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This guided meditation by Tibetan teacher Dr. Robert Thurman invites you to explore one of the most profound ideas in contemplative practice: the rarity and potential of being human.

Through breath, visualization, and focused awareness, you’ll gently shift your attention inward to the center of your being, connecting with a deeper level of consciousness often overlooked in daily life. From this still point, the meditation expands your perspective, helping you reflect on the nature of awareness, your connection to other living beings, and the unique capacity you have for insight, empathy, and growth.

Settling into the meditation

Dr. Robert Thurman: Now we’re going to meditate on what we are as human beings. This is an ancient Tibetan meditation called Deljorn Yeka: the difficulty of finding a human life form endowed with liberty and opportunity.

To begin, first, just settle down. Focus on the breathing. And imagine that, at the very center of your heart chakra—which is at the height of the heart, roughly level with the nipples, whether male or female, but back near the spine—in that center, in the central channel, there is a little bubble.

Within that bubble, a tiny, mustard-seed-sized consciousness is present, what we might call the soul consciousness. A super-subtle mental continuum is what the Tibetans might call it.

And then imagine, as you inhale, that you bring energy to that key point, which is your central awareness—and which we normally don’t occupy. We’re usually in the sense consciousness of our ordinary body.

But when you inhale, you bring fine energy into that center. As the air goes up through the nostrils, it enters a central channel, rises to the crown at the middle of the brain, and then descends down a very subtle nerve channel—passing in front of the cervical joints, down along the spine—and reaches the heart. It actually goes all the way down to the perineum, but we’re not going to focus on that lower part.

Just feel that the energy goes into the center of your heart chakra. Then hold it there for a couple of seconds at first, and gradually, gently exhale from there. Exhaling can be through the mouth or the nostrils, but the inhale should be through the nostrils.

Just enjoy that for a couple of minutes.

Once you become calm there, you’re sort of bringing all life energy into that heart center. When you hold it there, it radiates warmth throughout your subtle body, blessing, oxygenating, every organ and every part of the body.

Awareness: the doorway of infinity

And that deep awareness of yours is so tiny it’s almost like a zero point. But it is the doorway to infinity, to your immersion in infinity.

Then, as you exhale, that awareness rises to become your main awareness, without interfering with whatever else you are attending to, even hearing your own thoughts.

And then you realize that that central awareness, this has always been existing. One reason it’s hard to find is that, from a point zero, there is the doorway of infinity. And infinity in time goes toward the past as beginninglessness, and toward the future as endlessness.

Within that, think of any animal that you know, your dog or cat, or any wild animal you’ve seen on TV, at a zoo, or walking in the hills, mountains, wilderness, or on a safari. And realize they also have a central point like that of awareness. But their central point is carried by a being that doesn’t have the same degree of analytical thinking that you do. It doesn’t have the same degree of self-awareness as you have.

So actually, you imagine yourself having been such a being. And then, anything you can imagine a deity, a god must feel like, if you know different visions of the divine from mystics, West or East, you have been all kinds of divine beings.

You’ve been sort of macho, you might say. You’ve been fierce predators. You’ve been prey beings. Both sides. And every time, that central point, awareness, the micro-infinite, encodes how you have been, and carries some central elements of how you have been into another state of being, into another coarse embodiment.

And somehow, you have reached this very complex coarse embodiment, with this amazing nervous system and this incredible ability to think, to imagine, and even to focus your awareness toward the center of your being, the heart center.

And so you have so much more awareness of your environment, how it works, its chemistry, its physical energy transformations. You have so much more awareness of others. You can imagine being them, identify with them, love them, feel empathy toward them, imagine being in their shoes.

Therefore, you have a really good chance at optimizing your relationship with them all, and really understanding what you and they are, and even what those animals are, and those divinities, those angels, or those demons, or whatever you have imagined you have been.

Neuroscientists say the core of our brain is the limbic brain. It’s like a crocodile, self-centered, survival-oriented energy. Fight or flight reactions, primal reactions to what’s perceived as the other, the world around us, outside our skin.

And if we’ve identified with animals, we realize they are really quite helpless in regard to what’s outside them. Even the most ferocious lion can attack a deer for food, but has no idea about the man aiming a gun at it.

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