This practice is a version of tong-len, sending and receiving, adapted from "Breath of Compassion" in the Levey's Simple Meditation & Relaxation.

This practice works by reconnecting us to a larger field of relationship and a vaster sense of ourselves...helps to build our capacity to transform every experience we may have into an affirmation of loving concern for ourselves, others and the world. - Joel and Michele Levey

Set the intention

Before we begin, take a moment to set an intention for this evening. Intend to offer compassion, to reduce or remove suffering wherever it is found.

Visualize or Imagine?

It's common to be asked to visualize for this exercise, and for many people that works well. Others find it challenging. So I invite you to expand your imagination to include all of your senses: imagine as sound, imagine as temperature, as smell, as taste, as pressure.

The Process

1. Become aware of the sensations of your body breathing. Tune into the movement of your belly as you inhale and exhale. Just sitting, just breathing, just being.
2. Bring attention to your body core, your chest, belly, all the way through to your back.
3. Imagine: your body core is empty - no heart, no stomach, no organs at all, no veins, arteries, blood. Empty like a balloon. Feel this balloon, this empty space, rising and falling with the breath. Rest in the sensations of this. There is nothing to do, figure out, or achieve.
4. Imagine: your skin is porous, that air is moving into and out of body core through your skin with each braeth. Feel the sensation of the air gently moving through your pores, across the boundary between what you think is you, and what you think is not. Rest in this.
5. Imagine: with each inhale and each exhale that energy - sound, light, vibration, temperature, healing, more - is also flowing through you, in and out through your skin. Rest in this.
6. Imagine: in the center of your empty and spacious body, at the level of your heart, a sphere of transformation. It's floating there in the spaciousness of your body like a star, a moon, a whirlpool. Bring to mind whatever suggests transformation to you: coal turning into diamond, sun burning away fog, cloth removing tarnish to reveal gleaming silver. Whatever passes into this sphere is changed instantly, like turning the light on in a dark room. Notice how vast and powerful this transformative space can be. Rest in this.
   
   

   Geshe Gyaltsen calls this part the "Hoover vacuum clean meditation"!

   You will use (not yet) your inhalation to draw a pain or negative energy (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual) into this transforming sphere, where it is instantly dissolved and transmuted.

   You will use your exhalation to send the transformed energy out to your entire body and mind - healing, energizing, and transforming you.

   Some ways to imagine the inhalation/exhalation:

   • thick smoke / clear light
   • hot heavy mass / light cool breeze
   • radio static, jackhammer / sweet harmony singing, bird song, gentle rain
   • unpleasant smell (wet dog, garbage can, sardines) / lilacs, fresh cut grass

   You will use your exhalation (not yet), to pour the transformed energy out - as clear radiant light, as delightful sound, as sweet fragance - until it fills your entire body and mind. Let it flow out through your skin to the world around you.

   Some examples:

   • Draw in agitation, radiate peace
   • Draw in judgement radiate kindness

   • Draw in anger, radiate patience.

7. Come back to the spacious and porous core of your body. Tune into the sensations of expansion and contraction, or air and energy moving within you and through you. Now practice for 5 minutes: inhaling, transforming, exhaling.

The Experience

How was it? Community comments:

• Easier to work with the pain of others than my own
• Was able to transform smoke to light at times, then the mind wandered at other times
• Working with others, I could feel myself reaching the limit of what I could take in
• Interesting (but possible) to do this practice after having worked with a different and opposite practice of breathing in light and breathing out darkness practice
• Noticed a throbbing in my head and was able to transform it and reduce the pain
• A very helpful practice I can add to my meditation techniques