Desire for compassion

So just allow your body to be met with awareness. Finding the ground—and refinding it, and refinding it—really pouring awareness into where your body meets the ground, until you have a really solid sense: body here, earth below, and where the two meet. Then, finding what feels right now to be the edge of your body. It may not be a clearly defined edge, but tracing with your awareness the shape that your body is taking. And then just watching this space—noticing what arises in this space. Probably most of it defies labels, can’t be named. Most of the sensations and experiences of your body are too subtle to be given easy names. So just watching. Watching for the tingles, the currents, the temperatures, the patterns of tension and relaxation—like ripples on water. And now, emphasising the breath as a constellation of experiences in the body. Tuning into everything that we can feel as part of the movement of breathing: the belly rising and falling; the air moving through the nostrils and the throat; the sense of lift in the whole body with the inhale—a sense of everything brightening; and on the exhale, the sense of release. If you want to—if it feels like it would be helpful—you can encourage the breath to be longer, smoother, only if this is in the service of less tension. Just seeing if this longer, smoother breath can be enjoyed and received with appreciation. Letting your body drink in the smooth, grounded energy of this kind of breath. Then we’ll orient ourselves towards metta—compassion, goodwill. One very helpful way to do this is to recognise that our motivations for practising already inherently include goodwill, compassion. We want beautiful things for ourselves, for others, for the world. It’s going to be slightly different for each of us. Even if it just feels today like, “I just want some headspace,” underneath this is a beautiful intention of self-compassion. So sense that there’s already compassion in your reason for showing up this morning, and allow it to be desired. Allow yourself to feel that you want more of that—more compassion. We can be hungry and thirsty for it. It’s actually important that we are hungry and thirsty for it. Maybe you can feel that in your body—maybe there’s a kind of burning in your chest, or a sense of purpose and strength in your body. Be very clear, very firm: “I want more compassion, more goodwill, more friendliness.” Why wouldn’t we? Holding this desire—this is our fuel for the practice. This is what’s going to power us through. More than anything else, this is what we can come back to when we need more engagement with the practice. Holding this intention, this desire, feeling it in your body, and allowing the breath to become the vehicle by which we receive more compassion, more goodwill. And if you can feel that desire for more in your body—in a particular place—sense the breath as originating there and coming back to there. So the breath answers your desire by bringing love, compassion, metta, goodwill—whichever of these words makes most sense to you, or another. Or you may just feel that desire in your whole body, and let the breath fill your whole body with kindness. We want to relax everything as much as possible as we’re doing this. And the breath doesn’t need to go out and find this compassion in a particular place. It’s not like there’s compassion out there and the breath brings it into the body. It’s more like we just recognise compassion, goodwill, kindness, love—we recognise these as fundamental qualities, just like awareness. They’re already there, waiting to be discovered in any experience. So it’s like we get beneath the sense of the breath as something like a physical movement of air, to something that feels more like an exchange of energy—something more subtle and less solid, less objectified. And this subtler sense of the breath—we can choose to feel it as being made of love, compassion, kindness, or infused with those qualities, or carrying those qualities. And to make this something more than a visualisation—something that’s very real—we need to drop the sense that the body right now is something objective, something solid, something that exists in the world as matter and energy. Instead, we recognise that in meditation, when we look within, the body is an experience. And when we recognise the body as experience, that already softens—makes more subtle, makes more flexible—our experience of the body. So it can be felt in different ways. So it can be felt as something whose nature is compassion or awareness. This isn’t a trick, or something we’re making happen. In a way, it’s more real. It’s what we uncover when we let go of the need to constantly reconstruct the body, the self, the mind as something that we then need to carry around. So rest in the body, and witness a breath that is made of—or filled with—love, metta, friendliness. Recognise that on an experiential level, a subjective level, this is more true than the breath as oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide moving past skin cells into lungs. That’s all true in an objective sense, but we need to drop all of that and feel the subtler breath that we can recognise as having this substance of compassion. And this compassion—it’s not really yours. It doesn’t belong to this body or this mind. Just like the air we breathe doesn’t belong to us. It just is—kind of there, as something we can receive. This impersonal sense of compassion, if that’s the right word—something universal—it can hold anything, if we’re able to stay with it. So allowing it to hold your whole body, your whole mind, your whole heart. Even allowing it to hold your stories, your suffering, your troubles, as well as your joys. Just surrendering into the compassion. Dropping everything. Not holding any part of you back from being touched and held and soothed and nourished. And if there are others in your life—or that you know of—who you would like to invite into this compassion, just effortlessly allowing them to come to mind. If nobody comes, that’s okay too. Just introducing them to this background compassion. And for the last few minutes, you can just rest like this—allowing yourself, and anyone else who comes to mind, to deeply rest in this pervasive, all-pervading atmosphere of kindness, love, compassion.