Meditation on Forgiveness.

II. Before you begin your meditation, we ask you assess and take notes on your own state of mind during the 24 hour period leading up to the meditation.

A. First, take note of the moods you’ve experienced.

-I woke up this morning with a sore throat, and I felt very sick and exhausted the whole day. Even doing really basic things got me really tired.

Also maybe its the sore throat, but I got annoyed easily at small things.

B. Assess your overall level of anxiety on a scale of 1 to 10.

– I would rate the level of my anxiety to be 6/10; its bed time right now and thinking about going to bed soothes me.

C. Assess the level of physical tension in your body- where do you notice the tension? Try rating your overall tension on a scale of 1 to 10.

– Obviously I feel a lot of tension in my throat. Beside that my head, shoulders and toes are feeling the tension. Physical tension around 6/10, given that I just took a nice bath.

III. After you have finished your meditation, re-asses your state of mind and body.
A. Reassess your mood on the chart.

– I feel slightly calm and hopeful, but still tired. And my body feels very warm.

B. Reassess your level of anxiety from 1 to 10.

-I would rate the level my anxiety to be 4/10.

C. Reasses your level of physical tension and rate it from 1 to 10.

-Physical tension to be 4/10.

IV. Describe the experience– What type of meditation did you choose? Describe what was going on in your mind and your body, what kind of thoughts and sensations did you experience during the meditation? Were there any challenging or frustrating aspects of the experience, and if so, what were they? Would you try this again in the future? Why or why not?

-I chose the meditation Guided Meditation on Forgiveness by Gil Fronsdal.

While listening to the audio, Fronsdal asks the listener to repeatedly say out things like ‘I forgive those who caused harm to me, I forgive myself for causing harm to others and I forgive myself for causing harm to myself.’ While saying those words out loud, it was quite emotional, because you start thinking about the mistakes you made that hurt people, you cared about. Even the small things!

The part that I  loved the most was when Fronsdal reads out a poem by Buddha which ends something like this, “May all beings be happy”. We are at an age where we are so preoccupied with our wants and desires that we forget there are other beings that also exists who only wishes for simple basic needs. The sentence wishes for every beings happiness and that was quite touching and it warmed my heart.

I did not come across any frustrating thing during the meditation process. But maybe not knowing what to do next could count as one challenging thing. Or maybe that is a task in itself.

I meditate occasionally, and therefore would definitely do it again. Meditation helps you to relax and calm down and I would definitely not pass up on something like that.