Awaken Your Inner Light: A Guided Breath and Light Visualization

Welcome to another enlightening episode of the Journey Your Own Meditation Series with Jyothi V. Robertson. In this session, we embark on a transformative journey to cultivate and share the radiant light of positivity, compassion, and love.

Intention for the Session: Generating Light

We began our session with a quick introduction to Diwali, the Hindu festival of Light. Candles are often lit for this holiday time as we acknowledge how light and positive energy show up in the world. It is a good time to reflect on how we can generate more of that light to share with others. For this session, we asked everyone to turn inward, to cultivate the candles of love, abundance, and compassion in our hearts so that we may be a source of light and positive energy in the world.

The Session’s Practice: Breath and Light Visualization

This month, we practiced a breath meditation along with a light visualization. This is a popular meditation for relaxation and healing. Since this meditation follows the breath, we started with shamatha in order to get to our calm center, leaving behind our thoughts from the day.

Once we were anchored in our breathing, we guided us through the light visualization to relax any areas of tension, and to bring positive energy into us. At first, we visualized an external light, warming different parts of our bodies and relaxing those areas. Then, we brought the light within ourselves, and felt it bathing us with warmth. We closed the meditation holding that light and positive energy and then releasing it into the space around us.

Support for Continuing Practice:

A recording of a breath and light visualization session can be found below (18:14).

Shared Practices

Tonglen practice – In our after-meditation share, we mentioned the Tonglen practice where we visualize taking in the heaviness of the world with every in-breath and sending out light on the out-breath. Through this process, we begin to feel compassion for both ourselves and others.

Setting Intentions – One participant shared a mental rehearsal every morning using these powerful questions to set intentionality throughout the day or week:

What do I want to accomplish?
How do I want my interactions to feel?
How do I want to move about my day?

Another participant acknowledges in their practice that everyone in the world is suffering in some way and grounds themselves in being present to the beautiful things around us.