Meditation Month 2022: Self-Transformation

Welcome back to the fourth and final week of Meditation Month, our annual challenge to sit all 31 days of January featuring guided meditations from Tibetan Buddhist teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. 

This week, Mingyur Rinpoche leads a guided meditation on tonglen, the Tibetan practice of “sending and receiving.” Tong means sending or giving, and len means taking or receiving. To practice tonglen, you breathe in and receive the suffering of other sentient beings, and then you breathe out and send happiness to others. Mingyur Rinpoche describes the act of sending and receiving as self-transformation. By practicing tonglen, he explains, we develop strength in our own love and compassion and we accumulate virtue through the will to help others become free from suffering.  

We’ll do hatred as an example. If we do [a] taking and sending practice with the hatred, then the hatred actually transforms into love and compassion. Without suppressing it, without getting rid of the hatred, poison becomes medicine. 

Download a transcript of this talk. It has been edited for clarity.

Meditation Month is free for all participants. Tricycle is here to support your journey with helpful articles, a live call on January 31 with meditation teacher Myoshin Kelley, a Facebook discussion group, and other free resources for meditation and Buddhist practice. Visit tricycle.org/mm22 to learn more.

This week’s Meditation Month articles:

• “The Efforts of Others” by Rev. Dr. Kenji Akahoshi
• “The High of New Beginnings—and the Joy of What Comes Next” by Jessica Angima
• “The Power of the Third Moment” by Trungram Gyalwa Rinpoche 
• “The Sound of a Bell, the Seven-Piece Robe” by Guo Gu
• “We Are All This Luminous Mind: The Possibility and Importance of Awakening” by Dosho Port
• “The Simile of the Lump of Foam” by Bhikkhu Bodhi

To keep up with all of our Meditation Month offerings, sign up for our newsletter using the form below.

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