Ocean Vuong

And also imagine, visualization, imagine the people around you, right?

Using the laying, even just saying that, I hope my sister has a good day, re-centers us.

Because there's, in Buddhism, we have this idea, in Buddhist psychology, we have this idea called sequential thinking.

What is that?

In Buddhist psychology, we do not believe that you actually feel two things at once.

One can only hold one emotion at a time.

So it's like holding a ball.

If you're holding the ball of hatred and whether it's for others or self-hatred, the only way to have another thought is to put down that ball.

You can't just grab another, right?

You have to put down that ball and then hold something else.

And in meditation practice, we usually do a check-in

with ourselves, and often, particularly nowadays, I sit down and something in me says, this is gonna be a bad session.

I can't do it, my knees hurt, my ankles hurt, there's too much going on in the world, that email is bothering me, I really gotta get back to that.

There's so much, and it's all about I'm holding my own suffering.

And what we do in Buddhism is that we start to displace our suffering with other people's suffering.

So we start to think about the people closest to us, and then we radiate outwards.

Oh, my brother's having a bad day today.

I remember now.

He's really struggling.

My brother works retail at a sporting goods store.