In tonglen practice, you have the chance to own that
completely, not blaming anybody, and to ventilate it
with the outbreath. Then you might better under-
stand why some other people in the room look so
grim: it isn’t because they hate you but because they
feel the same kind of timidity and don’t want to look
anyone in the face. In this way, the tonglen practice
is both a practice of making friends with yourself and
a practice of compassion.
By practicing in this way, you definitely develop
your sympathy for others, and you begin to under-
stand them a lot better. In that way your own pain is
like a stepping stone. Your heart develops more and
more, and even if someone comes up and insults you,
you could genuinely understand the whole situation
because you understand so well where everybody’s
coming from. You also realize that you can help by
simply breathing in the pain of others and breathing
out that ventilation. So tonglen starts with relating
directly to specific suffering—yours or someone
else’s—which you then use to understand that this
suffering is universal, shared by us all.
Almost everybody can begin to do tonglen by
thinking of someone he or she loves very dearly. It’s
sometimes easier to think of your children than your
husband or wife or mother or father, because those
relationships may be more complicated. There are
some people in your life whom you love very straight-
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