Tonglen

The clarity sets the table for transformation.

It's not just you achieve the clarity and you see the situation, then you start to, with practices like Tonglen and Lojong, shift the equation out of that clarity.

And that's called purification.

So there's clarification and purification and transformation.

My sister Carol just walked in with her dog.

And anyway, we are just all part of this healing tradition that we knew from the very beginning when our grandmother was helping to raise us by saying, here are the herbs that work for this.

Here's the treatments that work for that.

Here are all the books that have all the techniques that you can learn.

So if we're raising our vibrations and our frequencies and doing all of this high energy work, it's helping the entire planet come higher and higher.

And that's how I feel like, you know, having that original training in naturopathic medicine, which I got in Guatemala.

I stayed in Guatemala for a total of nine years doing all this training and working with the natives there and the Mayan traditions.

All of that has been transferred now to being here in the U.S. due to Guatemala became a dangerous place to live back in the 1970s.

And even beyond that, traditionally, forgiveness and compassion are taught for somebody else.

You look at the Buddhist teachings about compassion, like Tonglen or basic compassion practices, and they're almost always talking about having compassion for somebody else.

And in the West, though, we need to have compassion for ourselves.

Even maybe sometimes before we're able to open up to the suffering of other people.

Just give yourself three very neutral, uh, very non-judgmental labels such as pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, or you can notice it in your social interactions, right? And for those of us who work with others, if you work with other people, I would encourage you...

Well, I would encourage you to learn Metta meditation, Tonglen meditation.

We work with those a lot in the year-long Buddhist studies program.

Uh, but if you work a lot with other people, if you're a teacher, if you're a therapist, if you're a doctor, um, if you're a boss, you know, if you're a, if you manage a, a team, I would really encourage you to have methods where you see how you are, you are drawn towards certain people and pushed away from other people.

So I feel very grateful.

But yeah, definitely it could have been from all of that practice of, you know, Tonglen and self-compassion and all of that.

Yep.

Thank you for that observation.

Some years ago, I learned a very helpful meditation exercise that pointed directly to what you're talking about here from Pema Chodron in her book, When Things Fall Apart.

And Tonglen, I think, is the name of the meditation exercise.

Yeah.

And so it was just fascinating to me the way this worked.

And one approach really resonated with me and applies to my I suit.

Tonglen, that's spelled T-O-N-G-L-E-N, is an ancient Tibetan Buddhist practice where instead of pushing suffering, anger away, you breathe it in, sometimes visualizing it as dark, heavy energy, and then you breathe it out with something lighter, like compassion, relief, or even just simply space.

Now, if you're a sci-fi movie buff like me, you can liken this to the dark side of the force in Star Wars.

There's a scene where Yoda takes in dark energy from his nemesis, Count Dooku, and deflects it back.

Or if you're a Marvel fan, in the movie Black Panther, the Black Panther has a special vibranium suit, and that vibranium suit absorbs its opponent's kinetic energy.

It holds it in, and then the energy is rebounded and redirected back as a powerful shockwave, right, that completely overwhelms, um, its enemies.

But in the Tonglen practice, what we want to have to do is we wanna change the last part.

Someone is directing dark force of energy or anger at me.

Instead of trying to push it away, you just acknowledge, oh, this is what it feels like.

And for me, that brings in instantly, because I have a very rich meditation background, the practice of Tonglen.

And Tonglen is the practice of sending and receiving love.

And so it is about receiving the negativity of the world and breathing out fresh air.

So you don't start with that.