By practicing simple, calming breathing meditation we learn to increase harmony and compassion in our personal relationships

The best way to learn to appreciate others; to recongnize, become aware of and utlilze compassion in day to day life is to practice breathing meditation and to use compassion as the object of focus. .

The Buddhist Kadampa teacher, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso says; "The main reason we do not cherish all liviing beings is that we are so preoccupied with ourself, and this leaves very little room in our mind to appreciate others."

Practicing meditation regularly has several benefits. It can help calm us and reduce stress. It can help eliminate negative thoughts and emotions and it can help increase positive thoughts and emotions. These positive thoughts can be best used in our interpersonal relationships.

It is possible to achieve this through a two part breathing meditation practice taking about five minutes (or more if you choose). Meditation of this nature always has an object. We can use our breath as our object or a specific emotion as our object.

Choosing the object of our meditation

Of course at the beginning of any meditation, we need to get in a comfortable position, putting our hands in our lap, gently closing our eyes and relaxing our body, letting the stress of the day fall away like dropping heavy luggage.

Then, in the first part of this meditation, we become familiar with the object of our meditation, which in this case is compassion, love or peace. We do this by recalling an incident in our life where we felt great compassion for example. Once we feel that feeling again strongly, we do the second part of the meditation. We visualize holding that object (compassion) at our heart by gently keeping our focus on it, allowing no other thoughts to intervene and simply allow ourselves to feel it.

How to hold the obect of meditation without losing it

Our thoughts are like birds that are free to fly. We don’t want to hold on to our feeling of compassion too strongly, or it will feel uncomfortable and we don’t want to forget about it completely, or it will fly away. So, we practice gently keeping our object at our heart by steady concentration.

Inevitably, at some point, we will realize the bird has flown away – in other words the object we were holding, in the case, compassion has disappeared. This is completely natural. As we continue to train our mind, the number of times we lose our object will decrease. But for now, do not worry, simply retrieve it by going back to the first part of the meditation, reconnecting strongly with the emotion, and starting again.

Regaining the object if it is lost

We needn’t give ourselves a bad time or beat ourselves up over losing the object. There is no such thing as guilt in the Buddhist tradition. Thinking how we should concentrate more or by reprimanding ourselves serves no purpose other than to stop us from thinking about our original object, which was compassion – which includes compassion for ourselves. So, we simply return to the object, reconnect with it and start again.

Once we have reconnected, we concentrate on feeling compassion single pointedly.

A Buddhist breathing meditation can benefit anyone of any religion, some people choose as their object the compassion of Christ and his deeds.

The benefits of meditation on compassion

The more familiar we become with the feeling of compassion or love as we continue to meditate on it and are able to hold it single pointedly for longer periods of time, the more we will realize that we are becoming a more compassionate, more loving person in our every day life and we will feel better and better about ourselves, others and the world. This will have a very positive effect on how we relate to others in our interpersonal relationships.

There are many ways in which this practice will help with relationships. Here are some examples. We will naturally stop placing blame on others and focus instead on cherishing them. We will have compassion for their short comings as well as our own and not see these as reasons for responding in anger. When they are angry, we will realize that it is because they themselves are not happy and instead of lashing out at them, our compassion will help us reduce the cause of their anger.

So, by practicing this two part meditation practice, we can improve our relationships with others and feel better about ourselves.

The excerpt above came from the book Transform Your Life by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso – page 118

Further references:

http://www.newyorkbuddhist.org/what_buddha_taught/meditation.htm

A Heart as Wide as the World by Sharon Salzberg - Published By Shambala Sun - 1977