work with by learning how to be more gentle, how to
relax, and how to surrender to the situations and peo-
ple in our lives.
Having said all that, now I’ll talk about tonglen. I’ve
noticed that people generally eat up the teachings,
but when it comes to having to do tonglen, they say,
“Oh, it sounded good, but I didn’t realize you actually
meant it.” In its essence, this practice of tonglen is,
when anything is painful or undesirable, to breathe it
in. That’s another way of saying you don’t resist it. You
surrender to yourself, you acknowledge who you are,
you honor yourself. As unwanted feelings and emo-
tions arise, you actually breathe them in and connect
with what all humans feel. We all know what it is to
feel pain in its many guises.
This breathing in is done for yourself, in the sense
that it’s a personal and real experience, but simulta-
neously there’s no doubt that you’re at the same time
developing your kinship with all beings. If you can
know it in yourself, you can know it in everyone. If
you’re in a jealous rage and it occurs to you to actually
breathe it in rather than blame it on someone else—
if you get in touch with the arrow in your heart—it’s
quite accessible to you at that very moment that
there are people all over the world feeling exactly
what you’re feeling. This practice cuts through cul-
ture, economic status, intelligence, race, religion.
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