Sixteen minutes into a guided meditation recorded at Serenity Ridge Retreat Center on October 3, 2026, a teacher's voice settles over a room of seated practitioners and asks them to imagine a golden figure in the middle of their chest. She is Sherap Chamma, the wisdom-loving mother, and the instruction is not to picture her from a distance. You are to feel her presence in the heart, pray to her for help, and then breathe with her: light coming in on the inhale from the left, what is toxic leaving on the exhale from the right. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche leads the session, which is the second part of a Sherap Chamma practice focused on emotion, breath and what he calls the channels. Shot in a sparse, unhurried style, the video moves from visualization to silent sitting to a sung mantra and ends on a short reflection about change. It is a compact, practical teaching, and it rewards a reader who wants to understand the logic behind each step before trying it.
The teaching begins with an image, not an argument. As the chant of the deity's seed syllable is sung, the instruction at 0:43 is to imagine her presence in the heart, the way she appears in the printed booklet that accompanies the retreat: golden, loving, peaceful, fully ornamented. The point is to feel the quality she embodies, which the speaker names as wisdom, love and caring, and to let that presence be present in the body rather than in the mind's eye alone. The practice is framed as a relationship. "We see, connect, we pray to her," he says, and the prayer that follows is concrete: help me remove the obstacles, the blockages in my heart and in my field of emotion, the things that block wisdom.
That phrasing is worth pausing on. The meditation does not ask the practitioner to become calm by force. It asks for help, and it names what needs help: trauma, wounds, karma, emotions. Around the 1:46 mark the teacher lists them in one breath, "help clear all the blockages of trauma, wound, karma, emotions," and the list is a map of the territory the practice intends to enter. The aim, as he puts it in the same prayer, is an opened heart, the "eyes of heart" able to see and to feel empathy, care and love, first toward oneself, then toward others and the world.
For a Western reader, the inviting-a-deity gesture can sound unfamiliar. The video's own tags place the practice within the Bön tradition, and its framing treats the figure less as an external rescuer than as a way of orienting attention toward wisdom and compassion that the practitioner is already trying to cultivate. The relationship is the method.
This is the mechanical heart of the session, and the instructions are specific enough to repeat. At about 3:29 the teacher begins to guide the breath: gradually breathe in from the left, and imagine countless energy syllables of Sherap Chamma coming in from the left side and entering the heart. The heart fills with golden light, which the speaker describes as the energy of the wisdom-loving mother. Then the breath leaves from the right side, carrying out what is toxic and blocking.
Notice the structure. Inhalation is a filling; exhalation is a clearing. The breath is not simply counted or watched. It has a direction and a content, and the teacher spells it out in the most useful sentence of the session: "every inhalation bring more light. Every exhalation from the right clearing more toxics, karmic toxics, energetic blockages all out." The instruction is to continue this cycle without interruption, and he adds a small permission that matters for beginners: if you want to use your hand to help the movement along, you are welcome to, "at least in the beginning."
The word he uses for the framework is "channels," and it runs through the whole teaching. The practice treats the body as having pathways through which energy and breath move, and it works with the left and right sides as distinct routes. Readers who want the full doctrinal account of these channels will need to go to the teachings themselves; the video gives the instruction and the intention, not a treatise. What it does give is a clear rule of thumb a practitioner can hold: receive from the left, release from the right, and keep the light coming in as the toxins go out.
The middle of the session is quiet by design. At about 4:27 the instruction shifts into silent practice, and the video leaves room for it. Around the four-and-a-half-minute mark the teacher's voice is still audible, offering the hand-gesture permission, and then the room is given time to breathe without commentary. Silent sitting is where the earlier visualization either takes hold or does not, and the video makes no attempt to fill that space.
A bell at about 9:29 marks the turn toward the mantra. The sung section that follows is the emotional and devotional center of the practice, and it is also the hardest part to present in text. The auto-generated captions for the chanting are fragmentary, and this article will not attempt to reconstruct the syllables. What the captions do show is a long, repeated, sung passage that the teacher and the room carry together, with the vowel sounds stretching and dropping in a way that the transcript can only approximate. If you are following along, the booklet image and the sung syllables are meant to work together: the visual of the deity and the sound of her name.
The sung mantra closes the meditation. It is not an afterthought. Within the logic of the session, it is the moment where the prayer, the breath and the visualization are gathered into a single sound, and that is why the teaching ends with it rather than with a conceptual summary.
The final section, starting at about 15:21, is the reflection that gives the session its frame. After the mantra, the teacher steps back and names what the practice is meant to change. Here is his summary, lightly cleaned from the auto-generated captions:
"So continuously the wisdom loving mother Sherap Chamma's kind of blessings in our body. And transformation of our body, and her blessings in our emotion, emotional, energetic level and breath, and the last one is more in a deeper sense of consciousness, perception of self, identity, and deeper shift. So these are, you can see, somehow different levels." (Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, video at 15:21)
There are three levels in that summary, and they are worth separating because they move from the most visible to the least. The first is the body: the blessings and transformation that show up physically over the course of the practice. The second is emotion and energy, which is where the breath and the channels do their work and where feelings that had been held in place begin to move. The third is the deepest, and the teacher describes it in terms of consciousness, perception of self and identity. This is the claim that the practice is not only about feeling better during a sitting but about a shift in how the practitioner understands who is doing the feeling.
The video closes with a question rather than a conclusion: "Can that make sense? Can you feel that?" It is an honest ending. The teaching does not promise that the three levels will be felt on any given day. It offers them as a way of noticing what is happening, and it asks the practitioner to check against their own experience.
The video is short enough to practice in one sitting, and its own description gives the first instruction: find a quiet place and sit comfortably. From there, the sequence is clear. Invite the presence of Sherap Chamma into the heart and pray for help with the blockages you know are there. Begin the left-in, right-out breath, letting light fill the heart on the inhale and letting what is toxic leave on the exhale. Use a hand gesture if it helps, especially at first. Sit in silence for a stretch without narrating. When the bell rings, join the sung mantra. Then pause and notice what has changed in the body, in the emotional tone of the mind, and in the sense of self that is doing the noticing.
Two cautions follow from the material itself. The teacher is explicit that the practice works with trauma and wounds, which means a session can bring up strong feeling, and the instruction to breathe continuously is not a call to push through it. Treat the visualization and the breath as tools for steadiness, and stop or slow down if the intensity exceeds what you can hold. Second, the transformation the teacher describes unfolds across levels, and the deepest one is not something a single session delivers. The video offers a direction, not a deadline.
Start with the video itself, and then return to it with a notebook. The most useful thing a first-time practitioner can do is write down, after the closing mantra, what they noticed in the body, in the emotional tone, and in the sense of self, then compare notes over the following week. That is the teacher's own final question made into a practice. If the Sherap Chamma framework interests you, look for the wider Ligmincha teachings and the Serenity Ridge retreat materials referenced in the video's description, which give the full context for the deity, the channels and the Bön lineage behind this session. The video is the doorway; the practice is what happens after you walk through it.
