Breathe In Harm, Exhale Benefit

In Today's Karma Build Exercise We Turn Negativity Into Benefit To Build our Natural Compassion, Change Our Minds and Change The World.

Today's Exercise: Breathe In Harm, Exhale Benefit

• ​Karmic Muscle Group: Compassion, Generosity & Awareness
• Materials: none.
• Time Requirement:  about 10 to 15 Minutes, though you can do it for as long as you like.  

Training Notes:  Tibetan Buddhists will recognize this exercise as the Tronglen or "taking and sending practice".  It has nothing to do with religion, but everything to do with conditioning your mind to be a natural filter for negativity.  It trains our minds to be responsible for negativity and to make it our habit to be a force for transformation turning every negative thing we encounter into a benefit for all living beings.  The power of this practice, especially when done regularly, cannot be underestimated.

The Exercise:

1. This practice is best done in a tranquil place.
   
2. Situate yourself comfortably on a chair or on a meditation cushion and get your breathing under control.  Take long inhales with slow exhales that are of equal duration to the inhale.
3. ​Visualize the center of your chest an empty space of pure, clean white emptiness.  It is perfectly empty of anything but white light.
4. Think about the harm in the world.  Think about disease and violence.  Try to see it clearly in your mind.
5. As you identify a harm, turn it into black smoke in your mind and inhale it into your center of pure white light.  The second the black smoke touches the white light it turns to white mist and is purified.
6. Exhale the white mist back into the world.  With every breath, continue to inhale harm into the white light in your chest and exhale harmless white mist that is beneficial to all living things.
7. Turn yourself into a filter that inhales harm and exhales benefit.  When you have completed the exercise, check in on your own mind to see how you feel about it.

Karmic Benefits:

1. To Breathe In Harm, You Have To See Harm: as human beings in the chaos of the Information Age, we tune out negativity.  We turn on music so that we do not have to listen to the news of people being murdered or who are starving to death.  We literally drug ourselves so that we do not have confront the discomfort that we feel when we consider the true nature of the human condition.  Eventually, we become too weak to confront harm at all.  When we get to the point that we must ignore harm because we are too weak in mind to deal with it, we have officially become part of the problem.  Opening our eyes to suffering and seeing ourselves as a "negativity filter" is one way that we can train our minds to have the strength to confront negativity in the world.
2. It Is All About Intention:  when we blind ourselves to suffering, we lose the ability to hold an intention to provide a remedy for that suffering.  The harm goes unattended and becomes worse.  Psychologists call this "denial".  Look around you.  The reason that there is so much negativity in the world is because it is not being confronted.  We cannot rely on a hand full of aid workers to lift the burden of human suffering.  The entire human race must come to its own rescue.  This begins with forming a firm intention and understanding the better world depends on you.
3. The Joke Is On You:  the black smoke coming in and white mist going out are visualizations that are not doing much for the real world, but they are doing wonders for you.  The training here is to get your mind to engage suffering, and to train yourself to take responsibility for it.  The being that is being healed here is yours.

​Editor's Note: Karma Builder™ is a series of simple experiential exercises that anyone can do that are designed to create personal insight and build wisdom.  These exercises require a combination of both thought and action and will not be as effective if done by contemplation alone.  Karma Builder™ exercises are based on the principle that thought alone is not nearly as powerful a state of consciousness as experience.  By creating a point of contemplation joined to specific action, these exercise produce change in both the mind and the real world.  By observing the change in consciousness and the change in the outer world, practitioners can, over time, develop a deep understanding our inner and outer worlds connect and how to have meaningful impact on our lives and the world.  Karma Builder™ exercises develop multidimensional consciousness that can empower the influence that we can have in our lives when we find ways to make our best intentions and aspirations manifest.

About The Author

David Kenyon is a long-time practicing Tibetan Buddhist practitioner of the Kagyu lineage and formerly, a martial arts instructor in Aikido tradition.  He is president of a holistic healing school in St. Louis, Missouri.