Tonglen And Compassion

An explanation of the Tonglen (Taking and Sending) practice from Tibetan Buddhism and a guided meditation. Tonglen cultivates compassion for self and for others. It is a powerful tool for healing the judgemental mind.

Transcript

There is a Tibetan Buddhist practice called Tong Wen,

Or in English,

Taking and sending,

Or even also translated as giving and receiving.

It is a very powerful practice,

It's a very simple practice,

And it is also a very radical practice,

Because usually when we are doing a spiritual practice,

We take into ourselves that which is wholesome and sacred,

And we let go of that which is difficult and toxic.

But Tong Wen is a practice to deepen the qualities of loving-kindness and compassion in our hearts.

Tong Wen is very obviously a dualistic practice,

It's not at the level of compassion where we know we are compassion,

It's a concentration on compassion and also on loving-kindness.

It even has the ability to take us beyond the feeling of helplessness.

So for instance,

If somebody happens to have a relative who is really ill,

Maybe close by,

Maybe far away or a friend,

And you are in a situation where you are really not able to help that person in some obvious outer way,

One could feel really helpless.

But you can always,

Even if the person is far,

Far away,

Even if the person is not accessible to holding and touching and giving good advice,

You can do Tong Wen practice for that person.

At the very least,

This opens your own heart,

And at the very most,

It actually changes that other human being.

So let us briefly describe the practice.

Traditionally it has four parts.

One of the parts is the main body of the practice,

And once you get more familiar with it,

You can concentrate on the main part,

Part three,

But just for the sake of really understanding the depth of the practice,

I will go through all four parts.

Tong Wen can be done for another person who is suffering.

It can be done for a group of people who are suffering,

And it can be done for a part of yourself that is suffering.

Traditionally it is taught for the suffering other person,

Because it is sort of assumed in these Eastern traditions that when you get to the place where you are feeling compassion for other people,

That you are a loving,

Compassionate person yourself.

In the West,

We see that this is not always the case,

And in fact,

In these groups,

One of the main ways we are using meditation practice is not to become a great meditator,

But to uncover the emotional,

Physical patterns from long ago that keep us caught,

And then after we become aware of them,

Begin to have compassion to be able to embrace those places in ourselves where our heart is closed.

The mind creates the abyss,

The heart crosses the abyss.

So by becoming aware of your patterns,

Then it will enable you through Tong Wen,

Through other compassion practices,

To not only be aware of that place in yourself,

But beyond that to have a loving relationship with that part of yourself.

For the sake of describing the practice,

At first let us describe it in terms of Tong Wen for another person.

So let us suppose that right now in the center of this circle,

There is someone lying here who is obviously suffering.

She or he is very emaciated,

It's clear there's pain in her or his body,

There seems to be emotional disturbance.

The first step of the practice is what is called flashing on compassion,

Which means we begin to open our heart.

Can we really,

Rather than get lost and I'm supposed to do something here,

Oh my God,

How difficult that must be for you.

Can we go into our own heart?

And one of the ways to do this is to remember something that happened in your own life,

A moment in which your heart was really open,

Just remember that.

One of my meditation teachers grew up in Tibet and he said that when he does this practice,

He remembers a time when he was a child,

When he was walking about and he saw some other children throwing stones at a puppy and abusing,

Torturing this puppy.

And it just broke his heart so that when he wants to feel his heart really opening,

He remembers that moment and his heart just opens up.

Clearly,

One can do Tong Len or any practice from the surface of your mind.

You just say,

Oh,

Somebody's suffering,

Let me do some Tong Len and you just have a nice kind idea in your mind,

But to the extent you really do this from a place that is genuine and sincere and in a way brokenhearted,

It has that much more power and effectiveness.

So the first thing we do is go as deeply into our heart as we can.

And as we go into our hearts and there is this person before us who is so obviously suffering,

The second stage comes up in which we open ourselves to be willing to feel the suffering of this other human being.

What is the texture of it?

What is the rawness of it?

How does it actually feel?

Now,

Obviously,

Neither you nor I can feel that suffering as immediately as the person who is in that body.

But at the same time,

If we open our hearts,

We connect with this other person.

The two in a way begins to merge through open heartedness.

And maybe without knowing exactly the details,

We have a strong sense of the suffering that this person is going through.

And we go into this suffering more and more deeply till we get to the point that we begin to feel I'm willing to take that suffering into me.

I want that person to be happy and free of suffering so deeply that I'm willing to take that suffering into me.

And at that point begins the third stage,

The main body of the practice.

So that as we breathe in,

We breathe in with compassion and take the suffering of that person into our own body,

Into every pore of our body and then into our heart of hearts.

And as we breathe out,

We send the antidote to that suffering as loving kindness is healing to that human being,

Taking suffering with compassion,

Sending the antidote with loving kindness.

That is the practice.

And it is a practice of concentrating on the feeling of compassion,

Deepening compassion each time you breathe in and deepening loving kindness or healing energy as you're breathing out.

If you're somebody who likes to visualize,

I am not particularly one of those person.

There is a visualization that goes along with this that keeps your mind occupied and busy.

But the main part of the practice is the feelings of compassion and loving kindness as you're breathing in and out.

And the visualization is as you are breathing in,

You visualize the suffering of this person congealing as hot,

Dark smoke.

And it's coming out of her or him into your body.

And as you're breathing out,

We're sending the antidote is cool,

White moonlight.

But once again,

I emphasize that it is not a visualization so much as a concentration upon the feelings of compassion and loving kindness.

This is a radical practice because we are willing to take in that which is the most difficult of someone else and offer to them freely that which is most precious of our own.

In doing that,

We are cutting at the root the place in us of identification with the small I in Buddhism is called self cherishing,

Not self cherishing in a psychologically healthy way,

But in a sense of being attached to I'm separate from you and I've got to take care of myself so that not only are we feeling loving kindness and compassion for this other human being,

But in doing it,

We are cutting through the place where suffering arises in us,

This place where we're identified with our own separateness.

It's very important to remember that we're not breathing in the cause of the person suffering.

I was once with a meditation teacher called Kala Rinpoche,

A very wonderful Tibetan Lama.

And somebody asked him,

I have a friend who has cancer,

And I would like to do Tonglen for this person.

Yet I'm afraid that if I do Tonglen for her,

I will get the cancer.

And Kala Rinpoche said,

If you get that cancer,

You know that it worked.

And then he started laughing.

This Buddhist joke is that we're not breathing in the cancer.

We're breathing in the suffering that arises in response to cancer.

Because as we know,

Cancer does not cause suffering.

Resistance to cancer causes suffering.

And it is human nature that most people with cancer resist having cancer and they do suffer.

But we have to be clear here that we're not breathing in the illness.

We're breathing in the suffering that is caused by resistance to the illness.

That is the practice.

That's the third part of the practice.

Then the fourth part of the practice is that we generalize the practice from this person who is here before us to all the people in the world,

Or at least any group that has roughly,

Approximately the same quality of suffering that they do.

All the people with the same kind of cancer,

All the people with the same neurotic structure,

All the people whose children have just been lost,

Or whatever the situation might happen to be.

So that we're taking the practice from this very specific practice of I'm doing it for you or for me to generalizing it to the quality of suffering itself,

To all the other beings that have that same quality.

And even though we don't know all these other beings,

At the same time,

We're very familiar with how they're suffering because it's so similar to this person before us.

Then finally,

And in fact,

In a way most importantly,

Doing Tonglen practice for ourselves is a very strong healing practice.

As we live our lives,

As we follow our spiritual practice,

As we investigate who we are,

We begin to notice that there are patterns,

There are qualities in us that arise again and again.

And yes,

You can go to therapy.

We're not looking to put any therapists out of business here.

You can go to body work,

You can go to a meditation retreat.

But what you will see is that there are some of these conditions,

Patterns that are so ingrained that you can be aware of them,

You can go and talk in therapy about them.

But until you've been able to embrace them,

Until you are willing to have compassion for them,

Then they will probably continue.

Now,

Certainly the goal of therapy is to get to that place where you not only become aware of what it is that's going on,

But you begin to be able to embrace that which is going on.

We're not talking about our own self-therapy,

If you will.

When suffering arises in yourself,

Can you be aware of that rather than pulling back from it automatically?

And if you then begin to identify these patterns,

Then you can imagine this part of you that has this pattern sitting in front of you and you doing this practice for that part of yourself.

So there's the meditating you who's doing the tonglen practice and the part of you that is suffering.

So you may remember my own story is that when I was very young,

I had a couple of severe electrical shocks.

And I ended up feeling that the world isn't a safe place,

That I was just following my own curiosity.

And twice I had this very shocking and one time almost fatal experience.

I grew up,

I started doing a lot of meditating.

There was a lot of mental activity.

And I'd meditate enough and it would calm down,

But then the thoughts come back again.

And I began to notice that a lot of my thoughts were planning thoughts.

I was trying to plan to not have that shock again.

I was trying to plan to make the world a safer place.

Yet this went on for a decade or two of going to retreats,

A lot of planning.

But when I finally noticed this pattern and started doing tonglen practice for the part of me that was frightened that the world was not safe,

That place dramatically relaxed and released.

But it is challenging to admit these places in ourselves,

To admit the place where we're deeply frightened or deeply arrogant or deeply agitated or whatever it might happen to be.

The first stage is becoming aware of that.

The second stage is being willing to have compassion,

To lean into that,

To be with that,

To embrace that quality.

It's very possible to be sitting with someone who's suffering and you're having an ordinary conversation about whatever it is that's going on.

But inwardly,

You're doing tonglen practice.

A friend of mine is a psychologist and he was at one of those psychology conferences where at lunchtime you gather around big round tables and 10 or 12 people have lunch at each table.

And he sat at this table eating lunch and there was somebody else at the table who was obviously in a great deal of emotional distress.

So he,

Very quietly without saying anything at all as he's eating,

Just was doing tonglen for this fellow who was sitting across the table from him.

And at the end of the lunch,

A third person came up to him and said,

I'm a psychic.

I just want to thank you for what you were doing.

It was so beautiful to see that love and compassion going across the table,

Working with that fellow who was having such a difficult time.

I really thought it was beautiful.

Thank you so much.

Once again,

At the very least,

This will heal the heart of the person who's doing the practice.

And there is evidence to suggest that it is healing for the person that you are doing tonglen for,

Whether it's yourself or for someone else.

This is one of the main tools in my toolkit.

Maybe I'm just driving down the road and I see a dead animal on the side of the road and I have a moment or two and I just do a couple of breaths of tonglen for the spirit of that animal.

Or maybe I'm trying to go to sleep at night and my mind is a little bit busy and rather than counting sheep,

I start doing tonglen for all the people I know who are suffering,

Which to be honest with you is everybody I know.

So I begin to think of my family and then the people in my groups and the people,

My friends and my neighbors.

Pretty soon my heart opens and my body relaxes and it's very easy to go to sleep.

So imagine,

Imagine how your life would change if your motivation for action in each circumstance were compassion rather than am I getting enough?

Do they like me?

Is this going to work?

But you are just going through life noticing where suffering is arising,

Opening your heart to that and feeling compassion.

Reviews

I accidentally discovered this technique years ago and didn't know it had a name. Thank you!

What an excellent description of Tonglen. Such a powerful practice. Thank you so much. Tashi delek.

I just had a friend pass away tragically from suicide. I came across Tonglen while researching meditations/prayers for grief and death. Near the end of your talk yoy mentioned doing Tonglen for an animal who has passed and it came to my mind that it Acrually did that a couple of weeks back for a dog that had been hit and was lying on the side of the road. I pulled over to see if it was still alive but it wasn’t and so without knowing that I was doing Tonglen, I breathed in his pain and suffering and breathed out peace and love to this poor animal. Wow! So happy to have come across this talk. THANK YOU. I will be revisiting it often while I learn this new meditation technique. What I would give to have a teacher such as yourself in my part of the world. Thank you for this talk. 🙏🏼💗

Such a beautiful practice explained with so much heart.. thank you sincerely.🙏🏽

Very clear, helpful guide for tonglen practice. Thank you!

Part 2 is where? Abrupt ending.
Appreciated the instructions and anecdotal examples, thank you.🙏🏽

Thank you very much for your clear explanations 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽

Excellent and inspiring explanation of the incredible practice of Tonglen.

Very helpful explanation and description, thank you!

Simple and great.

Very illuminating. Thank you.

Great teaching. Thank you.

Very clear introduction to Tonglen. Full of heart.

Excellent information however, it cut off in the middle.

I love this concept and description. Thank you. I want to incorporate this into my life.🙏

Inspiring, thank you.

This is wonderful. Though I wish it was a longer talk, I'm grateful to have learned something. I enjoy your teachings and would like to see/hear more of your talks here on IT. Thank you.💕

Clear explanation delivered with a tone reflecting the sincere essence of the practice. Thank you.

Made so much sense to me. Just what I needed. Thank you 😊.