Random Ramblings

The chapter from Pema Chodron for today was on tonglen practice: the meditation on receiving and giving. As usual it starts with the importance of self-compassion. "What you do for yourself--any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, and gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself--will affect how you experience the world." This is because we are all interconnected. "Now people know that what we do to the rivers of South America affects the whole world, and what we do to the air in Alaska affects the whole world."

I'm familiar with Tonglen practice from a book I teach quite a bit, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying , where it's a meditation on compassion Sogyal Rinpoche advocates to encourage compassion before interacting with those who are dying, though the instructions Chodron gives are more detailed. Basically she teaches 5 stages: (1) Connect with bodhicitta--a sense of space, the "vast, tender, empty heart of bodhicitta, your awakened heart;" (2) breathe in the dark, heavy, hot nature of the negative emotions (anger, fear, jealousy, pain, rage, etc); (3) breathe out cool white light; (4) begin with a specific person/being who is suffering, to be very specific about the sufferings you're breathing in and the compassions you're breathing out; and (5) extend the tonglen practice to all who are suffering similarly.

In many ways this is similar to the metta meditations she talked about in an earlier book; begin with someone you dearly love and extend outward. It's easier to generate compassion for someone you know and love, but then work the practice outward. I've been trying to do this in my daily meditation, though I do find it challenging to extend it to those who cause me rage and pain. Of course that's part of the purpose of the practice. "If you have rage and righteoulsy act it out and blame it all on others, it's really you that suffers. The other people and the environment suffer also, but you suffer more because you're being eaten up with rage, causing you to hate yourself more and more." She compares it to grasping a hot coal to throw at your enemy: you may hurt them but you've definitely burned your hand.

She also talks about internal resistance to tonglen. "In essence, this practice of tonglen is when anything is painful or undesirable, to breathe it in. That's another way of saying you don't resist it. You surrender to yourself, you acknowledge who you are, you honor yourself. As unwanted feelings and emotions arise, you actually breathe them in and connect with what all humans feel. We all know what it is to feel pain in its many guises." In fact, she says, by feeling and acknowledging these unwanted feelings, we can then have compassion for others who also feel fear, rage, pain, helplessness, etc.

The one odd thing I find challenging in tonglen practice is the breathing part! The motivation (e.g. I'm breathing in X's pain at experiencing this health problem) takes longer than the in-breath, and the sending-out motivation (I'm breathing out compassion and healing) longer than the out-breath! Obviously it doesn't have to be the same breath, but sometimes that trips me up.

In this chapter she also talks about Milarepa's encounter with the demons in his cave: trying to teach them dharma, and then when that doesn't work, trying to live with them, and when that doesn't work, offering himself to be devoured by them. That reminds me of a meditation taught by Tsultrim Allione in one of her books, I think this one to teach radical non-attachment to your body/self, where she visualized chopping up her body and cooking it in her skull as an offering for hungry demons. I really don't think I'm there yet. There is a sense of self-protection even when practicing tonglen: I don't WANT to breathe in all of the ills of the world. Sometimes I visualize myself as a tree purifying the negative energies in my root system and transforming it into fruits that are safe to eat. I'm not sure if that's cheating (escaping the consequences of the negative thoughts) or if that's what I'm supposed to be aiming for.