People everywhere feel pain—jealousy, anger, being
left out, feeling lonely. Everybody feels that exactly
the way you feel it. The story lines vary, but the un-
derlying feeling is the same for us all.
By the same token, if you feel some sense of de-
light—if you connect with what for you is inspiring,
opening, relieving, relaxing—you breathe it out, you
give it away, you send it out to everyone else. Again,
it’s very personal. It starts with your feeling of delight,
your feeling of connecting with a bigger perspective,
your feeling of relief or relaxation. If you’re willing to
drop the story line, you feel exactly what all other
human beings feel. It’s shared by all of us. In this way
if we do the practice personally and genuinely, it
awakens our sense of kinship with all beings.
The other thing that’s very important is absolute
bodhichitta. In order to do tonglen, we’ve first estab-
lished the ground of absolute bodhichitta because it’s
important that when you breathe in and connect
with the vividness and reality of pain there’s also
some sense of space. There’s that vast, tender, empty
heart of bodhichitta, your awakened heart. Right in
the pain there’s a lot of room, a lot of openness. You
begin to touch in on that space when you relate di-
rectly to the messy stuff, because by relating directly
with the messy stuff you are completely undoing the
way ego holds itself together.
We shield our heart with an armor woven out of
very old habits of pushing away pain and grasping at
50 Start Where You Are