This is my latest favorite find from Pema Chodron. On her FB page, she posted the link to a HuffPost article about her recent appearance on Oprah’s “Super Soul Sunday”, with some beautiful tips on ending suffering or any level of general discontent:
“You breathe it in,” Chödrön says. “It’s as if you breathe it into your heart and your heart just gets bigger and bigger. Every time you breathe in, the heart gets bigger and bigger, so that no matter how bad it feels, you just give it more space. So when you breathe in, you’re open to it, I guess you could say. And then when you breathe out, you just send out a lot of space.”
“Sometimes I say, ‘What does your heart feel like?’ People will say, ‘It feels like a rock.’ What does your stomach feel like? ‘It feels like a knot. It’s as if my whole body was clenched… because I’m so miserable,'” Chödrön says. “So, breathe in and let that heart open. Let the stomach open.”
Do six deep in-breaths, she suggests. It’s a practice that Chödrön calls “compassionate abiding,” and with it comes an enlightened view of the world’s connectivity: You are not alone.
“When you breathe in, you can recognize that all over the world — right now and in the past and in the future — people are going to feel exactly what you’re feeling now. A feeling of being rejected. The feeling of being unloved. The feeling of insecurity. The feeling of fear. Rage.” Chödrön says. “Human beings have always felt this and always will. And so you breathe in for everyone that they could welcome it, that they could say, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’ Embrace it.”
