Healing the Deepest Wound

Everything is a manifestation of Buddha nature, of Christ consciousness. The Beloved can only be everything. We are each fundamentally radiant, sacred human beings.

Consciousness does not die. Yet as I have worked with groups and with individuals over the years, as well as in my own practice, again and again arise the contractions, the long-held conditionings, that cause us all to suffer. Even though the details of the stories change, the stories are a reflection of the same deep woundedness.

There is a simple healing practice that takes great courage yet has the potential to bear great fruit. Tonglen, also called taking and sending, is the practice. It can be done for others as well as for the lesser pain we all experience. Eventually though, we are invited to admit and identify the place of our deepest wound.

Imagine this wounded you seated in front of meditating you. Open your heart and become truly vulnerable. Let the heart be broken. Can this brokenness then begin to meet the place of woundedness, the separateness, this place where you have felt there is something outside of yourself that you need in order to be whole; this feeling of being not enough? Can you begin to feel directly, to experience in your body how this wound has caused suffering over the years, probably even decades? Can you feel it ever more deeply?

Seeing the suffering on your face; feeling deeply enough that you begin to experience true compassion for this part of yourself; your open heart meeting the suffering; keeping your heart open to the fire of the pain; letting this compassion deepen; letting yourself touch and be touched by the suffering more directly, to the degree where you finally become willing, out of the depth of your compassion, to take this suffering into you. You breathe in, with compassion, willingly taking the suffering, as you visualize the suffering, coming from this suffering you into every pore of your being and then into your heart of hearts. If you like to visualize, you can picture the suffering as hot dark smoke going into your own body and then gathering into your innermost heart. As you breathe out you send with great lovingkindness the antidote to the suffering you in front of you, that you may visualize as sending cool white light; cutting through the very core of the place where you hold onto pain, where you hold onto separateness. With each breath this willingness deepens, taking the suffering on the in-breath with compassion and sending the antidote on the out-breath with lovingkindness; transmuting suffering into joy, healing. Touching, meeting who you are beyond identification with suffering, with the old wound. Eventually we can do this in just a few breaths whenever suffering arises, realizing it is the gateway to union with the Beloved.

— Dale Borglum