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Transforming Suffering
The breathing exercises from the retreat on the power of love consist of eight steps:
- Four breathing exercises to handle suffering and generate joy.
- The fifth exercise generates joy, the sixth generates happiness by bringing the mind back to the body and recognizing the conditions of happiness that are already present.
- The seventh exercise is to recognize painful feelings—breathing in, knowing there is pain, and embracing it with the energy of mindfulness.
- The eighth exercise helps to handle suffering in just a few minutes thanks to mindfulness, like “cooking a pot of sour soup.”
When strong emotions such as despair or anger arise, the practitioner stops, pays attention to the breath in the belly (the “dan tien” energy center) to dwell peacefully and calm the heart. Breathing in deeply—the belly rises, breathing out—the belly falls, helps us to be solid like the trunk of a tree in the midst of a storm. Each emotion is only a very small part of the vast territory of the human being—the five aggregates: form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Thanks to mindfulness and the understanding that “an emotion is only a very small part of me,” we handle our emotions gently and sustainably.
Applied in education and family, this method:
- teaches children five or six years old to breathe and pay attention to the rising and falling of the belly to forget suffering,
- trains teachers and educators to use mindfulness to reduce suffering for students, as in California where Governor Jerry Brown brought the Dharma door into schools,
- practices loving speech and deep listening to reconcile conflicts between husband and wife, parents and children, as in stories of transformation after three to six days of meditation retreats with thousands of participants (1,300 people in Canada),
- uses “watering seeds of joy” and the Four Right Efforts to prevent negative seeds such as anger and jealousy from growing, while encouraging wholesome seeds—faith, love, forgiveness—to develop.