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 :-)