Meditations

Meditation without grounding in basic ethical commitments and an inclusive philosophical orientation is not advised. If you have received some basic instructions, the meditations found here may prove helpful.

Meditation is one of the Arts of Awareness that help us to enter into a more skillful way of knowing, being, living, and loving. All Arts of Awareness must be handled with care, with philosophical/psychological/ecological sensitivity. They can help us to practice and realize an inspired life, characterized by an eco-sensual awareness, which is our own natural awareness. It is an eco-centric state of being—eco-centric in the sense of finding our true home, our true refuge, and allowing action to unfold in, through, and as that. It is not “ecology” in a narrow literal sense, but certainly inclusive of what we conventionally think of as “ecology”. This eco-sensual awareness is relational, and fundamentally involves mutual nourishment, mutual illumination, and mutual liberation. It is the actualization of the fundamental point of our lives.

Because of the importance of compassion in our shared world—especially a world facing ecological catastrophe and a great deal of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—compassion practice matters more than ever. Therefore, it seems urgent to offer teachings on compassion.

You may find it helpful to listen to some basic framework and instructions for compassion meditation, and then you may like to try the 3-Minute and, eventually, the 20-Minute Love and Compassion practice—and even, after some time, the fuller practice of all of the Six Immeasurables. You can find written instructions at the DW blog, and useful recorded teachings below.

Written Instructions for Love and Compassion practice, The Four and Six Immeasurables

It’s important to start small. A steady, consistent practice will offer increasing benefits over time, but pushing yourself too hard will delay progress.

Below you will find basic framing teachings first, then a guide to the practice, and then 3-Minute and 20-Minute versions to get started with. It’s important to keep a light touch, to stay relaxed as we learn about our incredible capacity to work with life, and begin to enter the heart of wonder, the real magic and mystery of this world.

If you have already received some basic instructions in love and compassion meditation, this is a helpful 3 minute version to get started with the practice. It is vital to have some basic philosophical instruction before beginning this or any other practice that we might call meditation or the arts of awareness.

Remember to start small. Doing something truly positive for three minutes every day will have positive effects in the world. Gradually, you can try doing this practice more than once each day—for instance, once in the morning, then once after lunch, or when you return home from work, or just before bed. If you have trouble remembering to practice in the early days, try tying a ribbon around your toothbrush, and take three minutes to practice as soon as you see the ribbon. You can gradually extend the duration of the practice according to the written instructions. Then, you can move on to the 20 minute version, which can feel more spacious in some ways. Love and Compassion meditation is a practice of spaciousness, but the 3 minute version itself takes practice so that we can generate that feeling of spaciousness within the time of the meditation. Once we do that, we will cultivate the skill of touching spaciousness more easily

This may be a helpful way to extend your practice. Again, it is important to study some of the philosophy of compassion, and to cultivate a broad and skillful view, and working with an experienced teacher can be life-changing.

This meditation, like all meditations, belongs to a holistic ecology. While it can bring healing benefits to anyone who sincerely works with it, the meditation becomes far more powerful and empowering with some study and learning. You can start with Joe Loizzo’s book, Sustainable Happiness, from which this meditation was respectfully adapted. Those of you working with me personally have enough (or, if you’re newer, you will have) of that holistic ecology in place to work fruitfully with this meditation.

This meditation uses the power of our imagination for spiritual liberation and healing. We often restrict the power of our imagination to things like imagining how to make more money, imagining how to design a new app, imagining how to make a better bomb, imagining how to get through another day, or even imagining a new work of art.

But we can unleash the power of imagination for the aim of liberation and healing. Imagination, properly empowered, becomes something of Cosmic power and importance.

While healing our physical ailments matter, a philosophical orientation to healing always integrates our physical healing with spiritual healing and liberation. But you can enjoy one of my favorite examples of how powerful this kind of mediation can be for our physical well-being by reading Meditation Saved My Life: A Tibetan Lama and the Healing Power of the Mind, a wonderful, short book by Phakyab Rinpoche. An incredible story, very much worth knowing about.

This is a more “analytic” meditation, in the sense of a meditation that seeks to challenge unskillful and unrealistic views, and to cultivate a broader, more inclusive, and more skillful, realistic, and graceful sense of things. The ideas move too quickly for the discursive mind to grab onto them and begin elaboration, and the ideas themselves challenge some of the limited and limiting notions that might be guiding our lives—even if unconsciously. It is not a meditation that, so to speak, in and of itself cultivates spacious awareness, but practicing spacious awareness should be understood as integral to practicing this kind of meditation. Just rest the mind, relax (a kind of relaxed engagement—passionate yet balanced, at ease but not sleepy). Relax mind-heart-body-world. Let mind-heart-body-world-cosmos become synchronized and settled into their natural state. Rest in non-distraction, and let the heart receive the words with a gentle but precise contact. Such a meditation is about realigning ourselves, almost a kind of relearning, in which we discover and create a more skillful way of living. Discovering and creating a skillful path of life is the essence of all meditation.

It’s good to try and begin with the full version, then move progressively down to the shortest. Once we thoroughly learn the full version, we can bring that fullness to each level of condensation. We use each version to train the mind and evolve ourselves into a more generous, abundant, and spacious realization of ourselves. It’s also fine to use the shorter versions when time feels limited.

Teachings on the levels of compassion can be illuminating and very helpful. But they are not always easy to find. This contemplation relates compassion to the other immeasurables and to the core skills of life, and also relates the immeasurables to the sometimes challenging work of forgiveness, especially self-forgiveness. Part of the secret of forgiveness involves understanding that our resistance to forgiveness relates to the soul’s imperative to make things right, and then to getting in touch with the immeasurables and the core skills as the very medicine that heals things and makes them right.

Tonglen is a most powerful and empowering compassion practice, part of a holistic approach to training mind/heart.