Awakening Compassion in a Fearful World: The Practice of Tonglen

Welcome friends to the Tara Brock podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting TaraBrock.com where you can also join our email list. Now let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste. Namaste. Welcome. Thank you for being here friends. I'd like to begin with a story I read as a New Yorker author and he describes how when his son turned 12, they kind of lost their closeness and they weren't really able to have conversations. And finally he stumbled on texting as a way to keep some connection even though he apported. This was in the early days of texting. So he caught on some as his son taught him some abbreviations. But he says, the one he didn't have to teach me because it was so self-evident was LOL. And I knew right away that it meant lots of love because he put it at the end of every message he sent me. So he says, such a beautiful telegraphic abbreviation for the 20th century, like a little arrow of love you can send out to anybody you know. Then he described the next six months his infatuation with instant messaging and its kind of power of emotional transmission. He sent LOL to everyone he knew. His sister was getting a divorce and he wrote to her, you know, we're all behind you and beside you. LOL, your brother. He says, my father got LOL. I sent him LOL in Canada. Everyone I knew at work, at home, everyone, I sent them LOL. He said he happened to be texting his son from an airport saying how much he hated being away, but he had to travel to make the money they needed as a family and he signed it off LOL. And his son responds, dad, what exactly do you think LOL means? Well, lots of love, obviously. No dad. It means laughing out loud. And it's where it kind of crumbled, you know, you'd have to go through every message, all the LOLs he had sent to people while they were suffering. So I start here because texting, a lot of misunderstandings can happen. And in a deep way, the amount of texting we do instead of personal contact means less empathy, less compassion. It's really in decline. I have noticed myself so many times being texting or emailing and finding that there's an emotional triggering going on and it's getting worse and worse and then realizing we need to talk, you know, because as soon as there's, we're on the phone or Zoom even, of course it's best in person, there's enough connection that we can, you know, we have a better shot at understanding. So in the United States, it's not just texting and emailing, there's these very clear studies that say social media use less empathy, less compassion. I'm talking about this today because as we face this kind of growing global instability and fear, we're steadily becoming a less compassionate, a less connected world. We can feel it in our larger society and it's not just the dividedness, but it's the capacity for cruelty, for closing hearts. How could that not be the case if when desperately needed aid, humanitarian aid is blocked, or when we knowingly let people in the United States here go hungry, depriving people of health insurance, the terror and the violations of ice rates and more. So my friends, I know a lot of us are asking or really praying, you know, how can I help? And if there is a capacity, we need to grow collectively for the sake of the survival of our species and many species, and also for the sake of freeing our hearts, it's compassion. This is what leads to transformational action. So today what I'd like to do is look at the very practical ways we grow compassion, and I'll do so in part by exploring the Tonglen meditation. This is a compassion practice. It's been practiced for probably almost a thousand years in Buddhist Asia, and it was popularized into bed in the 12th century. There are several versions, and I'll share with you the practice of Tonglen I find most helpful, and you're invited to customize. Compassion arises when we directly sense the vulnerability or hurt in others and ourselves. It arises when others are real to us, when we perceive them as subjective living beings like us, and then we don't want to violate them, we want to help because we feel our belonging. There's a very well-known line from Relka that I meditate on a lot, that's that I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one, but I give myself to it. And I love this sense of living in widening circles where more and more of this living world is a part of us, is real to us. Henry David Thoreau once said, could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? And this capacity to imagine another's inner world, it's a profound gift of awakening consciousness, and we're not limited to our own perspective, others become real. So as many know, compassion is a more recently evolved capacity along with perspective taking and emotional regulation and mindfulness and moral awareness. And it correlates with this relational circuitry in the brain, and when the circuits are online, when they're activated, we feel the realness of another's inner life. We feel connection, we feel caring, and we naturally want to help relieve suffering. In contrast, when we're in a limbic hijack, in other words, possessed by fear, anger, hatred, that circuitry deactivates. We're cut off from a sense of the realness of others, and instead of longing and caring, we can be cruel, we can be heartless. Others can quickly become perceived as less than human, dispensable, not mattering. But here's the thing. While we might not be cruel, when we're stressed, most of us devouring degrees get cut off from perceiving others' realness, from embodying caring. There is some deactivation of that relational network. And in the language of trance, we are, to some degree, that trance of narrowed focus, we're self-centered, we're not inhabiting our wholeness, our awakened, integrated heart-mind. And the sign of it is pretty clear. When we hear about the struggles of others, especially those more vulnerable in our larger society, immigrants, those struggling to feed their families, those in Gaza, those in Saddam, we might abstractly care. Like in our mind, we'll say, oh my god, this is awful. But because that circuitry is not totally activated, our hearts actually don't feel touched and tender, and our attention quickly goes elsewhere to our shopping list or to due lists. And it becomes easier to be complicit or passive, to turn a blind eye to the horrors in our own country or elsewhere, when we get habituated. Similarly, if we move through our daily life with a lot of stress in some form, we're wanting something to be different, we're thinking something's wrong, problems to be solved. Again, that relational circuitry gets deactivated, we're caught in that bubble of self, what I want, what I fear, others are not so real. I always think of that image of being late for an appointment and you're in rush hour and sensing traffic everywhere and how everyone else is the traffic, right? So because this process of unreal othering is so unconscious, it's really poignant and really valuable to see in our personal life how we go into that trance, how the people around us actually become unreal, how we're not so sensitive or tuned or responsive. I see it with myself so often when I'm anxious and busy, really trying to check something off my to-do list so that I can feel better about myself. And then in some way, in those times when I'm engaging with Jonathan, my partner, not being so attentive or intuitive or if he's having difficulty with something, my response is coming from a much more mental place. Or if I'm interacting with people and stress creates a kind of an agenda in me, like I want to get off the conversation because I want to get on to something else, or I'm stressed because I need to get their cooperation or agreement on something, or I'm in some way trying to avoid something with them. I don't notice so much about who they really are, their subjective state. Again, I'm cut off. Now you might be thinking, yeah, but we have things to do, we have needs to meet and we can't always be tending to others and that's absolutely true. And here's the point, that we get habituated to feeling stressed, to being self-centered, to having anxiety or self-promotion be at the forefront and in the habit of actually not really tending to others. Others quickly become unreal. It's as if we're the lone protagonist in a movie and everyone else is reduced to kind of a background character. They're either useful or they're obstructing our progress or they're irrelevant. Their inner worlds disappear. Our for you gamers, other people become like non-player characters in a video game. They're programmed to either give us something or block our way or fade into the scenery. The point is that we forget there's a living consciousness behind those eyes. A story for you, one man told like this, he said working people frequently ask retired people what they do to make their days interesting. Well, for example, the other day my wife and I went into town and went to a shop. We're only there for about five minutes. When we came out there was a cop writing out a parking ticket. We went up to him and I said, come on man, how about giving some senior citizens a break? He ignored us and continued writing the ticket. I called him a cranky marshmallow. He glared at me and started busily writing another ticket for worn tires. So my wife called him an overcaffeinated squirrel. He finished a second ticket and put it on the windshield with the first. Then he started writing a third ticket. This went on for 20 minutes. The more we insulted him, the more tickets he wrote. Just then our bus arrived and we climbed on. Retired people really need a way of having fun. So entertaining and here's the point. When we are self-fixated, going after what we want, moving away from what we fear, others become less real. They become more like objects out there. Again, they're either there to serve by meeting a want, they're an obstacle, or they just don't really matter to us. In another little story a guy hears a knock at his door and when he answers he looks around, doesn't see anything, but then he looks down and sees a snail looking up at him. The guy picks up the snail and just casually tosses it into the neighbor's yard. Eight months later, the same guy hears another knock at his door. He answers and sees the snail again. The snail looks up and says, what the heck was that all about? Sometimes I look for excuses to share this stuff with you, I admit. So this again is our filter. How subjectively real is the other? And seeing that when we're in a trance of narrowed attention, when we're in our separate self-bubble, the relational network is deactivated and others become unreal. And maybe here's a good time we'll just pause and give you a chance to explore it a little bit in a kind of contemplative way. You might take a moment if you're able to come into stillness, take a few full breaths. Just invite yourself right here right now. So bring to mind someone that you have been with recently who you respect. Might be an employer, an authority figure, a teacher, or someone who's very accomplished, maybe a potential romantic partner, someone who you feel a bit insecure around. So you're worried about how they might judge you. Okay, so bring that to mind. Most of us have someone that we get insecure and self-conscious around. Bring yourself to that situation and just remind yourself of it, what it was like. And then look to see how real was that other person. How much did you notice about them, about their vulnerability, their wants, their fears? What mood might have been in their heart? What was going on inside for them? What mattered to them in that time? Just notice without any judgment, just curiosity. How real were they? And take a full breath, inhale, exhale. And now bring to mind someone different. Someone with whom you might have an agenda that you want their approval, their cooperation with something, their money, their time. So someone you know that you were with recently when you had an agenda. You wanted them to do something you wanted them to do. Just remind yourself of that situation. And as you do, sense how much you were perceiving about them. How real were they in those moments? How much did you notice of what they might have wanted or needed? What they might be feeling? What was important to them at that time? And again, without any judgment, simply noticing how others become less real. Nice full in-breath and out-breath, last one to explore. Bringing to mind someone who's dear to you, who you see regularly. And remind yourself of a recent time when you were with them but feeling stressed. Not related to them, but just feeling stressed. Preoccupied. And in that moment, how real did the other person seem? How much did you notice about their inner life? Did their vulnerability register what might be mattering to them at that time? Are in those moments where they're more of an obstacle who was taking your time, or a potential resource to help you, or really a background figure in the play of your life? Again, observing gently without judgment, what it's like when others are unreal. And in this one, you might imagine that you're pausing with them, that you're slowing that moment of being with them down, or those moments, slowing down and breathing and deepening attention, wondering what might they be feeling, what's mattering to them right now, what might be challenging or exciting. And just notice how even a little inquiry starts to restore their dimensionality as real. Just notice what shifts when you remember the humanness behind the eyes. Okay, take a few full breaths and let's continue onward. But the invitation here is to start scanning how real, how real are others to us. So unreal othering, which like bad othering, which is a more extreme way of separating, is a trance. We're living in a kind of a sliver of reality, we're forgetting the larger truth of our belonging and connection with each other. And from an evolutionary perspective, in those moments, we're living more in a primitive and egoic psyche, and we're not living from our wholeness, which includes mindfulness and compassion. So there are two key elements. If we want to wake up those relational pathways and really access compassion, two elements. And the first one is that we intentionally look to see the vulnerability of another, and we want to see ourselves be touched by another's vulnerability, because that awakens care. And the second is that we in some way extend care, we offer, we offer our heart outward to that being. It could be energetically through prayer or through action. Share a story that is in a novel by Mary Gates-Skill. She describes a social work intern in a struggling Los Angeles neighborhood, and how that woman noticed a skinny stray cat everybody called him Baldi. And so she felt moved to feed him, but she worried that the men that were hanging around in the community center would judge her. And when she brought out a can of cat food for Baldi, they stared and muttered that cat wouldn't know what to do with something so good. Still, she set it down. And as Baldi began to eat, head deep in the can, paws spread almost trembling with relief, the room went quiet, and for a long moment everyone just watched. Then one of the men slowly crouched down and gently held the can so the cat could reach it more easily. And after that day, they all gathered whenever Baldi ate. Something softened in a place where hunger, want, and struggle was common. They got to witness a simple, pure need being completely cared for, and in that small ritual, their own hearts opened too. So the cat became real. They could see the vulnerability and be part of offering care. These are the elements of compassion. And I love that story. There's something so pure and tender about it. And yet we know that in daily life it's so easy to go into the trance and forget that others like us are living with fear and are living with yearning, that others are real. The poet Naomi Nye captures this in a verse that I love. She says, How he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. So we forget. We forget the subjective realness of those around us that we know and even more fully, those who are different from us. So I think of it as a life work to wake up from unreal othering, from bad othering. And I want to share with you one of my more jarring wake-ups. And this was, I don't even know how many years ago, 25 maybe. I was at a Unitarian church on Christmas Eve with my family week because I grew up Unitarian. And the minister shared this story. And this is a story that was actually told by a Unitarian minister. And she describes her family traveling on Christmas Day, stopping at a diner that's mostly empty and just wondering what were they doing there on this holy day. And she writes this, she says, On the metal high chair tray, his face was alive with excitement, eyes wide, gums bared and toothless grin. He wiggled and chirped and giggled. And then I saw the source of his merriment and my eyes could not take it in all at once. A tattered rag of a coat, obviously, worn and worn, baggy pants, toes that poked out of wood-bees shoes, gums as bare as Eric's hair, uncombed, unwashed, and a nose so varicose it could have been like a map of New York. I was too far away to smell him, but I knew he smelled. And his hands were waving in the air, flapping about on loose wrists. Hi there, baby. Hi there, big boy. I see you, Buster. My husband and I exchanged a look that was a cross between what do we do and poor devil. Eric continued to laugh and answer, Hi there. Every call was echoed. I noticed Waitress's eyebrows shoot to their foreheads and several people out loud. This old geezer was creating a nuisance with my beautiful baby. I shoved a cracker at Eric and he pulverized it on the tray. I whispered why me under my breath. Our meal came and the nuisance continued. Now the old bum was shouting from across the room, Do you know Patty Cake? Atta boy, do you know Peek-a-boo? Hey, look, he knows Peek-a-boo. We ate in silence except Eric, who was running through his repertoire for the admiring applause of a skid row bum. Finally we had enough. Dennis went to pay the check, imploring me to get Eric and meet me in the parking lot. I trundled Eric out of his high chair and looked toward the exit. The old man sat poised and waiting his chair directly between me and the door. Lord, just let me out of here before he speaks to me or Eric. I headed toward the door. It soon became apparent that both the Lord and Eric had other plans. As I drew closer to the man, Eric, his eyes riveted to his best friend, leaned far over my arm, reaching with both arms in a baby pick-me-up position. In a split second of balancing my baby and turning to counter his weight, I came eye to eye with the old man. Eric was lunging for him, arms spread wide. The bum's eyes both asked and implored, Would you let me hold your baby? There was no need for me to answer since Eric propelled himself from my arms to the man's. Suddenly a very old man and a very young baby were involved in a love relationship. Eric laid his tiny head on the man's ragged shoulder. The man's eyes closed and I saw tears hover beneath slashes. His aged hands full of grime and pain and hard labor gently, so gently, cradled my baby's bottom and stroked his back. I said, awestruck. The old man rocked and cradled Eric in his arms for a moment and then his voice opened and set squarely on mine. He said, in a firm, commanding voice, you take care of this baby. Somehow I managed, I will, from a throat that contained a stone. He pried Eric from his chest unwillingly, longingly, as though he was in pain. I held up my arms to receive my baby and again the gentleman addressed me, God bless you, ma'am, you've given me my Christmas gift. I said nothing more than a muttered thanks. With Eric back in my arms I ran for the car. Dennis wondered why I was crying and holding Eric so tightly and why I was saying, my God, my God, forgive me. So many in the congregation that night, including me, were in tears. And I just kept wondering, you know, how many people do I just diminish or in some way not see due to bias in all the ways that I make others unreal, others that are different, others that I just forget my belonging to. There's a beautiful line from Srinagar Sargadatta, which is that the mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it. And I feel like training in compassion practices is a way for the heart to cross the abyss. It's an intentional use of our imagination to get close into others that we might habitually just consider unreal and not pay attention to, to see their realness. I often talk about Ruby Sales, a civil rights activist, and how she said her work entirely changed, her activism entirely changed, when she started to use the inquiry, where does it hurt? What's it like being you? She would do this with white supremacists, she would do this with anyone who seemed to be causing suffering to others. Where does it hurt? So, as I mentioned, usually when we hear the news, we'll say that something's terrible but we'll move on. It's also possible if we want to train in compassion to pause and to actually take in the stories of real people and what they're living with and imagine what would this be like if it were me? What is it like being you? The essence of Tonglen in the Tibetan tradition is exchanging ourselves for others, that deep belonging. What's it like being you? I was recently listening to some interviews of people who are living below the poverty line or near the poverty line, who are right now, as I'm speaking and recording, facing a huge uncertainty about food aid. One grandmother who's raising a two-year-old, you know, how am I going to feed them listening to the tears and taking it in? Maybe some of you listening know this horror close up, but for those who don't, can we try to imagine and let ourselves be touched? We need to feel with others if they're to be real, if we're to care. So, that brings us to the challenge of compassion, which is we have really strong conditioning not to let ourselves feel pain. We don't want to feel and get proximate with what's unpleasant. And yet, by armoring ourselves, and it's very unconscious the ways we do it, we create the deeper pain, which is that of separation. That of holding back our love. We get locked in a trance of a separate self. So, the Tonga in meditation, the basic process, goes right at these two elements of awakening compassion. The first is to see the suffering and let ourselves be touched. And the second is to offer out-care, sensing the larger space of loving awareness that we belong to. And it's a radical reversal of our usual habits, of our unconscious habits. And we use the breath with Tonga and on the in-breath, instead of resisting what hurts, the fear and distress of that woman, instead of resisting it, we actually let ourselves gently receive it, letting the breath open us to the pain and sorrow and rawness that we habitually would push away. And then on the out-breath, on behalf of that person, we release into something larger than the contracted self. We surrender the tightness into the field of space and love. We're offering them, oh, may you feel the space of loving presence holding you, may your suffering be relieved. And over time when we do this, when we learn to breathe in and not resist but let ourselves be touched, when we learn to breathe out and offer our care and prayer, we come less and less armored. We're not trying to resist or grasp the ways or manage them. We start discovering ourselves as the ocean itself, a vast sea of awareness and love. Okay, so I got big on you and vast on you. Let me get down to some of the particulars about how it works, because really this is experiential. This is you feeling it out from the inside out. How it works is you start where you see suffering. It might be in yourself, some hurting part inside yourself. It might be in another individual, a friend, a colleague. It might be in a group that feels like a group of vulnerable beings that are suffering and in which case helps to choose an individual representative. And then the practice, breathing in, feeling touched, breathing out for the sake of the one that's suffering, breathing into loving awareness. And then after you've breathed for that person, there's a widening out to all who are feeling that particular kind of suffering. So you're breathing in for the world, for huge numbers of beings, and breathing that out. It's really important to let the heart be a transformer of sorrow as you breathe it out into the vastness of space. Now, many people wonder, well, how can I imagine another person suffering? I am not them. But if you've ever been in a movie and cried, you know our brain does have a relational network. We do have these mirror neurons and more that help us to actually feel with and we can develop it. You can do tonglen as a longer meditation, we'll do a medium-sized one together. But you can also do it on the spot. You can do it on the spot with whatever comes up, whatever kind of suffering you encounter, and just for a few moments as a spontaneous response to suffering. So for me, I was listening to this interview with the woman I mentioned, feeding her family, her fears, her tears, and I paused and I just breathed for her. Okay, some more tips. If you're feeling huge trauma or fear, tonglen is not the appropriate practice. Instead, do what helps to hold the fear, calm the fear, bring you back to what's called that window of tolerance, get the help of others if that's necessary. So tonglen is not a match when you're feeling traumatized. If you are practicing tonglen, start where it's easier. Don't go for something that's more emotionally wrenching. Start building the muscle by breathing with another where it's a little more easy for you to open to that pain. Now, you might start for another person, but realize that you have a really strong reaction when you're doing it, say it brings up huge fear or grief. Then do tonglen for the emotional part inside you that has stirred up and then return to the other person. Some people say, well, you know, when I think of that other person, all I can feel is my judgment and aversion towards them. Same thing, if stuff is stirred up, start doing tonglen for the parts in you that are stirred up. Keep coming back to what's inside you until you can then start breathing for the other person. Tonglen uses the breath and it's a very powerful, both metaphorical and real pathway. And if for whatever reason you find the breath gets in the way, it's difficult for any reason, you can drop the breath. Because the process itself of opening to the pain that's here and offering care out, you can do it. It doesn't need the breath. So think of the breath as a support, but it's optional. One of the questions that comes a lot when I teach tonglen is that people will say, well, it's hard for me to actually feel another's vulnerability in my body. And of course that makes sense because the more we've been hurt or traumatized, the more we dissociate. So it's just harder to feel. And so if that's the case, deepen the attention to that kind of inquiry of where does it hurt and what it would be like if this was me experiencing that. Like really try to inquire into that and put your hand on your heart to bring you into the body and emphasize the in-breath, the feeling in your body. I was listening to another interview, another program. It was about Palestinians returning to Gaza now that there's at least this on again, off again ceasefire, but returning. And one was describing what his home meant to him and then getting there and it being just rubble and him saying, you know, to the interviewer, I had this feeling that everything was over. And I imagined for myself, what if that was me returning to my house and everything, the house was gone, everything surrounding it was gone, my pets were gone, because many, many in Gaza had pets, cats, dogs and other pets, widespread death, all my possessions. And can you imagine the pain of so much stripped away and that got me tender and that made me naturally feel that sense of care and prayer? So bring it close in. Brian Stevenson, who is an author and lawyer and activist, talks about proximity, that if we want to feel compassion, we have to have a sense of proximity, of being close in to another's experience. And we can't always do it by being with them, so we need to use our imagination. What would it be like to have this happening in my life? Now for many people, proximity gives them a sense that they're going to be overwhelmed by feeling. And this is, many of us have, you know, not that much, we're thin-skinned in that way and it can feel overwhelming. And if that's true for you, focus on the outbreath. Again, I love that phrase, let the heart be a transformer of sorrow. If you breathe something in, breathe it out and keep emphasizing the outbreath, letting the currents of what are being felt held in a larger field, in the vastness of the sea or the sky. It's really important that we know how to hand it over, surrender it to something larger. And in the process, call on mindfulness. When something's strong, the feeling is strong, name it. Just naming it gives more space. Here's the blessing, the blessing of cultivating this capacity, that the more we intentionally practice, the more all beings become real. We're living in wider circles, the cat, the plant, the tree, the human. We can never be alone. Our hearts get connected through compassion. We're in it together. We're sensing this vast heart space that's our home. We're going to practice, but I'll share one last story before we practice. And this is again from Palestinian poet Naomi Nye. She writes this, she says, wandering the Al-Bakirqi airport, after learning my flight was delayed four hours, I heard over the loudspeaker, anyone near Gate Four-A understand Arabic? If so, please come immediately. I hesitated. But this was my gate, so I went. An older Palestinian woman in embroidered dress, just like my grandmothers, was crumpled on the floor, wailing. The gate agent pleaded, talked to her, we told her the flight was late and then she did this. I knelt beside her and put an arm around her and spoke a few halting Arabic phrases. At the first familiar words, she stopped crying. She thought the flight was canceled. She needed to reach El Paso for medical treatment. We called her son. I promised to stay with her and sit beside her on the plane. She talked to him and then we called her other sons and then my father and they discovered ten mutual friends. Why not call some Palestinian poets too? Soon she was laughing, patting my knee, telling stories. She pulled out a sack of homemade Mamoul cookies, powdered sugar mounds filled with dates and nuts, and offered them to everyone at the gate. Not one refused. It felt like a sacrament. We were all dusted in sugar. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the woman from Laredo. Then the airline brought free drinks and two little children passed apple juice to everyone, sugar covered too. I noticed my new friend had a potted plant, a potted medicinal plant poking from her bag. Old country wisdom, always carry a plant, always stay rooted. And I looked around at this gate of delayed weary travelers and thought, this is the world I want to live in, the shared world. Once a confusion stopped, no one was afraid. They took the cookies. We held hands and I thought, this can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost. May it be so. Real others, a more loving world, and each of us can practice to evolve our world. Be part of this awakening. Okay, so we'll explore this Tonglen meditation together. If you haven't already found a comfortable way of being, let me say that differently. Take a moment to find a comfortable way of sitting for the practice so that you're relaxed and alert. And take some moments to let go of any habitual tension, allowing your body and your mind to settle. The traditional practice of Tonglen begins by taking a moment to sense the stillness or the openness that's already here, to sense the stillness or openness that's already here. This is considered a flash of remembrance, reconnecting with our already awakened heart and mind. Now bring your attention to the natural rhythm and quality of your breath. And as your breath flows in, allow yourselves to receive this life energy. So with each in breath, open with total receptivity, like a balloon gently expanding with air. Be aware of the experience of no resistance, of allowing yourself to be touched by the sensations of the breath. With the out breath, notice the sensations of letting go and releasing into the space that surrounds you. Imagine your total body and consciousness flowing outward with the breath, mingling with the vastness of space. Breathe out as if you're offering yourself into relaxation, ease, spaciousness. Continue meditating on the essence of receiving, being touched with the in breath. And letting go into the openness with the out breath. Now invite into your awareness someone you know personally who is suffering, someone you want to help. And when you've got that person in mind, imagine yourself in their circumstances, so you're experiencing their fear or their hurt or their loss. Try to imagine through their eyes. And what does the world look like through their eyes? What might they be believing that's painful? What's it like to live inside this person's body to feel with their heart? What's the most vulnerable, painful part of this person's experience? What are they really needing? Now breathing in, invite all of this pain into your heart, allowing yourself to feel it fully. It's that willingness, yes, to this suffering. And as you breathe out, release it into the vast space of awareness and love, sensing your offering, your wishes, your prayers for space, for ease, for love. Breathing in, letting yourself feel the pain. Breathing out, visualizing and sensing, releasing it into the vastness of awareness and love that you're offering, your wish, your blessings, that this being may be held in awareness and love. And if as you inhale you find you're meeting your own resistance to the pain, a sense of aversion or anger or fear, maybe there's judgment going on, if you're feeling a reactivity, then shift and begin doing the breath for whatever is going on inside you. Breathe for yourself. Breathing in and letting yourself touch the anger, judgment or fear. Breathing out, offering it into space and love, letting it be held in something larger. And then as your resistance often returns to breathing for the person you intend to help. As you inhale, letting the person's pain touch you, feel how they're held in your heart. And as you exhale, release into the field of loving awareness, sense that field holding the currents of suffering, holding this being. If you find the experience is really strong with the in-breath and difficult, emphasize the out-breath that whatever is here you're offering it, surrendering it into the great sky of awareness, into the heart of the universe. If it's hard to feel the pain of another, deepen your imagining, sense what it's like for this other being, what hurts, what it would be like to live with that hurt. Now enlarge this taking in of pain and releasing, sending out to include all those who are in the same situation experiencing the same suffering. So if the person you want to help is grieving a loss, breathe in and out for all those experiencing the pain of loss. If this person is feeling like a failure, breathe in and out for all who feel like a failure. Sense as you breathe in unconditional willingness, tenderness and receptivity of your heart. And as you breathe out the vastness of loving awareness that is here holding this world. Continue breathing, opening to the universal experience of suffering, letting go into the spaciousness with your prayer, with your care. You can trust as your heart opens to the enormity of suffering, you become that openness. As you offer your tender care, your awareness becomes suffused with compassion. A closing prayer. May we each awaken to the loving awareness that's our true nature. May we live from this loving awareness and may our awakening hearts ripple out to touch all beings everywhere. That there might be a growing justice, peace, love and freedom in our world. May all beings everywhere awaken and be free. Thank you my friends, thank you for being part of this, for holding hands, for your good hearts, for your caring for our world. All blessings. Thank you.