The following meditation is led by Tara Brock.

To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit TaraBrock.com.

Today's practice will be Awakening Compassion.

The opening that happens with the compassion practice is the suffering that we contact

shifts from being my pain, my fear, my grief to the pain, the fear, the grief.

And as we'll practice today, the tongue-line practice which I really love and find really

powerful, very explicitly will take us from reflecting on a place of suffering within

our own being and then opening out to include all those others who suffer in the same way.

So we can really in a very direct visceral way start learning to feel this heart-space

that includes all of our suffering, the suffering, the pain.

So a way to begin and to let you know there are many styles of compassion practice and many

versions even of tongue-line.

So as with everything, this is one particular style and the invitations to experiment.

Even as you practice today, if let's say I describe breathing and feeling certain things

and you decide the breath isn't really useful to you, just drop it.

Experiment.

Let's begin with the breath and a way to begin that is very much part of the classic training

in tongue-line is to sense with the breathing in that what you're breathing in is the substance

and grit, the darkness, it's almost got a kind of granule texture that you're actually

breathing in the earthy stuff of the world that is easy to get stuck on, to get collected

around.

It's this willingness to breathe in the stuff of life, breathing in and sensing the substance

...