With the Compassion/Lovingkindness wish that I use, I like it. I use it. I have a short form, I have a long form. With Rosemary, it's the same. She likes the one she uses. She has a short form, she has a long form. The reason I say "short form" is because often that's what we do just anytime during the day. You walk into the meditation hall, you see everyone, you might give a little short form wish. I stick to the ones I have, short and long. I don't vary them. I don't change back and forth, using mine sometimes, using Rosemary's sometimes. We encourage you to make one that you really feel comfortable with. Now it could be mine; you might like it the way it is. It could be Rosemary's. It could be the new ones that we're going to do a little of during this retreat in different ways. That's fine. But we do encourage you to make one that you feel comfortable with and then just stay with that one. As I said, you can have a long form and a short form. When you're sitting in the formal practice, you use the long form.
The advantage of this is that we don't have to sit there and decide, "Well, which form am I going to use this time?" Even though this person uses the same form for the whole session and then changes the next session, still, there's a confusion. What's the bet that halfway through a session, often automatically, they will switch to the other form? They won't really remember as our wandering mind goes off. We don't actually want that type of switching to interfere with the meditation. What that actually means is that we have restlessness in the practice. So we want to be careful about getting too restless in the Compassion/Lovingkindness, and, by keeping the same phrase all the time, it helps us stop being restless.
Something else this person said is that they change the wish in relationship to the Dukkha contemplated. I don't change mine. My wish is what I feel is so good that it's for everyone on the planet, no matter what their Dukkha is. It's a wish I feel I can give to someone who's two years old and to someone who's 80 years old. I can give it to someone who has legs and to someone who doesn't have legs. I can give it to a sick person; I can give it to a healthy person. In that way, by having the same wish, we make it universal. It goes to everybody equally. It's the same with Rosemary. If you change your wishes and have different ones, thinking, "Well, this person needs a little more of this than that," then it's not universal; you're shifting, you're changing. Keeping the same wish helps you to be more universal in the wish.
Now, also, it helps stop the wandering mind. As I mentioned, if you have two or three wishes that you use, you might automatically change over. Well, that's the wandering mind, isn't it? So by having the same wish all the time, we're able to stay more focused. When we stay more focused, our concentration builds. We get deeper into the meditation. So keeping the same wish (having a long one and a short form of the wish is fine) helps greatly in the meditation.