(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
In
addition to the mediations that accompany this written course, the
following are some exercises that may be helpful for you or others.
Visualizing Your Life Purpose
This exercise comes as a compilation of ideas from Shakti Gawain’s book Creative Visualization (1995).
Visualization is a tool that can help us connect to our life purpose.
If we know what this purpose is, we can visualize being in alignment
with it. Otherwise, we can visualize what it would be like to know what
our life purpose is.
To use visualization as a
tool for accessing information about your life purpose, Gawain suggests
that you start by relaxing your body. You can then focus on what your
goal is (i.e. finding out what your life purpose is or aligning with
your life purpose). You can then create an idea or feeling of the goal.
After focusing on this idea or feeling, you can come back to it often.
When you do this, you send positive energy to your goal, helping to
further create it.
Looking At Your Choices For This Life
Joanna Macy offers this exercise in Coming Back To Life (1998).
Macy states, “This process focuses on our individual lives and helps us
see how their basic features and conditions can serve the healing of
the world—almost as if we had chosen them for that purpose.” (130) For
this exercise, we begin by imagining the state of the world during the
time that we were born. Perhaps we imagine the states of the
environment and the human population. We then ask ourselves further
questions about the circumstances around our birth. Where were we born?
What was our family like? What gender did we decide to be? Asking these
questions and any others that come to mind can give insights into one’s
life purpose.
Tonglen Practice
This is a Buddhist practice that can help us to connect with a greater
sense of self by being present with our emotional suffering and the
suffering of the other forms of life on earth. Instead of running from
suffering, this practice helps us to embrace it. This awakens our
hearts and helps us to be with our underlying feelings of suffering.
Joanna Macy states, “With Shantideva, the Buddhist saint, we can say,
‘Let all sorrows ripen in me.’ We help them ripen by passing them
through our hearts...making good rich compost out of all that
grief...so we can learn from it, enhancing our larger, collective
knowing...” (http://www.joannamacy.net)
To create this rich soil, we can begin by breathing in feelings of
pain, grief, and sadness. We then exhale feelings of peace and
lightness. We continue to breathe in suffering and breathe out peace.
It is as if we are a purifier for the suffering in the world,
transforming it into peace. Whenever we get deep into the feelings of
sadness and grief through the in-breath, it is then time to breathe out
peace. In this way, we learn how to flow between peace and sadness.
This is a profound practice in that it helps us to awaken our hearts
and our Buddha nature, which is one of compassion for all beings.