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For this exercise you will need a fresh flower.

Sit somewhere quiet where you can be alone and undisturbed. Either place the flower in a vase or hold the flower by its stem in front of you.

Gaze at the flower with your eyes half-open, half-closed, so that there is little else in your peripheral vision.

Feel that this flower is the most beautiful, sacred, precious thing in the world, and you have been entrusted to care for and protect it. Love the flower with all your heart. Admire, appreciate and adore its beauty, simplicity, delicacy and fragrance.

Imagine the flower has its own breath, and breathe in time with the flower. While breathing together, breathe in from the flower all its best qualities, which in turn become your own: as you breathe in the flower’s simplicity, your mind and thoughts are simplified and stilled; as you breathe in the flower’s beauty and purity, you feel beauty and purity blossom within your heart, spreading and wafting like the flower’s fragrance, to envelop your whole being.

Concentrate on one petal of the flower: imagine the whole world has been reduced to just this petal.

Now close your eyes and imagine the flower is blossoming inside your own heart, and from there it is expanding to encompass your whole body.

You have become the flower. Its beauty, delicacy and fragrance are your own.

The flower is complete and perfect in itself. It matters not whether it is appreciated or admired. Its exquisite beauty and fragrance remain the same even if no-one would notice it. Our spiritual heart is the same. Our inner peace and satisfaction are not dependent on any outer circumstance or the approval of anyone else in the world.

Our heart is an ever-blossoming, ever-fresh, ever-beautiful, ever-fragrant perfection-flower.