Atisha's Heart Meditation
Throughout this busy holiday season I have been practicing Atisha’s Heart Meditation also known as Love and Kindness Meditation. This meditation is a wonderful technique for transforming fear, pain or suffering into love and compassion. It is an excellent meditation for coping with anxiety and for calming the nervous system and overly busy mind by bringing our energy into our heart center through conscious breathing.
This meditation comes from Atisha, The Thrice Great. It is a beautiful meditation for people who want to transform negative thoughts and emotions and experience the spaciousness and compassion of their heart. The heart has great transformational power, it can change any fear, worry, pain or suffering into love and heal your troubled mind.
Many meditation techniques encourage you to breathe out your negativity and to breathe in positivity. This meditation does exactly the opposite, it uses the power and compassion of the heart to transform your own worries, fears and pains and also the suffering and misery of all beings into compassion.
In this meditation, you allow all the suffering of yourself and of all the beings in the world to ride on your incoming breath and reach your heart. The heart can do miracles and I think you will be surprised at how it transmutes the pain and suffering into love and compassion – just by holding it there with awareness. You consciously breath in misery and it in the heart space it is transformed into compassion. Then, as you breath out, you pour that compassion into the whole existence.
I will be offering this meditation on Wednesday evenings January 11 and 18th, at 5:30 pm MST and you can join either in person or via Zoom via this ZOOM LINK as a New Year’s gift to you.
You can also read the instructions to this meditation below and try this on your own. If you are local and you’d like to join me in person just shoot me an email and I’ll send you the information.
This Heart Meditation comes from Atisha’s 7 points of mind training which is the foundation of our January retreat. We still have a few spots left for this retreat and would be happy to have you join us. This will be a deep dive. Atisha's seven points of mind training will deepen our understanding of meditation and provide tools for us moving forward with more awareness and compassion. (Note:You can read the Sutra and Osho’s discussion at the end of this post).
Reach out if you want to jump in or explore your participating. The retreat is January 20 - 22, Friday morning through Sunday late afternoon. We will be in a beautiful residential retreat center in the mountains above Boulder.
Nature and community; meditation and inquiry; medicine and celebration; integration and intention. Start the New Year by bringing all of this into your BEING.
Meditation Instructions: The meditation has no fixed format so you can play around with what works for you. I have been using the Osho Heart Meditation music (on iMusic or Spotify), which indicates and energetically supports the stages.
Here is a link to the music I use and below are the instructions. You can also use your own playlist and modify the time accordingly.
Instructions:
The meditation lasts 50 minutes and has four stages. During the first three stages you may stand, move, sit or lie down as happens for you naturally; eyes open or closed. The meditation is over when you hear three gong beats.
First Stage: 5 minutes
Moving into the heart.
Bringing your awareness to your body and breathing, feel yourself here and now.
Then bring your awareness to your heart chakra, the energy center inside the middle of your chest. If it helps you, place one or both hands on your heart center.
Absorb each in-breath into the heart, pour each out-breath out from the heart.
Second Stage: 15 minutes
Begin with yourself.
Start with your own misery, feel it with as much intensity as possible. Accept the hurt, the wounds, and the suffering in your whole life into your heart center with acceptance and compassion for you. Breathe in your misery and absorb it into the heart. Let it be transformed there into joy, into compassion. Breathe out all the joy, the compassion; pour this joy, this compassion, which is your true nature and birthright back out of your heart into existence.
You may express in sounds, words, gestures and movements what is happening inside you or you may let it happen sitting silently. Experiment with both. Listen to what your body needs.
Third Stage: 15 minutes
Include all the people in the world.
Now expand this process. Breath in all misery of all beings, unconditionally. Breath in the suffering of your friends, your enemies, your loved ones, the poor and exploited, the suffering and pain of all beings into your heart. Accept and welcome it there and watch as it changes into love and compassion. Absorb all sufferings into the heart. Let it be transformed there into joy, into compassion. Then breathe out all the joy, the blissfulness; pour your true self, your love and compassion into existence.
You may express in sounds, words, gestures and movements what is happening inside you or let it happen silently.
Fourth Stage: 15 minutes
Come back.
Now completely withdraw your attention from the world, from others, even from yourself and let go. Witness.
Lie down, close your eyes, be silent and still.
Once you experience how pain and suffering can be transformed into joy through the breath and heart, you may like to apply this method silently whenever people and events around you trigger the process. I have been using this technique for a few years now and it is really powerful.
Atisha’s Sutra:
Begin with the development of taking with yourself
When evil fills the inanimate and animate universes
Change bad conditions to the Bodhi path.
Drive all blame into one. Be grateful for everyone.
Here is an excerpt from the Book of Wisdom with Osho explaining this sutra:
It is one of the greatest methods. When you breathe in, think that you are breathing in all the miseries of all the people in the world. All the darkness, all the negativity, all the hell that exists anywhere, you are breathing it in. Let it be absorbed in your heart. This is the method of compassion: drink in all the suffering and pour out all the blessings.
You will be surprised if you do it. The moment you take all the sufferings of the world inside you, they are no longer sufferings. The heart immediately transforms the energy. The heart is a transforming force: drink in misery, and it is transformed into blissfulness. Then pour it out. Once you have learned that your heart can do this magic, this miracle, you will like to do it again and again. Try it. It is one of the most practical methods – simple, and it brings immediate results. Do it today and see.
And before you can do this with the whole of existence you will have to start first with yourself. This is one of the fundamental secrets of inner growth. You cannot do anything with others that you have not done in the first place with yourself.
Whatsoever you can do with others, you must have done to yourself before because that is the only thing that you can share. You can share only that which you have; you cannot share that which you don’t have.