circles of metta - loving kindness

Every once in a while I get bits of inspiration out of nowhere. By serendipity I end up making up an activity that engages students much more than other activities. Last week it one of these.

With the older ones (about 12 this year) we did almost 15 minutes of meditation. Most of them where sitting pretty quietly by the time I finished the session. We stretched, talked a bit and then I thought another 5minutes of sitting would be nice.

I asked them to sit in groups of 3-4. I ended up with 2 groups of 3, a group of 4 and two groups of 2. They had to sit in circles. The exercise was to send loving kindness 'energy' to the person on the left. This way the person on the right was sending 'metta' to myself and I was sending metta to the person on the left. Metta circulated clockwise in each group. I asked them to feel the energy coming in through one arm and leaving through the other. It seemed that liked the activity.

We then discussed what they felt when they meditated. They mostly said 'calm'. 

Surprisingly they could not come with examples of other situations where they felt the same way. I said that I felt somewhat like that when I sat in the beach, listening to the waves and feeling the breeze. They did not seem to click on the simile, so I think they enjoy the beach in a different way :-)

SRE workshop - a success

I have been with a flu and classes just started at Uni, so I had not able to report on the funtastic workshop organized by the NSW Buddhist Council.

We followed the program for the day quite closely:
10:00 - 10:10 Welcome and meditation
10:10 - 10:50 Daniel Yeo “how best to use the Come & See CDs” gave us a great show, with music, dancing and a lot of ideas on how to make our classes more fun.  The CDs of D-Kidz, his group, can be acquired in the website.  You can listen to samples in his site or from Buddhanet here. The songs tell the story of Buddha and as such they can be very useful. Note, some of the lyrics have religious connotations common in asian countries, but that not all teachers might want to bring to their classes in Australia (or other western countries). As I told Daniel, I wish I could sing and entertain like that!, but as he replied 'if you can't sing, use the CD!' 

10:50 - 11:10 DET Representative on their protocols. A discussion of mostly administrative issues, but the lady who presented provided some useful materials.
11:10 - 11:30 Michelle Corby “meditation with children”. Michelle told us about her experiences and a discussion followed.
11:30 - 11:40 Break
11:40 - 12:00 TC Lim “the Dhammapada”. TC Lim, a long term benefactor of different Buddhist organizations told the personal story of editing a version of the Dhammapada, and suggested looking into it as a source for children stories.
12:00 - 12:30 Ven Jin Rou "Teaching Ecology through Buddhist Stories" read some of the stories she has written.
12:30 - 12:50 Group discussions

We then went for a delicious lunch at a restaurant in Crows Nest.

Thank you to Roselin and Brian for organizing this