A Special Healing Meditation


From a teaching given by Venerable Thupten Rinpoche in Christchurch on 2 March 1997, and at the Dhargyey Buddhist Centre on 9 March 1997. This transcript was taken from the latter teaching. The teaching was translated on both occasions by Losang Dawa. © Copyright Thupten Tulku & Dhargyey Buddhist Centre, 1997.

Today I would like to teach you a type of meditation that experienced lamas have advised will help you regain energy and power and strength. It can be particularly useful when you are sick.
You can do this meditation in the usual way, sitting up on your cushion. Or, if you are sick, you can do it lying on your back on your bed.
The first visualization is as follows. If you are lying on your back, imagine in the space above you, not too far above, a brilliant full-moon-like disk. If you are doing the visualization sitting up, imagine this moon-like disk just above your head. The size of the white disk is up to you.

This white disk has a Tibetan syllable HUM (see image) with the top fixed into the disk. The HUM can be red in colour. Even if you don't know Tibetan, try to visualize the Tibetan letter HUM. What's wrong with imagining the English letters HUM? Because these are written side-ways, whereas the parts of the Tibetan syllable HUM are written vertically. This has its benefit.
You need to spend as long as is necessary on this, until you have gained a clear visualization of the white moon-like disk and the red HUM. Lamas have advised that you need to have as clear and vivid a visualization of this as if it were not an imagined thing but a real thing -- some-thing that you can almost grab with your own hands.
Next, imagine that the red HUM emits five coloured rays of light -- white, yellow, red, blue and green. This band of coloured light comes down to you and falls on your body. As the light touches your body, feel strongly that your body also has attained the state of that band of light, so that it becomes extremely resplendent, clear, and extremely light. As your body transforms into a body of coloured rays of light, extremely clear and striking in colour, feel that your body has completely overcome the lethargy and heaviness of the sickness you were experiencing a while ago. Now feel that your body has become extremely supple and light, as if it were a floating feather in a light breeze.
This is the first way of visualizing to overcome sickness or discomfort of the body.
The second visualization is the same as before until you reach the part where you feel that the five-coloured band of light-rays comes down to you. Then, rather than visualizing that your body becomes a band of coloured light, imagine that from the top down, the rays of light keep pushing on all the undesirable elements in your body -- undesirable elements that have been responsible for your sickness, for the heaviness of your body, etc. All the undesirable elements of your body are pushed downward. As the band of light works its way through from the top down, feel that finally your body is being completely rid of the unwanted, sickening elements.
The third type of visualization is a special-ized healing process. All three are ways of healing but the third is specially targeted. Suppose you have a sickness in one part of the body -- a tumour for instance: imagine that all the energy of the multicoloured rays of light is focused onto the affected organ, and extinguishes the malignant elements. Then feel that the sickness melts into light and finally disappears.
If you do this kind of healing practice through visualization, through meditative techniques, lamas have said that it has an impact. Of course you won't notice an effect right after you've started, but if you do it for quite some time -- and if you have the need for such a healing process, of course you will do it for quite some time -- lamas have said that it will have an effect.
These explanations about healing techniques that one can do oneself in one's own meditation, were taught by lamas not just because they were in the texts, but because they were known to work. They were taught because in the past they had been undertaken by people in need, who did them just as they were explained in the texts, and experienced positive benefit. The explanations were verified by the experience of people who needed to do this meditation and who did it.
I thought I would describe this healing practice to you, thinking that maybe someone would benefit from it. Even if it doesn't benefit anyone, there's no harm in telling it to you.