Among the many objects used as support for cultivating meditative concentration, loving-kindness holds a special place for being one that is intrinsically pleasant and extremely beneficial, both for the meditators and those around them. In this workshop we will look specifically on how to rely on loving-kindness as support to transport us into states of deep absorption.

Visualization meditation makes use of our power of imagination to bring forth engaging visual images, be they consciously created or spontaneously arisen from the non-conscious mental processes, as supports for our attention. In this workshop we tackle the usual obstacles that hinder our visualization and foster favorable conditions that enable us to tap into this inner resource as a way to enter into meditative absorption.

So often we were told that meditation is good for us but rarely were we invited to enjoy it. In fact, it is through our enjoyment of the meditation journey, by attending to the pleasures that derived from meditation itself, that we are able to shift our consciousness into altered states of deep meditative absorption. In this workshop, we learn to welcome all of these meditative pleasures into awareness and work with them so as to facilitate that shift to absorption.

The various states of absorption of our attention into objects that we find captivating are surprisingly more common than we may have imagined. Such absorption experiences are wobbly because they are not all that stable. Their supporting conditions may assembly for only short durations of 10-15 mins and the experience may be marred by various imperfections, such as sounds intruding, wispy thoughts flowing in the background and so on. Nonetheless, they represent an accessible meditation goal for many of us non-professional meditators that we will explore in this workshop and also how familiarity may help to stabilize them, leading to ever-deepening experiences of meditative concentration.