Heartfulness – Compassion Meditation

Transcript

This is a heartfulness meditation on compassion. The aim of this meditation is to become more intimate with the pain, difficulty and suffering of our lives. By doing so, we invite in the quivering heart of compassion, and it’s limitless response. We’ll begin this meditation by finding our seat. So finding a seat where you can sit in, be upright, and comfortable. Your hands can be on your thighs, or in your lap, whichever is most comfortable. feeling a sense of balance in your body from the left to right sides, from the front to back, up and down, balanced in all six directions. And feeling the core of your body, particularly the spinal cord aligned with the force of gravity.

Inviting the body to relax, may the body relax. And at the same time feeling the energized quality of sitting upright, relaxed and energized the same time settling your attention into your body feeling what it’s like from the inside.

Letting the stories and thoughts about your experience settle into the background.

And in this practice period, we’re going to focus on self compassion. developing a sense of compassion toward our own experience. So that we can then expand that outward to include other people. And we’ll do this by calling to mind at first and reflecting on some of the difficulties that you’ve had in the last few days. We all have difficulties, things come up that are challenging.

So thinking back over the last few days, what challenges have you run into difficult situations at work, or in relationships with family members or friends? Perhaps there’s some health or medical challenges you’ve been working with.

Let’s take a moment to recall or reflect on some of the challenges both big and small that you’ve run into the last few days.

Now, we’re not going to spend time ruminating on these things. We’re going to work with them in a meditative way. And we’re going to start by sensing what these difficulties feel like in our bodies. So as the stories come up as we remember these challenging times, feel what it’s like in your body. Is there tightness or tension, aching, warmth? Just feeling what this is like in your body. Feeling to what it’s like emotionally. What emotions do these difficulties bring up in your experience?

Is there confusion, numbness, sadness, anger. just noticing to what it’s like emotionally to reflect on these challenges.

Letting yourself feel the emotions directly. And notice to the thoughts and stories that are associated with these memories. Allowing yourself to be aware of them without being totally caught in them.

And now see to if you can notice that often times there is a certain amount of tension that we feel around all of these things. When we contemplate difficulty or pain, or suffering, there tends to be an underlying tension in our experience, it can be felt in the body, it can be felt in our emotions, it can be noticed in the storylines of our thoughts. But in general, it manifests as a type of resistance in our experience of not wanting something to be present. See if you can notice any resistance or tension that’s present in response to these memories of pain and difficulty, feel what the tension is like, the resistance is like. See if you can soften into the tension, relaxing around the resistance. Feel what it’s like to be a human being, who’s tender, and exposed.

All of us carry some measure of pain and grief, from the past. Pain that we’ve inherited through our family of origin, or through life circumstances.

All of us experience conflict and tension in our relationships with each other from time to time.

Sometimes a great deal of the time. We all each and every one of us get sick, have difficulties with our health. All of us struggle with the basic uncertainty of our lives of not knowing what’s going to happen next. None of us know what the future holds. And we all to some degree, fear what’s unknown. All of us will die. If not soon, someday. Being born means dying. So we all must face the overwhelming magnitude of our impending death.

I’d invite you to feel into the part of you that knows the truth of these things. The basic truths of our human experience and also feel the part of you which can hold the suffering, the pain inherent in our human experience that can hold the pain without blinking and without turning away. Who sees the truth of this and can be with it and hold it. Embrace it. Invite the heart of compassion to be present. To hold the universal suffering of human experience which is such a personal part of our own experience. Know that this compassionate heart is as much your birthright as the pain of being human. Something in us knows how to feel pain, to be with it and to respond. Something deep and primordial. Trust that, trust that compassionate heart, rest and the heart of compassion. This is a meditation written and recorded by meditate IO and Vincent Horn. If you found this valuable, you can find more resources for training in the digital age at meditate.io.

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