we live all day every day, so that we work with all life’s situations and find peace and happiness everywhere.

If you practice meditation this is the book you’ll want to take every where with you! Steve and Rosemary Weissman offer insights into the development process because when you start to meditate you eventually will look at all the problems that people on the spiritual path want to overcome. How do you deal with anger, fear, greed, aversion or being judgmental? The Weissmans offer a guided meditation to help get rid of feeling of guilt and lack of self worth they present a way to learn how to look at the world around you with compassion and lovingkindness. Full of practical information this is a resource that you’ll use over and over again and you may want to give it to a friend.

The Weissmans teach meditation retreats at the Wat Kow Tahm Meditation center in Thailand. They also teach in the United States and at their Center in Australia. This book was written at the request of people who have studied with them for many students of Vipassana meditation wanted a ready reference to take home. Included with the text is basic instruction for working with meditation postures sitting standing lying and walking so you can learn to use Vipassana Mediation techniques everywhere you go.

This book is a collection of selected teachings used during 10 day meditation retreats we lead at Wat Kow Tahm international meditation Center Koh Pahngan Thailand. These retreats have been designed as a basic introduction to many of the methods found within Buddhist teachings for training the mind in order to find deep inner peace and wisdom.

The emphasis of the retreats is the developments of beneficial qualities such as compassion, Lovingkindness, equanimity, joy, patience, perseverance endurance, energy understanding and wisdom. The retreats help people let go of unbeneficial qualities such as greed hatred anger jealousy fear worry grief and ignorance.

An important part of this type of mental training is to develop keen awareness of our actions speech and thoughts. This awareness also referred to as mindfulness is essential in order to develop clarity and strength in the mind. With this clarity and strength we are than able to see which actions words or thoughts lead to stress and difficulties and which lead to peace and harmony in ourselves and in others.

Developing this understanding enables us to learn how to let go of the stress and difficulties that come from our attachment to greed aversion and ignorance.

We have found in our own practice that the development of mind fullness and the letting go of difficulties have been aided greatly by the development of a compassionate intention behind and a compassionate attitude toward our actions, speech, and thoughts. A compassionate attitude encourages us not to cause harm or difficulty for ourselves or others. The more we develop compassion within the more we see that mindfulness is an extremely valuable way to develop understanding of life in all aspects. Then with this understanding we can work toward increasing beneficial qualities and lessening unbeneficial qualities. This will create the causes and conditions that eventually will produce more peace contentment and deeper happiness.

We began teaching at Wat Kow Tahm in 1987 at the request of the head nun there. She asked us to give meditation instruction to the many Western travelers who come to Koh Pahngan and find their way to this small hilltop forest monastery. As the number of visitors increased and as we saw the potential for offering more formal teaching we initiated the current format of intensive 10-day retreats in 1988. Since then we also have taught in the USA and in Australia.

Meditation compassion & Lovingkindness offers selections from our retreat talks organized in an easy to read inspirational format. When we first started to prepare this book we had the following thoughts in mind we wanted to select sections of our talks which could stand by themselves as being inspirational sometimes just a few words sometimes a paragraph or more sometimes a two or three page story. We wanted a book that could be opened to any page a book to have as food for thought additionally if the reader wished a book which could be read from page one to the end.

If you do read is straight through we would like to encourage you to pause from time to time to allow the teachings to settle within. We recommend this due to the nature of the concept of selected teachings rather than condensed talks. This can be especially helpful when it is obvious that the particular teaching was not meant to flow on to the next.

If you do read is straight through we would like to encourage you to pause from time to time to allow the teachings to settle within. We recommend this due to the nature of the concept of selected teachings rather than condensed talks. This can be especially helpful when it is obvious that the particular teachings was not meant to flow on to the next.

Meditation compassion & lovingkindness is a book that can travel with you. It can sit in your car ready for rush hour or other traffic delays. It can carried in your side bag for the ride on the bus train airplane. It can go with you on camping trips to the beach or wherever you go. It is a book that can be opened at odd times, anywhere or during the quiet moments in your home read a little then closed and reflected upon taken inside for a while.

An appendix with some basic formal meditation instruction has been added at the end of this book. If you have never practiced formal meditation you need not worry this book has been designed for the benefit of both meditators and non meditators.

We would like to express our deepest appreciation for the hospitality encouragement and support that we have received that we have received at Wat Kow Tahm by the head Nun, Mae Chee Ah Mohm Pahn and the other nuns and monks of the monastery during our years of teaching here.

A special thank you to Abby karp for helping edit and type this book. Special thanks also to Ruth Weissman, Peter Sudworth, Elaine Karp Gelenter, Steve karp and other friends in Baltimore to Kay Zumwinkel from Germany to John Douthitt and to Hazel Forbes.

We hope our book will help you all to find more peace contentment patience lovingkindness, equanimity, joy, acceptance, wisdom and compassionate understanding.