Guided Practices | Awakening Compassion Through Concentration, Imagination, and Prayer

About this episode

This episode explores a spiritual exercise aimed at awakening compassion through concentration, imagination, and prayer.

This spiritual exercise is known in some gnostic circles as the prayer for the irradiation of love, a direct means for awakening, developing, and empowering bodhichitta. Such an exercise can be practiced any time to inflame and inspire the consciousness towards alleviating humanity's suffering. It is also a remedy for reducing one's own pain, because by focusing on others, we develop genuine virtue and strengthen our best qualities (because if we are blinded by our passions and desires, we are less effective in serving our communities). Learn how to develop concentration, imagination, and prayer in combination to produce a profound synthesis: the rare virtue of impactful, divine compassion in service of others' wellbeing. This exercise accompanies the lecture Cultivating Bodhichitta Through Intention and Practice from The Way of the Bodhisattva course. Resources and References: Awakening Compassion Through Concentration, Imagination, and Prayer

Topics covered

• compassion
• concentration
• imagination
• prayer
• bodhichitta

Keywords

• spiritual exercise
• gnostic
• love
• humanity's suffering
• virtue

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Cultivating Bodhichitta Through Intention and Practice

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