Ultimate Healing: The Power of Compassion by Lama Thubten Zopa & Lama Zopa Rinpoche Author & Ailsa Cameron

Author:Lama Thubten Zopa & Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Author & Ailsa Cameron
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Body, Prayer & Spiritual, Health & Fitness, Meditations, General, Religion, Buddhism, Healing, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9780861711956
Publisher: Wisdom Publications
Published: 2001-06-15T01:56:47+00:00

14 The Heart of Healing: Taking and Giving

THE BODHICITTA PRACTICE of taking and giving, or tong-len, is the quickest, most powerful way to heal ourselves. In the taking and giving meditation, by generating great compassion we take the suffering and causes of suffering of the numberless other living beings within ourselves and use them to destroy our self-cherishing thought, the source of all our problems; by generating great loving kindness, we then give other living beings everything that we have: our body, our relatives and friends, our possessions, our merit, and our happiness. We perform this practice of exchanging self for others after we have meditated on the shortcomings of self-cherishing and on the kindness of other living beings and the benefits of cherishing them. We should do the practice of taking and giving whenever we have a problem, whether it is AIDS, cancer, some other disease, the breakdown of a relationship, failure in business, or difficulty in our spiritual practice.

The taking and giving meditation is a profound and powerful practice in which we use our own pain to develop compassion for other living beings. Through this meditation, we experience our disease and all our other problems on behalf of all living beings. Doing the meditation well helps to stop our pain, and it is not uncommon for it to even heal disease. The main point of taking and giving, however, is that it purifies the causes of disease, which are in our mind.

Exchanging self for others is a brave practice, and it is far more important than visualizing light coming from healing deities or any other meditation. By taking all the suffering of others upon ourselves and giving them all our own happiness, we use our disease to generate the ultimate good heart of bodhicitta. This is the very heart of healing.

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