介绍:
43 Tonglen: The Key to Realizing Interconnectedness
PEOPLE GENERALLY eat up the teachings, but when it comes to doing tonglen, they say, “Oh, it sounded good, but I didn’t realize you actually meant it.” In its essence, this practice is: when anything is painful or undesirable, breathe it in. In other words, you don’t resist it. You surrender to yourself, you acknowledge who you are, you honor yourself. As unwanted feelings and emotions 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.
You breathe in for yourself, in the sense that pain is a personal and real experience, but simultaneously there’s no doubt that you’re 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 you have the courage to breathe it in rather than blame it on someone else, the arrow you feel in your heart will tell you that there are people all over the world who are feeling exactly what you’re feeling. This practice cuts through culture, economic status, intelligence, race, religion. People everywhere feel pain—jealousy, anger, being left out, feeling lonely. Everybody
feels it in the painful way you feel it. The story lines vary, but the underlying feeling is the same for us all.
By the same token, if you feel some sense of delight—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.
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