Skillful Compassion

There's a meditation technique you might have heard of, which is to think of the out-breath is breathing out bad stuff and the in-breath, breathing in good stuff. But if we imagine breathing in all the good stuff there's an idea that there's good stuff and there's bad stuff, there's already a bias. Our observation of the mind is no longer free from judgment. There's also the idea that we want the good stuff for ourselves, right? We wanna take, we wanna hold on to it, and we want it to last. And of course, we wanna push away the bad stuff, we don't want that, we wanna get rid of it. And we wanna get rid of it for as long as we possibly can. This dynamic sets up some unnecessary tension in the mind, but with this technique, we're flipping the entire thing on its head and putting the happiness of others before our own. So as we breathe in, we imagine breathing in all the difficulties of others. And as we breathe out, we imagine exchanging them for all the good stuff we've ever experienced in our life. Sharing these moments of good fortune with others is counter-intuitive as it may sound can actually lead to a greater feeling of happiness in our own mind....