Guided Meditations

The Practice of Giving and Taking

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• Get into a comfortable position and then fix your body still. Let your eyes fall closed, and focus on your breath for a few moments, to get the mind settled.
• Call to mind someone you know who is in pain. It could be either a physical pain or a mental one.
• Go to them wherever they are right now, and sit facing them. Although you can see them perfectly, you are invisible to them, coming to them in secret.
• Look inside them and see their pain. This pain takes on a physical form, as a thick black cloud of poison writhing inside their body.
• You feel an incredible sense of sadness that they are experiencing this pain. Now decide that you must take it from them.
• We are going to use our breath to help them. So now, as you breathe in, picture this black cloud condensing into a tiny evil black ball at their heart.
• Then on each successive in-breath, pull this black ball out of them—it rises from their heart to their throat, and then up further, coming out their nostrils. Next pull it through the air, until the black ball is suspended just in front of your own nostrils, but not touching you.
• Look now into your own heart, and see a tiny diamond light. This is the light of wisdom, that can destroy all pain.
• Focus again on the black ball of pain just in front of you, and decide that you must destroy it completely— both for the sake of the person across from you, and for the sake of ridding this world of pain.
• Then on one quick in-breath, draw the black ball inside you and down to the diamond light. As soon as the light and the ball meet, there is a brilliant flash of light, and the ball is completely destroyed.
• The light gets brighter and brighter and fills your whole body, then starts to pour out from the pores of your skin, so that you are glowing with white light. Look again at the person across from you. Their pain has miraculously disappeared, and their face is now serene.
• Now, on rays of diamond light that shoot out from your heart, send them every good thing—anything they have ever wished for, and more.
• As each ray of light touches them, see them getting happier and happier, until they too are filled with radiant light.
• At first, it may be easiest to do this practice with someone you feel close to. But the next step is to try this same meditation using someone you don’t really know that well. And after that, if you really want a challenge, try it on someone who you’re not that fond of, or who you have some tension with—you’re guaranteed to have some really amazing results.

Helpful Hints

• It is very common to feel a bit of fear when taking the black ball inside of you. That is actually a really good sign—it means you were really concentrated before, when you were imagining what the black ball was.
• Being willing to take it in is what makes this meditation so powerful. Just make sure that when you do take the ball in, you see it completely destroyed, gone without a trace.
• When you are doing the giving part, use your imagination! There are no limits in the realm of the mind. Create the perfect partner for them, or the perfect job. Give them back their youthful body. Give them wings to fly in the sky—anything at all.