This meditation aims at connecting with suffering and using suffering to connect with life.

People often think that the purpose of meditation is relaxation, a way to ease oneself out of the stresses of life, to retreat from the world. I think this is a wrong view. Meditation uses relaxation, we relax the mind, and we do retreat, but in order to find a stronger connection. We retreat in order to advance, in order to engage more deeply in a manner that no longer harms us.
If the Buddha opted to frame his First Noble Truth in terms of the existence of suffering, then meditation (in the Buddhist context) cannot be about escaping suffering, but about meeting suffering head-on, and transforming it, into something that awakens us, that brings us closer to the Buddha mind, a spacious, open, connected mind.

I used 4 phases, or exercises, in this meditation. However, exercises 3 and 4 (one or both), will often arise spontaneously as soon as we connect with suffering (#2). The purpose of these exercises is to train ourselves in using our suffering as food for the spacious mind, not just to transform suffering, but to literally make it almost a prerequisite for the Buddha mind.

1. The first exercise is to connect with life, with space. I can connect with trees, with the sky, with the snowy landscape, with mountains, with rivers, oceans, the wind, etc. This is so as to build a reservoir (or a recollection) of spaciousness.
   You can also connect with a loved one, but here there is a good chance that it will inevitably also involve pain, because we are always aware that my loved one will one day suffer, will one day die, etc. This can be a great theme on some days, but on other days it might be better to connect with life through its expression that does not evoke painful feelings in me (we tend to see mountains and rivers with a lesser sense of personal identification with them).
2. When my spaciousness “bank account” feels full, I connect with suffering. I suggest not using suffering that involves anger at the beginning, as anger tends to overtake the mind and will interfere with the next phases of the meditation. When I am confident about the process, I can take anger and frustration also, but at the beginning grief, fear, etc., might be more useful.
   Connecting with suffering, does not mean feeling suffering. I connect with the suffering from the place of spaciousness (which I have just built). Just as when I connect with the forest or the sunrise, I do not feel “foresty” or “sunrisy” but I feel some form of joy, or opening, when I connect with suffering, it does not mean I now feel the pain of my toe, but that I feel the sense of what pain is. In other words, I am not bringing on the pain, I am just connecting with it.
3. This stage might arise spontaneously, or the fourth stage might arise spontaneously. It does not matter which arises first. If the fourth stage arises, then you could ignore this phase. You may find that this stage arises immediately as you connect with suffering during meditation.
   Here I view/connect with suffering from the perspective of connecting to life. I use the spaciousness I established (my “bank account) to allow me to observe suffering without being overwhelmed by it. This is an interim stage.
4. Here I use my suffering to reinforce my connection with life. As I connect with suffering, I use it to create more space within me, more connection with life. This can come in the form of love or compassion. As delve into suffering, I see that all beings suffer, so I see that the individual suffering is universal is part of life. I see that say behind a glorious sunrise there is the all consuming furnace of the sun (which if I was in, would be great suffering…), that we all eat each other (literally), that the inspiring bird, squirrel, tree, and even mountain and lake are going (or will be going) through pathologies, rotting, death, etc., and yet they are part of life and inspire life and my connection with life. I use the suffering to connect more strongly with life.

When I can do the fourth exercise relatively spontaneously, that is when everything serves to create a spacious mind, both the beauty of the vast snowy landscape, and the suffering of someone dying from exposure to cold… That is when the First Noble Truth becomes real and serves to bring about the other Noble Truths – the cessation of suffering in service of the Buddha mind.

In my experience, these “4 stages” are artificial. I use them to create a framework. It is the fourth stage that matters – creating space out of suffering, connecting to life by connecting to suffering. However there are times when all one really needs is to work on the “bank account” (and there are a number of guided meditations in The Blooming of A Lotus that do that very well. Other times I might just connect with suffering and simultaneously feel it feeds my spacious mind. And at other times, I may go through each phase in different ways, times, and contexts. It s all about playing with it and finding what works for me at any particular time so that I do not “retreat” from suffering but engage with it in a way that feeds the spacious mind.