Field of Care

This practice is a continuation and variation on the gratitude practices found here. Field of care meditations help us access capacities from the depth of our awareness, our “buddha nature,” to heal our hearts and minds in its unconditional warmth, to settle deeply into its openness and clarity, and to establish the secure base of love and compassion that is needed to extend compassion reliably to others.

Field of Care

The meditation has three subdivisions:

1. Settling into body and breath

2. Field of care

3. Releasing

In this meditation, we use the field of care to bring out loving qualities from our underlying awareness—a felt sense of warmth, acceptance, being seen, inner rest, tenderness, well-being, spaciousness and so forth. When you start to experience such qualities, shift your attention mainly to the qualities, rather than the image of the field of care. Relax into those loving qualities, letting them become a healing environment for all your physical and mental feelings. Focus just on the feeling of those qualities, not on stories the mind may create about the field of care or your relationships. Dropping such stories when they arise, just settle increasingly into the feeling of those qualities, letting them permeate your whole body and mind, letting them draw you into oneness with them.

1: Settling into body and breath

Sit in a relaxed way, with back comfortably straight, eyes gazing gently downward. Come down from thinking mind into the body, and settle into the grounded feeling of the body on your seat. (pause) Let the breath flow naturally while breathing from the abdomen, so you feel the belly expand and contract with each breath. Let that feeling draw you into it more and more, breath by breath.

2: Field of Care

Has three subdivisions:

1. Caring moment

2. Benefactor

3. Spiritual field

In this meditation we experience ourselves held in the love and compassion of a field of care. This evokes loving qualities from our underlying awareness, as a holding environment in which all our feelings can process themselves, and from which we become more present to others. How to establish a field of care for meditation? There are three options—please choose one for this practice.

1: Caring Moment

Recall and reinhabit a caring moment. This is a moment with another person or being that makes you happy to recall, or feels heartwarming to remember. A moment when someone was joyful to be with you, or seeing you in your deep worth, or listening, or radiating warmth to you, or rooting for you, or wishing you well. This could be with another human being or a loving animal. Or it could be a moment when you were joyful to see others who were caring for each other. Or a moment when you were a loving figure for another. Or think of a moment when you were in a place special to you, as in nature, where you felt deeply safe, well, at peace, and at home. Reinhabit any such caring moment as happening right now.

2: Benefactor

Bring to mind a benefactor—someone that you are truly grateful has been in your life or world. Someone who has inspired, blessed, or uplifted you by their presence, way of being, or mentorship.

3: Spiritual Field

Bring to mind a spiritual figure, or a group of such figures, that is deeply meaningful to you, who hold you and your world in unconditional care, compassion and wisdom, such as a field of buddhas and bodhisattvas, spiritual ancestors, or a saint or divine figure of your own tradition. Or the presence of God. Imagine and feel that this field of spiritual power is holding you and your whole world in unconditional, enduring love, compassion, and wisdom. Your spiritual field could also be the natural world, as drawing you into the depth of your being, as with a sunset sky or ocean.

Which of those three options is most effective to help you sense that you are held in a field of warmth, deep acceptance, love and compassion?

Now bring to mind your field of care: your caring moment, benefactor, or spiritual field. Bring this to mind not just as a memory or abstraction, but as happening right now, right here. You are being seen and held in deep care, compassion, acceptance and warmth, beyond judgements. Relax into this experience, steeping in its loving energies, feeling its tender qualities, and letting them spaciously infuse your whole being and your whole world. Accept these loving energies and qualities into your whole body and mind—into every part of your body, into every layer of feeling and emotion. Every part of you loved in its very being. Let these loving qualities unify you with them more and more.

Let any thoughts or reactions that occur be gently embraced in the spacious warmth and acceptance of this loving environment. Let them find their own place in their own time, by letting them all be.

If you lose the feeling of the loving energies and qualities, freshly recall your field of care as present here now, and let its power draw you back into the feeling of it.

3: Releasing

After some time, let this loving environment of warmth and acceptance help your mind to relax deeply and release all its frameworks of meditation or concern. Let the mind settle back a bit inwardly and come to rest in the background of its awareness, which is naturally wide open and luminous like a sunlit sky. As thoughts and feelings arise, let them just metabolize themselves and release within this sky-like openness of awareness, by letting everything be.