Tonglen

Mother's Day, Pico Blvd., Los Angeles 2011

Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us.

I had tea yesterday with a dear friend who shares many of the same problems that I have -- balancing a life of one's own with a family, a husband, financial difficulties, a child with special needs and the siblings of that child. We also share a similar sense of humor. We joked about the circus aspect of our lives, about our roles as ringmasters, about how impossible it all is and seems and how relentless. We even joked about gassing ourselves, pantomiming the method. At one point in our conversation, she looked at me and asked Do you ever wonder why it's so hard for us? I know she meant why our lives are so much harder than many of those we know -- many of our friends and most of our families -- and I don't have an answer other than a deep, abiding knowing that life is hard. It's hard, anyway. 


Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us.


Those words are the great Pema Chodron's, a Buddhist teacher whose essay about Tonglen, the Tibetan word for giving and taking, a meditation practice, sustains me when I'm feeling down or overwhelmed, when life's suffering threatens to muffle its joy. 


Tonglen is a practice where one works with our tendency to avoid suffering and resist pain, a habit that also causes us to armor ourselves, separate ourselves from both interior experiences and those of others. It is a practice of compassion where you use your own suffering to alleviate the sufferings of others. Instead of resisting your feelings of anger, fear, despair, grief, pain, etc., you acknowledge them with your breath -- you even embrace them with your breath. And then you breathe out. When you breathe in again, you might acknowledge all the suffering of all the people you know and embrace that, too. And then you breathe out. When I am near to despair over Sophie's seizures I practice tonglen by breathing in the sufferings of all the mothers I know who have children that seize and all the mothers I don't know who have children that seize. And then I breathe out. I breathe out love and compassion and health and happiness for all those mothers and all those children.

I believe that embracing suffering, meeting it, accepting it and even embracing it might lead to understanding it, and that understanding connects me, deeply, to others.

Tonglen reverses the usual logic of avoiding suffering and seeking pleasure and, in the process, we become liberated from a very ancient prison of selfishness. We begin to feel love both for ourselves and others and also we begin to take care of ourselves and others. It awakens our compassion and it also introduces us to a far larger view of reality. It introduces us to the unlimited spaciousness that Buddhists call shunyata. By doing the practice, we begin to connect with the open dimension of our being. At first we experience this as things not being such a big deal or so solid as they seemed before. 
--Pema Chodron