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(…continued)

Imagine your breath forms a bridge between your heart and the flame. Across this bridge, you and the flame offer yourselves unreservedly to each other. The flame is offering you its light, simplicity, purity and delight: you are breathing in and absorbing all these qualities as you inhale. In return, as you exhale you are offering to the flame all your heart’s love, concern, appreciation and gratitude.

Any thoughts or distractions which appear, you will breathe out and into the flame, where they disappear.

This flame is your entire world. Only the flame exists.

Now imagine that there is a mirror image of this flame burning in the very depths of your heart – a tiny but beautiful, radiant flame. When you can picture and feel this flame clearly within, then close your eyes and focus all your attention within, absorb yourself in the flame deep inside your heart.

As you focus on this inner flame, so it responds and starts to grow larger. As it grows, all its qualities – its light, purity, simplicity, beauty, effulgence – increase and intensify. As the flame continues to grow, eventually it expands even beyond your physical form, subsuming your whole existence within it. While the flame started as a tiny thing within you, now you are a tiny thing within the flame. It rises up around you and above you, reaching for the infinite.

The source of the flame is the depths of your own heart; a formidable, ceaseless fountain of light flooding your entire being. This light spontaneously illumines every corner of your existence: wherever previously there had been any pockets of darkness – in the form of fear, anxiety, doubt, confusion – these shady areas are completely obliterated and illumined by the effulgence streaming forth from within.

(continued…)