The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World (8 page)

Whenever you realize you have met your edge – you’re
scared and you’re frozen and you’re blocked – you’re able to recognize it because you open enough to see what’s happening. It’s already a sign of your aliveness and the fact that you’ve shed a lot, that you can see so clearly and so vividly. Rather than think you have made a mistake, you can acknowledge the present moment and its teaching, or so we are instructed. You can hear the message, which is simply that you’re saying ‘No.’ The instruction isn’t then to ‘smash ahead and karate-chop that whole thing’; the instruction is to soften, to connect with your heart and engender a basic attitude of generosity and compassion toward yourself, the archetypal coward.

The journey of awakening – the classical journey of the mythical hero or heroine – is one of continually coming up against big challenges and then learning how to soften and open. In other words, the paralyzed quality seems to be hardening and refusing, and the letting go or the renunciation of that attitude is simply feeling the whole thing in your heart, letting it touch your heart. You soften and feel compassion for your predicament and for the whole human condition. You soften so that you can actually sit there with those troubling feelings and let them soften you more.

The whole journey of renunciation, or starting to say yes to life, is first of all realizing that you’ve come up against your edge, that everything in you is saying no, and then at that point, softening. This is yet
another opportunity to develop loving-kindness for yourself, which results in playfulness – learning to play like a raven in the wind.

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The vicious cycle of existence – the round of birth and death and rebirth – which arises out of ignorance and is characterized by suffering; in ordinary reality, the vicious cycle of frustration and suffering generated as the result of karma (one’s actions).

twelve
sending and taking

T
his morning I’m going to talk about
tonglen
, the practice of ‘sending and taking.’ Some of you have done it before and some of you haven’t, but in any case, it’s always like doing it for the first time.

Tonglen practice has to do with cultivating fearlessness. When you do this practice for some time, you experience your heart as more open. You begin to realize that fear has to do with wanting to protect your heart: you feel that something is going to harm your heart, and therefore you protect it. Again and again, in the Buddhist teachings, in the Shambhala teachings, and in any tradition that teaches us how to live well, we are encouraged to cultivate fearlessness. How do we do that? Certainly the sitting practice of meditation is one way, because through it we come to know ourselves so completely and with such gentleness.

I had been doing shamatha practice for maybe seven years when I first did tonglen. After doing this practice, I was amazed to see how I had been subtly using my shamatha to try to avoid being hurt, to try to avoid depression or discouragement or bad
feelings of any kind. Basically, unknown to myself, I had secretly hoped that if I did the practice I wouldn’t have to feel any pain anymore. When you do tonglen, you invite the pain in. That’s what opens your eyes, even though that’s what shamatha is all about – seeing pain, seeing pleasure, seeing everything with gentleness and accuracy, without judging it, without pushing it away, becoming more open to it. Even though that’s what we’ve been practicing all along, tonglen puts it right on the line; I realized that I hadn’t really been doing that before. Tonglen takes a lot of courage to do. Interestingly enough, it also gives you a lot of courage. You start out maybe with one thimbleful of courage and a tremendous aspiration to want to open to your world and to be of benefit to yourself and others. You know that that means you’re going to find yourself in places where all your buttons will be pushed and things are going to be tough, but nevertheless, you have the aspiration to be able to walk into any situation and be of benefit. You have at the most only a thimbleful of courage, just enough courage to do tonglen, maybe because you don’t know what you’re getting into, but that’s usually life’s situation anyway! Something amazing then occurs. By the willingness to do tonglen, you find, after some time – a few days or a few months or a few years – that you have a teacup full of courage, that somehow, by doing the practice, you awaken your heart and you awaken your courage. When I say ‘awaken your heart,’ I mean that you’re
willing not to cover over the most tender part of yourself. Trungpa Rinpoche often talked about the fact that we all have a soft spot and that negativity and resentment and all those things occur because we’re trying to cover over our soft spot. That’s very positive logic: it’s because you are tender and deeply touched that you do all this shielding. It’s because you’re soft and have some kind of warm heart, an open quality, to begin with that you even start shielding.

In shamatha particularly, you see your shields so clearly. You see how you imprison your heart. That already lightens things up and gives you some respect for the insight and perhaps sense of humor that you have. Tonglen takes that further because you actually invite in not only all your own unresolved conflicts, confusion, and pain, but also those of other people. And it goes even further. Usually we try to ward off feeling bad, and when we feel good we would like that to last forever. In tonglen, though, not only are we willing to breathe in painful things, we are also willing to breathe out our feelings of well-being, peace, and joy. We are willing to give these away, to share them with others. Tonglen is quite the opposite of the conventional approach. Usually if one is meditating and one really begins to connect with something bigger and feel the sense of inspiration and delight, even walking meditation seems like an intrusion. Having to clean the toilet and talk with people definitely seems to get in the
way of our bliss. The tonglen approach is, ‘If you feel it, share it. Don’t hold on to it. Give it away.’

Mahayana
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Buddhism talks about
bodhicitta
, which means ‘awakened heart’ or ‘courageous heart.’ Bodhicitta has the qualities of gentleness, precision, and openness, being able just to let go and open up. Specifically, the purpose of tonglen is to awaken or cultivate bodhicitta, to awaken your heart or cultivate your courageous heart. It’s like watering a seed that can flower. You might feel that you have only that little thimbleful of courage, or you might feel that you don’t have any courage at all, but the Buddha said, ‘Hogwash! Everyone has bodhicitta.’ So maybe it’s just a little sesame seed of bodhicitta, but if you do the practice, it’s like watering that seed, which seems to grow and flourish. What’s really happening is that what was there all along is being uncovered. Doing tonglen sweeps away the dust that has been covering over your treasure that’s always been there.

Traditionally, bodhicitta is compared to a diamond that’s been covered over with ten tons of mud for two thousand years. You could uncover it at any point and it would still be a jewel, our heirloom. Bodhicitta is also said to be like very rich, creamy milk that has the potential of being butter. You have to do a little work to get the butterness out of the
cream. You have to churn it. It’s also been compared to a sesame seed, full of sesame oil. You have to do a little pounding to get the oil, but it’s already there. Sometimes bodhicitta is said to be like a precious treasure lying at the side of the road with a few dirty rags over it. People – perhaps very poor people who are starving to death – walk by it all the time. All they have to do is just pick up the rags, and there it is. We do tonglen so that we don’t have to be like blind people, continually walking over this jewel that’s right there. We don’t have to feel like poverty-stricken paupers, because right in our heart is everything anyone could ever wish for in terms of open, courageous warmth and clarity. Everybody has it, but not everybody has the courage to let it ripen.

These days the world really needs people who are willing to let their hearts, their bodhicitta, ripen. There’s such widespread devastation and suffering: people are being run over by tanks or their houses are being blown up or soldiers are knocking on their doors in the middle of the night and taking them away and torturing them and killing their children and their loved ones. People are starving. It’s a hard time. We who are living in the lap of luxury with our pitiful little psychological problems have a tremendous responsibility to let our clarity and our heart, our warmth, and our ability ripen, to open up and let go, because it’s so contagious. Have you noticed that if you walk into the dining room and sit down and the one other person who is there is feeling good and
you know he’s feeling good, somehow it includes you, it makes you feel good, as if he liked you? But if you go into the dining room and the one other person who’s there is feeling really crummy, you wonder, ‘What did I do?’ or ‘Gosh, I better do something to try to make him feel good.’ Whether you’re having a headache or an attack of depression or whatever is happening with you, if you feel at home in your world, it’s contagious; it could give other people a break. We can give each other this break by being willing to work with our own fear and our own feelings of inadequacy and our own early-morning depression and all of that.

Practicing shamatha is one way of showing your willingness to see things clearly and without judging. Doing tonglen is a gesture toward ripening your bodhicitta for the sake of your own happiness and that of others. Your own happiness radiates out, giving others the space to connect with their own joy, intelligence, clarity, and warmth.

The essence of tonglen practice is that on the in-breath you are willing to feel pain: you’re willing to acknowledge the suffering of the world. From this day onward, you’re going to cultivate your bravery and willingness to feel that part of the human condition. You breathe in so that you can really understand what the Buddha meant when he said that the first noble truth is that life is suffering. What does that mean? With every in-breath, you try to find out by acknowledging the truth of suffering, not
as a mistake you made, not as a punishment, but as part of the human condition. With every in-breath, you explore the discomfort of the human condition, which can be acknowledged and celebrated and not run away from. Tonglen puts it right on the line.

The essence of the out-breath is the other part of the human condition. With every out-breath, you open. You connect with the feeling of joy, well-being, satisfaction, tenderheartedness, anything that feels fresh and clean, wholesome and good. That’s the aspect of the human condition that we wish were the whole show, the part that, if we could finally clear up all our problems, we would have as our everyday diet. The menu would read, ‘Only happiness. No pain here.’ There would be all the things that you think would bring you everlasting happiness, maybe a little bittersweetness, a few little tears, but definitely no heavy-duty confusion, no dark places, no closet doors that you don’t want to open, no monsters under the bed, no ugly thoughts, no rage, no despair, no jealousy – definitely not. That’s the out-breath, the part you like. You connect with that and you breathe it out so that it spreads and can be experienced by everyone.

All that you need in order to do tonglen is to have experienced suffering and to have experienced happiness. Even if you’ve had only one second of suffering in your life, you can do tonglen. Even if you’ve had only one second of happiness, you can do tonglen. Those are the prerequisites. In other words, you are
an ordinary human being with pain and pleasure, just like everyone else. However, if you were
just
like everyone else, you would breathe in the good part and breathe out the bad part. Sometimes that makes a certain amount of sense. But this path, the path of the warrior, is a lot more daring: you are cultivating a fearless heart, a heart that doesn’t close down in any circumstance; it is always totally open, so that you could be touched by anything.

There is a classic painting of the wheel of life with Yama, the god of death, holding the wheel. In the center is passion, a cock; aggression, a snake; and ignorance, a pig. The spokes of the wheel make six pie-shaped spaces that are called the six realms. The lower realms are the hell realm, the hungry ghost realm (also a very painful one), and the animal realm, which is full of fear and ignorance, since in that realm you are able to relate only to what is in front of your nose. The higher realms are the human realm, the jealous god realm, and the god realm. In each of those six realms stands the Buddha, which is to say, we ourselves. We can open our hearts to the point that we could enter into the hell realm, the hungry ghost realm, the jealous god realm, the god realm – any place. We could be there with our hearts, completely open and not afraid. That’s the aspiration of the bodhisattva. When we formally take the bodhisattva vow, we are given the tonglen practice to do. That means that we really wish to be fearless enough to help others; we are aware that we
ourselves have a lot of fear, but we aspire to have our hearts wake up completely.

Breathing in, breathing out, in the way I have described, is the technique for being able to be completely awake, to be like a buddha in any realm that exists. If you start to think what it would be like in some of those realms, you just thank your lucky stars that you’re not in them, but if you were, you could still be there with an open heart. The essence of the practice is willingness to share pleasure and delight and the joy of life on the out-breath and willingness to feel your pain and that of others fully on the in-breath. That’s the essence of it, and if you were never to receive any other instruction, that would be enough.

Now for the instruction. The first step is called ‘flashing absolute bodhicitta,’ which basically means just opening up. The second step is working with the abstract quality of pain by visualizing it as black, heavy, and hot, and breathing that in, and working with the abstract quality of pleasure by visualizing it as white, light, and cool, and breathing that out. My understanding of this stage is that before you get into the real meaty, difficult stuff, you work with the abstract principles of pain and pleasure, synchronizing them with the in-breath and the out-breath. The first stage is just open space. Then you start working with what’s called the relative practice – the humanness, our everyday life situation – breathing pain in, pleasure out, black in, white out. Then you get to the
third stage, which is actually the heart of the practice. Here you visualize a specific life situation and connect with the pain of it. You breathe that in, feeling it completely. It’s the opposite of avoidance. You are completely willing to acknowledge and feel pain – your own pain, the pain of a dear friend, or the pain of a total stranger – and on the out-breath, you let the sense of ventilating and opening, the sense of spaciousness, go out.