Universal Loving Kindness and My Personal Assessment

          As instructed I spent some time meditating on the universal loving kindness exercise.  It was very interesting. The phrases that I was to repeat for about 10 minutes were: "May all individuals gain freedom from suffering, May all individuals find sustained health, happiness, and wholeness. May I assist all individuals in gaining freedom from suffering. May I assist all individuals in finding health, happiness, and wholeness." After stilling my mind and body for a couple of minutes I began to repeat those lines.  Immediately faces started popping into my head very clearly.  It started with family members, then friends and neighbors, and even the village of people that I visited in Nicaragua.  What surprised me is that faces of children started coming to mind in regards to the little punks in my neighborhood that I have repeatedly battled to try and stop them from continuously tromping through my yard.  When  I realized who they were, a part of me wanted to exclude them from this exercise, but it was just a fleeting thought. About halfway through this meditation exercise I began to feel bit of apprehension mixed with a feeling of being overwhelmed.  There is no way on earth that I can assist ALL individuals - that is one enormous feat.  At this point I may have hindered what was the original intention of this exercise, and now I'm not sure what to do with it. 

          As for my personal assessment to discover what area of my life is causing me stress and needs some development, I feel that it is my biological self.  After really thinking about it, I spend much of my time fretting over my workouts, my calorie intake, my reckless amounts of snacking.  I have been trying to lose 5-10 lbs for about 3 yrs now, and I am realizing that it consumes way too much of my time.  However, the reason I have not accomplished this simple goal during this long period of time is simply that I sabotage myself on a daily basis. If I lose a pound, I celebrate with ice cream.  If I gain a pound, I comfort myself with pastries.  I will have 3-4 amazing days of nutritional eating and then go out to dinner and lose all self-control. This is an area in my life that is way more of a distraction then it should be! I use a nutrition tracker every day, but I'm not very faithful at recording all the extra little bites through out the day.  I need to figure out why I sabotage myself so much in this area, what the root cause is, and go from there.