Compassion Meditation #3 - Advanced Level

Here I am demonstrating an important and beautiful process, wherein we can incline the mind to peace and well-being through contemplating the body as elements.

In this meditation we brighten and calm the mind by generating metta first, and then take the good energy and even mindedness resulting from having generated metta, as the foundation for then investigating the true 'deeper' nature of the physical body.

A breath meditation and contemplation of the body, where hair, nails and teeth are meditated upon as earth element and not a self.

The meditation begins with awareness of the body and breath before contemplating death, and impermanence as a great equalizer that can illicit forgiveness.

Here we confront the habits of aversion to oneself and others by challenging some of our assumptions.

After establishing body based awareness a contemplation on forgiveness is presented.

A taken from Collection 4: Compassion Meditation, Forgiveness, Contemplation of Not-Self. Avaiable at www.peacebeyondsuffering.org 

When monks tell engrossing & inspiring true stories from their own experience, seemingly philosophical matters become less intellectual & much more compelling.

This guided Compassion Meditation is 'Level 3 - Advanced' in a three-part series. Here we add a greater number of beings as well as more diverse classes of beings to our meditation. Including enemies and even beings in hell. It is important to have listened to the two-part 'Cultivating Deep and Vast Compassion' talk and to have worked through levels 1 and 2 of the meditation before undertaking this advanced practice. Follow all of the steps diligently you are sure to develop Great Compassion.

In 'level 1' in this series of Compassion Meditations, we practised how to hold Compassion for Oneself, a Friend and a Neutral person. In level 2, we are increasing our capacity by including more friends, more neutral people, and also 1 'difficult person.'