Please see the following suttas in relation to forgiveness:

In this sutta, the Buddha doesn’t accept the harm from another. Thus he doesn’t get inflicted to the point that he needs to Forgive.

https://suttacentral.net/sn7.2/en/sujato

And this sutta, number 21 the first section, shows the importance of understanding one’s own mistakes and forgiving others’ mistakes.

https://suttacentral.net/an2.21-31/en/sujato

For more information on how to practice Forgiveness, see

Revised Instructions

Bhante Vimalaramsi created a powerful Forgiveness meditation, which he then practiced himself for two years. On his website you will find free resources and excellent instructions.

Revised Instructions

Bhante Vimalaramsi created a powerful Forgiveness meditation, which he then practiced himself for two years. On his website you will find free resources and excellent instructions.

Revised Instructions

If you are meditating and a headache, or some sort of painful feeling in the head, starts to arise, yes, it’s probably because you are trying too hard.

Remember, meditating and letting go of hindrances is not supposed to be a fight.

Follow this link for lots of help. 

TRYING TOO HARD

Good question. This is a deviation that Bhante Vimalaramsi did. He took it from the Visuddhimagga. It turned out to make the meditation easier for people to start with. It’s like using training wheels for a while. 

Instead of sending Metta to all directions and all beings as per the suttas, you first start with just one person that you admire – someone who makes you smile, when you think of them. 

 You start small, as your feeling of Metta is still weak and is just getting started. It’s much easier to dwell on one person, than on all beings at once.  The Metta initially gets too diffused or watered down when it goes into the directions. 

So, you start with a Spiritual Friend to get familiar with the process of the 6R’s. Once the Metta has built up to the level of the fourth Jhana, you will learn to radiate in the directions and to all beings.

Contact a teacher here if you’re not sure whether your practice has progressed to the fourth Jhana. They will advice you on how to progress.

Please check below if you want to know more about how to pick a suitable spiritual friend:

https://www.dhammasukha.org/getting-started-with-twim.html

We recommend doing Metta; it is much faster, and more pleasant than breathing meditation. Listen to bhante Vimalaramsi’s explanation:

Comparing Metta with breathing meditation

If you have practiced Breath or Anapanasati before, it is likely you didn’t practice it the way we teach it. We teach it using the 6R’s, and the Relax step, which is fundamentally different. It is in line with what the Buddha described as Right Effort.

We prefer people to learn a new type of meditation. That way, you don’t run the risk of accidentally falling back into old habits of suppressing hindrances. Please, don’t even consider breath. 

According to Bhante Vimalaramsi, it is almost unheard of if people truly can’t practice Metta meditation. Just stay with Metta – It takes a little bit of practice, that is all.

And besides, this world could do with a bit more Loving-kindness.

Group Support

If you need more advice, feel free to join our international community. Questions are always answered and you will get a great deal of encouragement from your fellow meditators!

https://groups.io/g/dhammasukha

Don’t worry! In the beginning, it can be difficult or awkward to bring up that warm, glowing feeling of Loving-kindness. 

These videos may help you to bring this feeling of Loving-kindness back into your meditation:

The feeling doesn’t need to be very strong; a little spark is enough! If you look into the eyes of a baby, do you need to try to feel love? Is it hard to feel it while playing with a puppy? Or while sitting on a bench in a park, on a pleasant day, watching people go by?

Develop this feeling one sit at a time and you will be going down the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. You use the Brahma Viharas to become awakened. Developing a smile will make this practice much easier.

For more information, read this helpful article:

https://www.dhammasukha.org/cant-find-the-feeling.html

Smiling is incredibly helpful in developing an uplifted and light mind. There is scientific evidence that smiling changes our brain chemistry. It’s like the brain thinks: Oh, the mouth is smiling. I must be happy then! You ‘fake’ it until you make it!

Right Effort

Seriously, we are developing Right Effort – What is that?  

1. Recognizing there is an unwholesome feeling
2. Letting go of that feeling
3. Bringing up a wholesome state (Smiling is one way)
4. Keep it going

This is the Buddha’s Right Effort, a part of the Noble Eightfold Path. We just transformed it into an easy to remember shorthand, calling it

the 6 R’s:

Recognize

 Release

Relax

Re-smile

Return

Repeat

You 6R whenever your mind strays from your meditation object, so whenever a hindrance arises.

Smile all the time. Smile with your lips, your eyes, and particularly with your heart and mind.

Are you washing the dishes? You can do that with a smile. Practicing walking or sitting meditation? Smile the entire session!

And smile at strangers. Though this might seem a bit scary at first, it turns out that most people love it and will smile back!

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-psychological-study-of-smiling

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/21/simple-trick-that-can-make-you-happier-according-to-research.html

Instructions for Metta Meditation and the 6Rs by Bhante Vimalaramsi

Options

As you will see below, we have many options available to learn this type of meditation. There are booklets in many translations, as well as an excellent YouTube channel (updated often). Of course you are more than welcome to ask any questions in our international community.

What is TWIM

TWIM stands for Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation. It is being taught by Buddhist monk bhante Vimalaramsi. Nowadays there are also many experienced teachers that will coach you, free of charge.

Loving-kindness

TWIM meditation uses the four Brahma Viharas. These are more commonly known as Loving-kindness or Metta, Compassion or Karuna, Empathetic Joy or Mudita and Equanimity or Upekkha.

Difference with other practices

This meditation practice bases itself on truly releasing and letting go of hindrances. It doesn’t suppress them in any way. The Buddha stressed mindfulness and Jhanas should be practiced at the same time!

Feel better

You’ll start to experience lasting personality changes and it doesn’t even take that long. Mental problems like anxiety, depression, traumas, irritability and even PTSD, start to lessen quite soon. This is because the root causes are being addressed.

Insight and Serenity yoked together

TWIM meditation teaches you how to be mindful of whatever arises, while simultaneously entering into a state of collectedness.

Here, you gently release any type of craving. You will let go of the commonly known five Hindrances; lust, anger, restlessness, sloth & torpor and doubt. But other emotions like fear and jealousy are being addressed as well.

No religion

Practice TWIM no matter whether you are religious or an atheist. You don’t even have to become a Buddhist! The Buddha was not interested in making us ‘Buddhist’. He taught one thing, and one thing only;

How to recognize and make an end of suffering

This is what you will learn in practicing TWIM meditation. This method guides you through the entire Noble Eightfold Path.

Nibbana

While this practice leads to the four stages of Nibbana, there is no need to wait until that happens. It lessens grief and distress bit by bit, starting from day one.

Resources

https://library.dhammasukha.org/books.html

https://groups.io/g/dhammasukha

https://suttavada.foundation/questions-and-answers/single-faq/what-is-the-6r-meditation-and-how-to-practice-this

This question came up in the Online 10-day Retreat Nov 3, 2020, guided by Delson Armstrong. Day 2 was part of a daily 30 -minute discussion on the suttas, the Dhamma talk and reflections.

Slightly edited to improve readability  

I would say that, if you want to just choose one and stay with that, and if there’s some piece of information that really resonates and pick up on that, that’s fine.

I do understand, because we were doing like a focus group for the text, before the retreat. It was not intended for this retreat primarily; it was going to be for the retreat that I was going to do in Europe. But since we had the opportunity to do an online retreat, I then divided it up for that.

But basically, the focus group said the same thing, which is that there’s quite a lot of stuff in there. It would take some time to really decompress it for people’s minds.

But if there’s certain things in there, that you pick up on, that you really want to just explore on your own, you’re welcome to.

It’s not like you need to necessarily follow along. If you need more time to develop your practice around certain elements of the text, or it feels like you need to slow down your pace, that’s fine too. So, you should do this at your own pace.

Watch it here

This question came up in the Online 10-day Retreat Nov 3, 2020, guided by Delson Armstrong. Day 0 was part of a daily 30-minute discussion on the suttas, the Dhamma talk and reflections.

(Slightly edited to improve readability)

The materials – the suttas and the videos – are really to start to get an understanding of the different parts of the Eightfold Path. We start off with what is known as Effective Choice and Effective Application. That’s talking about Right Intention and Right Effort, that is really the basis.

As you get deeper, you’re going to Mindfulness, or Effective Observation; Samadhi, or what is the Collectedness – we don’t like to use the word concentration – and then you start to get into deeper subjects, like Kamma, Rebirth and Consciousness.

These are materials to help you on your own self-directed meditation. I won’t really be leading any kind of group meditation, this is more a path of self-discovery, in your own time and the amount of effort you put into it.

Watch it here

This question came up in the Online 10-day Retreat Nov 3, 2020, guided by Delson Armstrong. Day 0 was part of a daily 30-minute discussion on the suttas, the Dhamma talk and reflections.

(Slightly edited to improve readability)

It really depends on the translations. Bhante Ananda’s translation likes to call it the Four Resting places of Awareness. That’s another way of looking at it.

This is, first and foremost the Body. Understanding how your body is feeling in any given moment.

The Sensations that are arising from the body is the second, the third is your mind, or consciousness they call it. I call it Mindset, because a mindset can continually change and is a collection of thoughts that creates a certain mindset.  When you get into the jhanas, each jhana is a particular kind of mindset, because it has different kinds of factors within each jhana.

And Dhamma is really phenomena. Any kind of phenomena related to the mind, whether it’s thoughts, emotions, memories, Formations, things like that.

These are the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.

When you are practicing the jhanas, practicing Metta and you get into jhana, the way you know you are in jhana is that your mind is collected. Effective or Right Collectedness is being in one of these four jhanas, first and foremost.

Going back to Dhamma, you have other aspects of it; you have phenomena related to the five hindrances; you are aware if any of these hindrances are in the mind. Any time a hindrance is present, you are no longer in jhana. This is how you are utilizing Mindfulness. By seeing whether a hindrance is present or not in the mind, because when you are distracted, you know there is a hindrance there. So, you use the 6R’s to come back.

And as you are doing this, you are also starting to activate and balance the Seven Factors of Awakening. This is also part of the Dhamma aspect of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. When it comes to the Seven Factors of Awakening, they start to be utilized more and more as you get higher into the process, into higher dimensions of perception, beyond the four jhanas.

But for the time being, all you should know if you are starting on the Path, or you’re still working with the first four jhanas, is if your mind continues to stay with the object, and you are not pushing. Because if you push, you are not utilizing Mindfulness anymore, you’re using too much effort, too much one-pointed focus. You just observe.

In the observation of that, you are collectively being observant of the body, of the mind, of the sensations and of the mental contents within the mind. It’s an open awareness. In the awareness of that, you are being attentive to the feeling, but you are also aware if there are any thoughts in the background, or if the mind is being distracted.

Watch it here (start from 10.20 minutes)

This question came up in the Online 10-day Retreat Nov 3, 2020, guided by Delson Armstrong. Day 0 was part of a daily 30-minute discussion on the suttas, the Dhamma talk and reflections.

(Slightly edited to improve readability)

When you read Day 1 tomorrow, it will give a little more in-depth explanation. The 6R’s are the modern version, if you will, of the Four Right Efforts. The Four Right Efforts and the 6R’s are intertwined. The process of the 6R’s, when you start with Recognize, aligns with the First Right Effort.

Let me go through the Four Right Efforts:

• The First Right Effort is the preventing of unwholesome states from arising. That is your hindrances and your distractions.

• The Second is abandoning presently arise unwholesome states or hindrances.

• The Third is to bring up your wholesome qualities of mind.

• The Fourth is to maintain that wholesome quality of mind.

When you’re using the 6R process, you see that the mind has gotten distracted and is no longer paying attention to the object of meditation (OoM). When you see this and you Recognize this, you’re preventing the distraction to further flow with your attention. So, you prevent any further distractions from arising, when you Recognize.

When you Release your attention, you take your attention away from that distraction and bring it to the Relax process. Which is to Relax the craving, the tension, that is a result of the craving in both the mind and the body. You are using the Second Right Effort, which is to abandon the unwholesome states of mind, presently arisen.

When you come back to your Smile, making sure you are smiling, and come back to your OoM – which is Loving-kindness, Compassion or whatever it might be – you are then bringing up the wholesome quality of mind.

Finally, as you Return and stay with your object, you are maintaining that wholesome quality of mind. And then you Repeat whenever necessary, whenever your mind gets distracted yet again.

Watch it here

Here you can find a huge list of interesting Sutta References.

They contain proof, definitions and hard to find references.