When I sit, I often see my drum as a membranous doorway that I'm pushing through. That's partially due to the primal image above, from The Prisoner, a 17-episode late 60s television series. My internal image is full body.
I sat yesterday for the first time in a long time. A couple of days ago, I got up on the wrong side of the bed. I was a nasty bitch. I have a nasty, self-centered bitch side.
I sat yesterday with the goal of starting down the path toward eradicating that demon within me. Then I thought that perhaps I needed to befriend that demon. Then I remembered the practice of tonglen:
From Making Friends with Death by Judith L. Lief:
When we are in the greatest pain, we have the hardest time stretching beyond our own concerns. There is a famous story in which the Buddha encounters a grieving woman, carrying the body of her only child. This woman was completely stricken by grief. She had lost everything-- her parents, her husband, all her family, and now she had lost her only son. She would not let her fellow villagers take him or bury him; she refused to even acknowledge that he was dead. When her friends heard that the Buddha would be passing through their area, they suggested that she go and see him and ask him to cure her son. So in desperation, she traveled to the Buddha and asked for his help. The Buddha told the grieving mother that he could indeed help her but only if she brought him a sesame seed from the home of a family that had not experienced death. In great relief, the woman set out to find that seed. But as she went from house to house, she found not a single one that did not have a tale of loss. In her search for the sesame seed, gradually she was drawn out of preoccupation with her own pain as she realized the level of suffering all around her. And when she returned to the Buddha, she was ready to bury her child.
The contemplative practice called tonglen in Tibetan, or "sending and taking" in English, works directly with this powerful tendency to focus on ourselves. The practice of tonglen exposes the depth of our self-absorption and begins to undermine it. It is a practice specifically designed to remove that obstacle and the many other obstacles that stand in the way of our natural impulse toward kindness.
The practice of tonglen is sometimes described as a practice of "exchanging self and other." This is because the goal of tonglen is to flip that pattern of self-absorption around completely, to the point at which instead of putting ourselves first, we put others first. So if I were continuing that game with my daughter it would go differently: "I'm 'you,' and you're 'me'." "No, I'm 'you,' and you're 'me'." Tonglen practice goes from the starting point of putting ourselves first, through the middle ground of viewing ourselves and others equally, to the fruition of putting others before ourselves.
If our view is to focus on ourselves, the our actions will tend to feed that view by grabbing on to whatever builds us up and pushing away whatever threatens us. Our habitual activity is to protect ourselves by constantly picking and choosing, accepting and rejecting-- but in tonglen practice, once again we reverse our usual approach. Instead of taking in what we desire and rejecting what we do not, we take in what we have rejected and send out what we desire-- basically the opposite of "normal." Tonglen practice completely reverses our usual way of going about things....
In the same way that it is possible to cultivate mindfulness and awareness through meditation practice, we can cultivate kindness through tonglen practice. Through the practice of tonglen, we learn to work straightforwardly with the difficulties we encounter and extend ourselves more wholeheartedly to others. Tonglen is training in how to take on suffering and give out love. It is a natural complement to mindfulness practice, a natural extension of the acceptance and self-knowledge that come as a result of sitting meditation.
Tonglen Practice
Each time you practice tonglen, being with basic mindfulness practice. It is important to take some time to let your mind settle. Having done so, you can go on to the practice of tonglen itself, which has four steps.
The first step is very brief. You could think of it as "clearing the decks." Simply allow a little pause, or gap, before you begin. Although this first step is very brief and simple, it is still important. It is like cracking the window to let in a little fresh air.
In the second step, you touch in with the visceral world of feelings and emotions. Each time you inhale, you breathe in heavy, dark, hot, sticky, claustrophobic energy; and each time you exhale, you breathe out light, refreshing, clear, cool energy. With each breath, the practice shifts direction, so there is an ongoing rhythm back and forth. You are taking the habit of grasping and rejecting, and you are reversing it.
The third and fourth steps take that same approach and apply it to specific topics. Start as close to home as possible, with something that actually affects you personally. You should work with a topic that arouses real feelings, something that actually touches you or feels a little raw. It need not be anything monumental; it could be quite ordinary. For instance, maybe someone screamed at you when you were driving to work. You could breathe in the aggression that person threw at you, and you could breathe out to him a wish to free him from the pain of that anger. Or if you are worried about a friend who seems to be spiraling down, you could breathe in your friend's confusion and breathe out to her your strength and support. If you yourself have just come down with a sickness, you could breathe in that sickness and breathe out your feelings of health and well-being. The point is to start with something that has some reality or juice in your life.
Once you are under way, it is good to let the practice develop on its own and see where it takes you. In this case, no matter what comes up in your mind, you breathe in what you do not like and breathe out what you do, or you breathe in what is not so good and breathe out being free of that. For instance, after you breathe in that driver's aggression and breathe out your soothing of that anger, what might come up next is your own anger at being so abused first thing in the morning when you had started out in a pretty good mood. You could breathe that anger in and breathe out the ability not to take such attacks so personally. In that way, your thoughts follow along naturally, revealing more and more subtle layers of grasping and rejecting.
When you let whatever comes up, rather than directing your mind along a particular theme, you find that everything that arises feeds right back into the practice itself. For instance, if you feel bad that you cannot do tonglen properly, you breathe that in-- in turn, you breathe out your wish to be good at it. Because the habit of grasping and rejecting runs so deep, there never seems to be a shortage of topics for tonglen.
In the fourth step, you expand the practice beyond your own immediate feelings and concerns of the moment. For instance, if you are worried about your friend, you expand that concern to include all the other people now and in the past who have had similar worries. You include everybody who has suffered the pain of seeing someone they are close to in danger or trouble. You breathe in all those worries and breathe out to all those countless beings your wish that they be freed from such pain.
In tonglen practice, we start with our own concerns, because those are what usually preoccupy us, but we do not get stuck there; we extend out to others. There is very little in our own experience that has not been experienced by countless other beings. The point is sincerely to include other beings in our practice. By the way, this does not mean only humans; it includes such beings as dogs, insects, birds, even bacteria....
If you are sick, that is also a good time to practice tonglen, taking in that sickness and sending out your wish for recovery. I had a friend who was sick for a very long time with recurrent breast cancer, which eventually spread throughout her body. As she struggled with her disease, she began to visualize that on the inbreath, she was taking in healthy energy that was clean and clear, and on the outbreath, she was breathing out her cancer, which was ugly and murky. She was trying to get rid of her cancer, which was ugly and murky. She was trying to get rid of her cancer and replace it with health. When she talked to Trungpa Ringpoche about this practice, he was very concerned and told her that she was doing exactly the opposite of what she should be doing. She was making things worse for herself by not accepting her cancer and working with it on that basis, and making things worse for others by projecting her negativity out toward them. He told her to practice tonglen instead. The odd thing is that once she change her practice, her condition stabilized and she lived far longer than anyone had expected. During this period of borrowed time, she was able to make a real breakthrough in her understanding of life and her relationship to death.
