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Story · Ajahn Brahm

Safety Bay — combining metta with the breath

As told by Ajahn Brahm in Insight | Ajahn Brahm | 17 April 2026

1 min read

The story — as told by Ajahn Brahm (verbatim captions)

Safety Bay. And that was when we used to hire this Catholic retreat center. It was run by Catholic nuns. They're very nice to us. And honestly, I didn't mind just whoever was running the retreat center, as long as they kept reasonably quiet, which these couple of nuns did. But while I was doing this retreat, and teaching it as well, in order to allow yourself to innovate, and to actually to experiment, to try other ways of teaching. One of the things which I did was uh combine two of the most powerful popular meditation techniques. And I remember asking monks who are much senior to me, "Can you do that?" And maybe I I hope that some of them said no, cuz that is a sure way of making me try it. I'm rebellious. You say you can't do it, of course you can do it. And I combined loving-kindness meditation together with breath

▶ Watch Ajahn Brahm tell it from 1:10 (to 2:33)

A reflection (in the spirit of Ajahn Brahm's talk)

Senior monks told rebellious young Ajahn Brahm you can't combine meditation techniques. So naturally he tried loving kindness together with the breath, and found it powerful. Insight, he says, is calm experiment: looking at something until you see what you hadn't seen. Is that a stick, or a back-scratcher? Explore.

In brief (our summary)

At a Catholic nuns' retreat centre in Safety Bay, senior monks say you can't combine techniques — so rebellious Brahm combines loving-kindness with breath meditation and finds it powerfully insightful.

Teaching point

Sometimes the experiment the seniors forbid is the door that opens.

When this story may help

Themes

Source & credit

Told by Ajahn Brahm in Insight | Ajahn Brahm | 17 April 2026 · 2026-04-18 · ▶ watch from 1:10 to 2:33 · Buddhist Society of Western Australia

2 other tellings of this story

Caption notes: YouTube auto-captions with machine-added punctuation; words left exactly as captioned.

The narrative is Ajahn Brahm's own telling, quoted from the talk captions. The summary and reflection are Being Mindful Stories's editorial notes. Please credit the teacher and link the original talk. Markdown version

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