A few weeks ago, I posted the text and instructions for a meditation designed to find purpose and direction through cultivating loving kindness, in the grandest old Buddhist tradition. In my experience, the meditation is a great way to quiet the needy voice of the ego so that Spirit can speak, restoring the connection to your highest goals. I also noted that I’d recorded a guided version of the meditation, useful if you’d rather not memorize the whole thing ahead of time, downloadable here.

But an Attentive Reader, Claire from Ireland, pointed out that there was a huge contradiction between the text of the meditation and an earlier post of mine on the proper phrasing of affirmations. In that post, I wrote about negation, vagueness, and other kinds of language that ought to be avoided when stating your intentions for Spirit. If evidence from phonosemantics is to be believed, negation (like “no”, “not”) and vagueness (”all”, “some”), and time dependencies (”will”) are completely ignored by Spirit, so that an affirmation like “I will not gain weight” changes into “I gain weight”. But Claire noticed that the text of the meditation is full of negatives, right from the very beginning:

May I be free from anger.
May I be free from sadness.
May I be free from pain.
May I be free from all suffering.

Confusing the issue further: Claire had downloaded the meditation and listened to it, and noticed that in the recording, almost all of these negative statements were replaced with positives:

May I be full of love.
May I be full of joy.
May I be full of good will.
May I be free from all suffering.

As Claire says:

In the recorded meditation … you only use one negative: May I (or they) be free from all suffering. There, the rest of the list is phrased positively. In the article, they’re about equally balanced between positive and negative. I have occasionally used a version like the one from your post since I was a teenager (i.e. on and off for over ten years), and I know from my own experience that if I’m very down and hating myself then it’s much more likely I’ll get stuck on the negative words and resonate with anger, pain and suffering than that I’ll be able to conjure a positive feeling to counter them. I haven’t used this meditation for a few years, which is why I downloaded your guide. I definitely hadn’t heard of intention-manifestation back when I was using it, so I wouldn’t have been paying any attention to how the affirmations were phrased. Today, having encountered the two different versions one after the other, and with the memory of your recent post (which really resonated with me) fresh in my mind, the difference was striking.

I totally goofed on this one!!

When I started recording the meditation, I noticed that the text I’d prepared was quite negative; I could feel the negative energy as I was speaking, sure enough! So I quickly tried to fix it. That’s what I recorded. Then later, when I was writing the article, I totally forgot about that, and just used my original text. Whoops!!

Banishing Negativity

Claire went on to muse with a great deal of insight about the best way to fix the text:

I can’t think of how to re-phrase some of the affirmations in a positive manner. What is the opposite of anger, for example? Somehow ‘peace’ feels different to me, broader somehow, than simply ‘not angry’. Similarly, one does not have to feel joy to not feel sadness — peace could cover that as well, or simply emptiness, or… Perhaps it’s necessary to identify the negatives in order to reject them? I was thinking of immediately countering each one, perhaps like this:

I love myself.
May I be free from anger.
May I be filled with loving kindness.
May I be free from sadness.
May I be happy.
May I be free from pain.
May my body be healthy and strong.
May I be free from all suffering.
May I be at peace.
but that feels all wrong, somehow. The four positives at the end build up a powerful feeling for me which this order doesn’t deliver. Any suggestions? I really liked the positive build-up in your recorded version, but maybe it’s good to remember what you’re trying to get rid of? It kind of corresponds to the release of fear…maybe it’s good to acknowledge that you have these negative feelings, then consciously replace them with positives? Perhaps run through the list at the start of the meditation, then focus on the positive? Maybe something like:

Anger vanishes.
Sadness vanishes.
Pain vanishes.
All suffering vanishes.

I like in particular the way Claire ties our emotional states into the communication we’re trying to make with Spirit. I think she’s right to focus on how the words make us feel — it’s much more important than their literal meaning. But I also agree that it’s important to evoke somehow the feelings you’re trying to banish, to acknowledge them and replace them. I’d argue, though, that you can do that without actually naming the emotions involved. The key is in understanding how opposites work.

The Opposite of Anger is…

Most people would say that the opposite of something — say, “X” — is “not X”, but that isn’t the case at all. The opposite of happy isn’t not-happy, it’s sad; and the distinction here is crucial. Not-happy includes all kinds of emotional states — melancholy, depressed, or angry, grumpy — or any other negative emotion. It also includes apathy, or the lack of any emotion; and it includes logic, and green, and anything else that’s not an emotion at all. But the opposite of happy isn’t any of that; it’s sad. Why? Because happy is a very simple, generic positive emotion, and its opposite needs to be a very simple, generic negative emotion. In other words, sad is just like happy except for one crucial difference.

Take another example: what’s the opposite of black? White, of course! Not any other color or shade, not music or logic or bananas or anything like that. Black is the absence of all kinds of light, and its opposite needs to be the presence of all kinds of light (ideally, all colors of light together in equal proportion). In other words, white is just like black, except for one crucial difference.

So this is how opposites work in human language. Amazing how linguistics can come in so handy in totally unexpected places!

So what is the opposite of anger? It really depends on what you think anger is. The American Heritage, my favorite dictionary, says it’s “a strong feeling of displeasure or hostility”; so we want something that means “a strong feeling of pleasure or non-hostility“. Joy is a pretty good candidate, but I don’t think it carries the idea of non-hostility far enough: anger is such a targeted emotion, we really need something that means “welcoming” or “taking delight in something”. The best word I know of is love.

The same exercise needs to be carried out with the other words in the meditation. I didn’t do this much analysis when I did my quick rewrite for the recording, so the phrasing could undoubtedly be improved by going through it more carefully.

Notice that doing this addresses the issue of acknowledging and banishing the bad emotion at the same time. Because you’re taking “anger” and finding out what it’s made of, and identifying an emotion that is its real opposite, you’re really targeting every part of anger and replacing it with its opposite. Contained in the word love is all the information you need to identify anger and dispell it.

Positive Loving Kindness

So below is the text of the meditation as it appears in the recording. There are still a few negative statements in it, but for the most part everything has been converted to positives. See if you can feel the difference, too.

I love myself.
May I be full of love.
May I be full of joy.
May I be full of good will.
May I be free from all suffering.
May my body be healthy and strong.
May I be filled with loving kindness.
May I be happy.
May I be at peace.

I spread this loving kindness out.

I send love to those who are dear to me.
May their difficulties fall away.
May they be full of love and strength.
May they feel only joy and good will. May they be healthy and happy.
May they be at peace.

I send loving kindness to my friends and associates.
May they be full of love, peace, and joy.
May they feel compassion and goodwill. May they be healthy and happy.
May they be at peace.

I send love and kindness to all the people of the world, known and unknown, everywhere on earth.
May all on this planet be free from suffering.
May they be full of joy, goodwill, and hope.
May they be happy and at peace.

May all beings in the universe be free from suffering.
May all beings in all universes, everywhere, be free from suffering.
May they be well, and happy, and at peace.

May all beings of all kinds, in all directions, be happy and at peace.
Above and below, near and far, high and low.
All types of beings.
Humans and non-humans. Seen and unseen. May they be happy; may they be at peace.

I open my heart and receive loving kindness of all beings in return.
I let that love into my heart.

May all be well and happy.
May there be peace.

One of the basic principles of the Order of the White Oak is social action:

We wish to apply the ethical insights we derive from the ancient Celtic past to contemporary concerns; environmental and ecological issues, human rights and social issues, and many other national and international peace and social justice issues that are of rapidly increasing importance.

Our understanding of the roles of the ancient Druid prompts us to follow them in an involvement in the academic, artistic and social justice arenas, as well as in purely spiritual and religious matters.

I haven’t had much of a chance to take on that role here at Druid Journal so far, but it’s certainly my intent to do more of it in the future.

Tara is the ancient seat of the kings of Ireland; it’s a hillside at the mythopoeic center of Ireland, where the nobles and chiefs would come every year to pay homage to the king and reaffirm the ties that bound the island together. The whole countryside there is riddled with archaeological sites, most of which remain unexplored because the country simply cannot afford to examine them all.

Now the government of Ireland is planning — indeed, they have already begun — to rip a huge road right through the center of this area, destroying who-knows-how-many irreplaceable sites in the process. Read the rest of this entry »

Every once in a while, I get really, really, really caught up in my goals. Sometimes it’s because I am so very excited about them, I’m on the edge of my seat — like I’m watching a basketball game or exciting movie — I just can’t wait to see whether my goal will be met, and how.

Sometimes, though, it’s just the opposite. I don’t know what my goals should be; and it feels like no matter how hard I strain my intuition, my logic, or my emotion, I just can’t figure out what I ought to be doing with my time. My old goals that fired me up a month ago seem lifeless or petty; and all the new ones I come up with seem boring, or too ambitious, or out of character for me, or inappropriate somehow.

When I’m in this state, it’s like I’m deaf or blind. I’m so wrapped up in my worry, I can’t really hear music, or see the colors in the sky or the trees. I can see them — but I don’t. It’s like I’ve forgotten how.

Either way, I end up thrashing around rudderless and graceless until I catch myself up short. “Whoa, Nelly!” I say to myself. “Slow down before you hurt somebody.”

Your Ego is Screaming

I’ve let my ego take over. It’s talking so loudly, I can’t hear anything else. Either it’s totally self-absorbed in chasing its little goals, or it’s afraid of picking the wrong goals, and its fear is making it deaf.

And in both situations, the solution is the same: put the ego to sleep for a while. Read the rest of this entry »