When we experience suffering there is a risk that we will respond with grief or anger. Instead Alan guides us to meditate on compassion, which is the heartfelt yearning: “May we all be free of suffering and the sources of suffering.” Compassion is the response that guides our spiritual practice swiftly upward like a rocket. Today’s meditation focuses our compassion on the first of three levels of suffering, the “suffering of suffering” commonly known as everyday physical and emotional pain.

Alan then answers student questions: How to distinguish an intuitive insight from a delusional thought? Is prana the same as the Tibetan word, lung? Can I lie down all the way to liberation?