You can do tonglen on the spot when strong emotions come up and you don’t know what to do with them. When you contact a painful situation in this way and stay with it, it can open up your heart and become the source of compassion. It’s not all that conceptual it’s almost spontaneous. You can send out a general sense of relaxation and openness, or something specific, like a hug or a kind word, or whatever feels right to you at the moment. But in this practice, instead of turning away, you could actually start to do tonglen for the little girl who is crying and also for the angry mother who has reached the end of her rope. Your first reaction might be to turn away out of fear and try to forget it. It is painful for you to see, but there is really nothing you can say or do at that moment. It’s a simple and natural exchange: you see suffering, you take it in with the inbreath, you send out relief with the outbreath.įor example, you might be in the supermarket and see a mother slapping her little girl. Unlike the formal practice, it does not involve any visualizations or steps. Whenever you meet a situation that awakens your compassion or that is painful and difficult for you, you can stop for a moment, breathe in any suffering that you see, and breathe out a sense of relief.
This is a practice that you can do for a real-life situation. Once you get used to it and practice it regularly, it will make formal tonglen practice more real and meaningful to you. Even if you choose not to do the formal tonglen practice, you can always do this on-the-spot practice.
Because I have found it very helpful for myself, I like to recommend it to all my students.
This practice is really the essence of the tonglen approach. At first the practice may appear self-defeating, but as the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche said, “The more negativity we take in with a sense of openness and compassion, the more goodness there is to breathe out. Put simply, the practitioner breathes in the bad and breathes out the good, taking on the suffering of other sentient beings.
Tonglen is the Tibetan practice of “sending and receiving.” Tong means “sending out” or “letting go” len means “receiving” or “accepting.” Tonglen is ordinarily practiced in sitting meditation, using the breath.
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