Recovery Dharma Meditations ❖ Ang Thomas Tran (any pronouns)

"Do you repress: Anger, Pain, Sadness?" Are you using addictive consumption to stuff your feelings? Aversion leads to deeper suffering—not just for ourselves, but for the ones we love, too. Here's a calm, trauma-sensitive, gently guided meditation. It uses self-compassion & mindfulness to help with acceptance of difficult emotions. If you can sit *with* the emotion, you won't have to act out. "You have already survived many strong emotions," Thích Nhất Hạnh once said. I know you got this.

In this *powerful* meditation: You'll see the 5-year-old child within you and offer compassion. You'll see others as their 5-year-old selves and offer them compassion. It's surprisingly easy to have compassion when we think of how blameless we each were as kids. Yet as adults, we continue to carry the shame of the wounds of our childhood traumas—none of which was our fault. To be free of suffering, we offer each child a compassion mantra: "I see you. I feel you. I care about your pain."

"We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness," wrote Thích Ñhất Hạnh. The everyday practice of Metta (AKA lovingkindness or friendliness) helps us achieve inner peace by sending metta to all beings. We even send Metta to those we may find stressful—we know from experience that when we feel safe and loved, we respond from our heartspace and we don't react so stressfully. Let's together practice taking down the illusive walls of separateness. Because when we offer Metta to others, we are in a very real sense also offering it to ourselves.