Interconnection Meditation

1. Interconnection with All Beings

Reflect on all that your mother, father, or some other benefactor or friend has done for you in this life. Reflect on all they did for you, for example your mother in carrying you in the womb, giving birth to you, and raising you as a helpless baby, helping you when you could not care for yourself. Reflect on the problems they went through in order to help and care for you in this way.

Reflect on how you have benefitted from their kindness and generate the desire to repay that kindness.

Generate the wish that they be happy, safe, free of suffering, and send them loving and kind thoughts and feelings in a personal way.

Reflect on the kindness of mothers, fathers, benefactors and friends throughout the world. Consider how so many people go out of their way to care for and help others and the trouble that it puts them through.

Generate the wish that all mothers, fathers, benefactors, friends and all beings be happy, safe, free of suffering, and send them loving and kind thoughts and feelings as well.

Then imagine that your mother, father, benefactor or friend is somewhere suffering great emotional or physical pain. Cultivate the desire to free them of that suffering, and reflect on how to turn away from their suffering would be the epitome of ingratitude.

Reflect on how we react when we hear of, or see someone we don’t know suffering greatly. Then imagine that we find out that that person is actually our mother, father, benefactor, or friend. Then how would we react?

Reflect on how although each person may not be our friend or relative right now, they certainly are someone else’s friend, relative, or benefactor who will suffer greatly when they hear the news of their misfortune. Also reflect that had things gone differently in our life, that suffering being could very well have been our friend, relative, or benefactor.

Cultivate the desire to free all beings who are all potentially our mother, father, relative, friend, or benefactor of their myriad sufferings.

2. Interconnection with All Life

Reflect on how life on this planet is endlessly interconnected. Trees provide materials for houses. Plants provide materials for clothes. Both plants and animals provide life for other living beings. Life is supported by myriad of living things on earth.

Consider how everything you have in this life is provided by others, from the cars we drive, the highways we drive on, the food we eat, the shelter we have, to our schools, hospitals, stores and more. Look around you and notice how everything is provided by others, and how interrelated all of the planet is.