Taking Difficulties into Compassion

After experiencing our extended version of the On-The-Spot Tonglen practice from Lama John Makransky’s book, Awakening Through Love, review the steps of the practice below.
As you become familiar with the practice, you can see that the practice can be done quickly, taking less than a minute to go through the steps of the practice, showing how this practice might actually be done ‘on the spot’ during your busy daily life. When you find yourself caught in difficult situations or are experiencing difficult emotions, use this practice as a mindful remedy.

Advice for Difficult Times / On-the-Spot Tonglen Practice

When you find yourself in a difficult or uncomfortable situation in you daily life:

1. Allow yourself to feel the difficulty fully in your body and mind.
   
2. Recall that many others experience feelings like this,
   
   Then, right from within the feeling, allow yourself to have the thought, “So, this is what so many experience! This very feeling.” Sensing through your feeling what they feel.
   
3. Now, recall you are always held in a field of care and absolute compassion by your benefactors.
   
   Receive the healing radiance of your field of care into both body and mind. Every part of you loved in its very being.
   
4. Imagine that you are accepting it into everyone’s similar feelings.
   
   Let that healing radiance flow through you to all others who experience similar suffering and commune with them through the wish of compassion.
   
5. Envision that all these other beings become free of their suffering through your wish.
   
   Take joy in their happiness to be relieved of their suffering, and share in that joy as if it were your own.
   
6. Finally, relax deeply into oneness with the radiance of compassion.

Let all the visualizations fade away, releasing all concepts, including distinctions of Self and Other. Rest in this luminous openness, allowing everything to be just as it is.