Everything Mind: What I’ve Learned About Hard Knocks, Spiritual Awakening, and the Mind-Blowing Truth of It All
Highlights
Practice: Tonglen
With the concentrated practice of Tonglen, the intimate nature of the hurt we experience either directly or indirectly, through empathy for another, becomes less personal. We begin to see the hurt as a byproduct of the shared human experience, one that most definitely sucks at times but that need not define who we are, nor completely dictate our well-being.
• Begin the practice by sitting in whatever meditation posture is most comfortable. Next, while focusing on your breath, imagine that you’re breathing in and out of your heart rather than your mouth or nostrils.
• Bring a sense of stillness and openness to the general experience of pain throughout the world. Our typical reaction to suffering is to try to push it away, to distract ourselves from it any way we can. With Tonglen, we learn to stop struggling against it. We relax our mind and open our heart, and as we do so, we cultivate a sense of trust in the process.
• Once you’ve anchored yourself in this cycle, begin the visualized exchange portion of Tonglen: continue breathing in the world’s pain and suffering, and breath out an offering of peace, comfort, and relief to all beings that are experiencing pain.
• Now, on your in-breath, breathe in a textured visualization of thick, heavy, and hot black smoke (or any other image that coincides for you with pain and suffering). Then, on the out-breath, send out qualities that are light and cool, visualizing something like moonlight, a gentle stream, or a soft cloud (or again, whatever imagery represents light and cool for you). Continue breathing in this way for a few minutes, and really embody the experience.
• When we do this, we’re flipping the script on the aversion we usually have toward suffering, bringing acceptance to what we’d normally not want any part of—not just our pain and suffering but the entire world’s collective pain and dis-ease as well. Breathing out, we send an aspiration of love, compassion, and fearlessness to the world. We’re offering everyone, everywhere, every ounce of our own well-being with the aspiration that they may enjoy freedom from suffering. (A quick note: Do your best to keep the in-breath and the out-breath evenly balanced. For example, don’t make the in-breaths shorter because they are unpleasant, or allow the out-breaths to be longer because they feel good.)
That’s the traditional practice of Tonglen.
Chapter 4: Breathe in the Fire
Keeping our hearts open and vulnerable is one of the scariest and yet most transformative things we can do in our lives. While this may sound counterintuitive, when we keep our hearts open, touching the center of our pain and feeling it in a completely raw way, it helps us become clearer on the areas where we still have aversions and attachments—the real places where we still have work to do.
Chapter 4: Breathe in the Fire
Heart intelligence is the flow of awareness, understanding and intuition we experience when the mind and emotions are brought into coherent alignment with the heart. It can be activated through self-initiated practice, and the more we pay attention when we sense the heart is speaking to us or guiding us, the greater our ability to access this intelligence and guidance more frequently