Tonglen Meditation
This Tonglen practice explores giving quiet and receiving busy-ness - all within a gentle and compassionate frame. Come to this Tonglen Meditation in the gentlest possible way. Find a quiet space and enjoy! This track contains ambient sounds in the background
Transcript
The following practice is led by Sonia Lockyer,
Host of the Wellbeing Ritual Club.
So we are working with Tonglen today and I'm going to suggest that we come to it from the gentlest possible,
Most possible way.
The most gentlest possible way.
So I know for myself when I approach these things often I come all guns blazing and I'm like I really want to do this well.
And I want to be good at it and I want to achieve all the things that I want to achieve.
And for me I've had a massive learning or unlearning of that dialogue and trying to approach everything from a very different place of curiosity rather than agenda.
And I think Tonglen is a really great example of that.
It doesn't need,
You don't need to be working with the hardest emotions,
You don't need to be dredging up the worst kind of feelings.
You don't need to be sacrificing yourself to the cross to make this world a better place.
It's just a game of curiosity and we all come across these boundaries of what we feel we can do and what we feel we can't do.
And that's not that we're failing because we've hit one of those walls,
It's because that's the point.
We're just curious.
Ah,
There's one of those walls.
And this is how we get to know ourselves.
And if we can't bring compassion to the practice for ourselves,
How on earth could we bring compassion to anyone else in the world?
It starts here.
So for me that's a big part of the practice.
It's just trying to wrap my awareness around my habits of trying to make it hard.
It's almost like validating through suffering.
Just letting go of that and allowing a space for enjoyment and play and curiosity is really the word.
So let's start by settling.
You can choose what you want to do with your eyes if you're closing your eyelids or just looking down towards the floor.
And either way,
Both ways,
Beneath the eyelids or not,
Let the eyes themselves soften.
There's such a direct route into our brain,
The eyes,
Just an extension of our brain in fact.
And that softness,
That curiosity can just begin in the small detail.
The way you do one thing is the way you do everything in life.
So even the gaze doesn't need to be so intense.
Let it soften.
Tongue gently resting up against the roof of the mouth,
Allowing a sense of spaciousness.
A softening of the palate,
The jaw,
The teeth.
A softening of our sense of hearing,
Noticing what we can hear close to us.
And expanding that sense of hearing to trace those sounds that are furthest away.
And then bringing our sense of hearing in close again,
Noticing the sounds of your own body,
Your breath.
Possibly even your heart.
Feeling the skin on your face.
Maybe you can feel the breath,
The movement of air in and out through your nostrils.
Maybe you can notice the clothing as it begins around the neck,
Maybe you can feel the difference in the temperature of air as it touches your skin.
And then the temperature of the clothing wrapped around you.
Perhaps across your shoulders you can feel any straps,
There's a different pressure around the chest or the waist.
A different texture of the lower part of your body as you connect to the floor,
Maybe the clothing is different.
Noticing your socks or your feet,
Can you feel the air when they wrapped in something warm?
Your hands.
Noticing how the back of your body feels.
What sort of sensation can you notice through the back of your body?
And then the front of your body,
A different texture,
A different quality of sensation perhaps.
And then starting to take some head circles,
Giving you the time to feel and hear what's happening in your neck.
And changing direction.
And then circling shoulders in a way that feels good for you this morning.
Recognizing that they didn't work in isolation so this movement can be felt all over in various different ways.
And then circling the heart.
Changing direction.
And settling into stillness.
Maybe placing your hands in your lap,
Palms facing upwards,
Right hand resting in left.
So a reminder again that we come to this practice with a sense of curiosity.
Laying down any agenda.
Just open to exploring.
A gentle breath in and out through the nose.
We're going to play with the sensations of quiet and what would the opposite be for you,
The opposite of quiet?
It could be loud or it could be busy.
I think for my words I'm going to work with the word busy.
You can interpret that as you like.
Let's just start with some simple sensations.
So to begin with we're just exploring the feelings in our own body,
Not working with anyone else yet.
And let's begin by breathing in dark and breathing out light.
And see how that feels.
Practice of giving and receiving.
Breathing in dark,
Breathing out light.
Just an exploration of how that might feel.
And let's turn it to breathing in heavy and breathing out lighter.
How about playing with breathing in hot?
And breathing out cool.
And let's see how that feels.
And the last one to just play around with is breathing in cramped and small and breathing out spacious.
And let's see how that feels.
And let's see how that feels.
And then moving towards our practice for today,
Breathing in busy and breathing out quiet.
And let's see how that feels.
And let's see how that feels.
And then we'll move the practice to sleep.
And then we'll move the practice to someone who we feel pretty neutral about,
Someone who we see regularly.
We may not even know their name,
But they kind of feature in our life because of our routines and our habits.
And choose one person.
Picture them.
And as you inhale,
Breathe in their sense of busyness.
Breathe it into yourself.
Breathe it right down into your belly where you can transform it.
And transmute it into a sense of your quiet.
And breathe that out to generously give it to them.
Giving and receiving.
Receiving their busyness.
Giving your quiet.
And then coming to someone who you hold dear.
Someone who is effortless to love.
Give and receive that person.
Picture them in front of you.
As you inhale,
Inhale their busyness.
And as you exhale,
Offer them your quiet.
See rea upcoming roll.
And then we move to someone who we find tricky.
One of our master teachers in this lifetime.
Somebody who really gets under our skin,
Brings out the worst in us.
And picture that person,
And as you inhale,
Breathe in their busyness.
As you exhale,
Offer them the gift of your quiet.
And as you exhale,
Offer them the gift of your quiet.
And as you exhale,
Offer them the gift of your quiet.
And as you exhale,
Offer them the gift of your quiet.
And then we can reflect on all sentient beings who have experienced this range of feeling.
So all beings that have felt a sense of busyness,
And who would welcome a sense of quiet.
We expand our practice out to all,
Breathing in their busyness,
And breathing out our quiet.
And as we exhale,
Offer them the gift of our quiet.
And as we exhale,
Offer them the gift of our quiet.
And as we exhale,
Offer them the gift of our quiet.
And then letting the practice go,
Just being in the stillness that follows.
And giving thanks to the practice,
Thanks to the teachers,
Pema children who brought practice to me,
And all the teachers of the future.
May the fruits of our practice be shared with all beings so that our personal wellbeing becomes collective.
Namaste.
