Training in Compassion 7: Send and Receive Compassion

Compassion literally means "to feel passion with." Passion means pain. Compassion is the willingness to feel pain with another, to feel another's pain as one's own.

It's impossible to take in the pain of another unless we are able to take in our own pain. Most of us are not so good at accepting our own pain. We prefer to deny it or distract ourselves from it. We are so intent on making our own pain go away that we don't allow ourselves to feel it. We can't take it in. Consequently we are incapable of feeling another's pain, so we are incapable of actual compassion, although we may think we are quite compassionate.

Real, full compassion requires training your heart to do what it usually does not want to do: to go toward, rather than away from, what's painful and difficult in your own life.

Second, it requires realizing that your own suffering and the suffering of others are not different. When you discover that this is so, you see that when you are willing to really take in your own suffering, you find, within that very suffering, the suffering of others. Also: when you are able to truly take in the suffering of another, you find within it your own human pain. Being willing to receive pain, we come to understand, is the only way to open our hearts to love.

To send and receive compassion, start by breathing in the openness of mind that you can feel in the clarity and strength of the inhale. And then exhale, letting go completely and merging with openness of mind, so that there is nothing else present but that. When you’re ready, breathe in your own suffering. Let compassion ride on your breath.

As you inhale, take in your own pain and the suffering. With practice, you can do it. Visualize the pain and suffering as a dark, sticky substance or smoke or some kind of goo that you are breathing in, taking into your body. This is receiving.

Then, breathe out. In exhaling we transform the goo, the suffering, the pain, into lightness, ease, peacefulness that comes out of our nostrils and all the pores of our body as a light sweet mist. This is sending.

You are sending healing light to yourself and to many others.

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More detail about this practice is in the longer version here.