自在聆听|晨读原著：T49: Loving-Kindness and Tonglen-Comfortable with Uncertainty

49 Loving-Kindness and Tonglen THE THINGS that drive us nuts have enormous energy. That is why we fear them. For example, you are timid: you are afraid to look someone in the eye. It takes a lot of energy to maintain that. It’s the way that you hold yourself together. In tonglen practice, you have the chance to own that pattern completely, not blaming anybody, and to ventilate it with the out-breath. Then you might better understand that when other people look grim, perhaps it isn’t because they hate you but because they also feel timid. In this way, tonglen practice is a practice of making friends with yourself as well as a practice of compassion for others. By practicing tonglen, you develop your sympathy for others. You begin to understand them better. Your own pain is like a stepping-stone that makes your heart bigger. It starts with creating space in which to relate directly to specific suffering—yours or someone else’s. You expand the practice to understand that suffering is universal, shared by us all. Lest we condescendingly do tonglen for the other one who’s so confused, remember: this is a practice where compassion begins to arise because we’ve been in the other one’s shoes. We’ve been angry, jealous, and lonely. We do strange things when we’re in pain. Because we’re lonely, we say cruel words; because we want someone to love us, we insult them. Exchanging self for other, or tonglen, begins when we can see where someone is because we’ve been there. It doesn’t happen because we’re better than they are but because human beings share the same stuff. The more we know our own, the more we’re going to understand others’.