Week 7

Jul 23, 2025

Thank you for last night’s great beginning of Week 7! We are now moving from compassion for others to an active compassion practice. The theme of week 7 is making your compassion more embodied and active. As usual, the week 7 resources and homework are below.

All class slides can be found here (note, not all weeks have slides).

Week 7 Homework: 

  1. Formal Week 7 meditation: Active Compassion Meditation

The link to access the CCT Guided Meditations is: https://www.compassioninstitute.com/meditations and the password is: cctaudio

  1. Informal Daily Life Practices 
  • Daily Taking Action: Compassionate action is a willingness to stay with suffering and through this willingness, compassionate action naturally arises. What does this willingness, this compassionate action look like in your daily life? Make a commitment to do an act of compassion or kindness each day this week. Look for small opportunities to give something in response to suffering. This could be a donation to a charity, a nice text to a friend to check in, a smile to a neighbor, etc.
  • Informal Tonglen: Practice “Tonglen on the Spot” or “Compassion on the Go”. During your day notice when the impulse to offer compassion arises in response to suffering. When possible breathe in as you become aware of the suffering; then breathe out the wish for happiness and the freedom from suffering.

Helpful Activities for the formal and informal Tonglen Practice: 

  1. Notice how your body warms the air as you breathe in and breathe out. This requires no effort on your part. It is a natural process.
  2. Notice if you feel any resistance to the practice of Tonglen and simply welcome it, allow it to be, and let go of any need to resist the resistance.
  3. Feel free to play around with images that work for you in Tonglen – dark cloud into light, heat into coolness, cold into warmth, tightness into spaciousness.
  4. Notice any sense of holding onto the suffering and see if you can let the suffering simply move through you into a sense of the expansive compassion that holds all of life, including you.
  5. Remember that you are always welcome to return to breath focused practice at any time.
  • Practice self-compassion in the manner that works for you personally.
    • Practice Tonglen for yourself once. When you notice you are stuck or suffering, take a moment to breathe in your suffering and the suffering of anyone else struggling with something similar. Then envision that suffering transforming in your heart to white light. And then breathe out your wish for whatever would relieve your suffering and the suffering of others experiencing the same thing. 
  • If this calls to you: Ask your partner from the call or your buddy if they’d be willing to send you a video wishing you the following phrases:

“May you be free from suffering and its causes;
May you be free from fear and anxiety;
May you achieve joy and happiness;
May you achieve peace and freedom.”

 

Supplemental Resources:


VIDEOS:

Compassion is Natural. So Why Is It So Hard for Us? – Thupten Jinpa on Compassion

Tonglen Meditation – Pema Chödrön (Brief 5 minute video in which Pema Chödrön introduces tonglen)

Secrets of the Vagus Nerve – Dr. Dacher Keltner. It’s the video we watched in class

 

ARTICLES:

“Transforming the Heart of Suffering” by Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön’s description of tonglen that we read in class.

 

QUOTES/POEMS:

“Because I am compassionate, I can be brave.” – Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

 

“Wage Peace,” by Judyth Hill

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble, breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields. Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music; memorize the words for thank you in three languages. Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries, imagine grief
as the out breath of beauty
or the gesture of fish. Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious: Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.