Pratipaksha Bhavana: Meditating on Opposites

Working with opposites during our meditation practice is an interesting way to show our minds that there are other ways of being; other truths to experience in any given moment.

Often, there is a gap between our present state of mind and our desired state of mind. In order to bridge that gap, we first must acknowledge where we’re at and where we’d like to be. If we’re presently sad but wish to feel happy, we can use our meditation practice as a tool to force happiness into our awareness for a moment in time.

Once we acknolwedge that happiness is where we want to be, we can recount times in our lives that we’ve been happy, we can dive into how our body felt in those moments. We can even imagine the embodiment that other people experience when they’re happy — there’s a whole Buddhist philosophy called Mudita about feeling happiness for other peoples’ happiness.

This is just an example. We can use this strategy as part of shifting from distracted to focused, from anxious to calm, or from anger to compassion. We must ask ourselves, “what would it feel like in my body to feel this way? Breathe into the sensations that arise. This is the first step in shifting the mind — simply letting the mind know that it’s capable of feeling differently than how it currently feels.