Rats - just spent ten minutes writing some thoughts about how I feel being here and coming from a different philosophical base and then managed to lose it somewhere in the ether! Mostly I wanted to say I'm still here and pondering how my meditation seems to be a much more mechanical thing like cleaning my teeth or eating (or sometimes sleeping!!)as it has no roots (for me) in spiritual or religious practice ...sometimes I wonder if it is right for me to be here ..but here I still am. Ruth I relate so much to your comments about red wine and also thought "Oh no! You don't have to deprive yourself completely! Why shouldn't we be drinking at all??!!" (Note the tone of incipient panic ...) For me it is about how I do things rather than what I do ...something about when I cling to things (like red wine)it's different from the times that I don't cling, can come and go with them ... and then too I think it is such a pleasure - and so is good chocolate! Perhaps I am lost to earthly pleasures ...
Well, drat, Barbara I'm sorry because I would certainly have wanted to read those thoughts.
I suspect that you're perceiving more distance between us than there is, and that the problem is largely one of vocabulary -- if you move (as I do) in largely religious circles you develop a whole language for talking about experience which is quite different from the one you use in secular circles. But the experiences you're talking about aren't nearly so different as the languages are.
But -- having said that -- I certainly get bewildered by the variety here. I'm always finding myself lost. For instance, I was going along thinking that I knew what people meant by "loving-kindness" meditation, because there's a very specific practice in my tradition, called more precisely tong len, or "taking and sending" -- and then I realized that people weren't talking about that at all. Or maybe some were and some weren't? Anyway, it's easy to get lost.
One thing I'm certain we don't have, you and I, is similar definitions of "spiritual" and "religious," because I can't imagine meditation without any roots in those things as I define them. But that doesn't mean I disagree with what you mean when you say that -- it just means I need to find out what those words mean to you. I rather suspect that if I were using your definitions, I too would consider my meditation practice not to have any religious or spiritual roots --but that's just a guess.
I'm very interested in how people who are self-identified as religious or secular tend to mistake each other, so if you have any inclination to collect those thoughts again, I'd love to hear them!
Me too. I especially want to understand how people who have been turned off by "traditional" religion are dealing with its absence in their lives - the whole gamut from those who define themselves as atheist and secular to those who are inventing or combining forms into something that thats feel right to them. I supect, like Dale, that the differences between us are more in language than in substance - especially when we talk about what we are seeking.
I'd like to focus in on the meditation Dale mentioned, tonglen in the Tibetan tradition, or loving kindness. I was past the point of joining any group when I began reading about Tibetan Buddhism (mostly through Miranda Shaw, initially), so while I have had a first level initiation, at a Buddhist house one night, by the same monk who initiated Trudeau in the 60s, one of the first out of Tibet, though I can't remember his name, nothing more. So I speak without knowing, if you know what I mean.
I just looked up tonglen. Yes, when I taught yoga we did this particular breath always at the beginning of the guided meditation. It's very a powerful and effective loving healer.
It's not what I'm doing when I now practice loving-kindness though. I can't presume to find fault with anyone. The article says, "to care about other people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean — you name it — to have compassion and to care for these people, means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves." But how can I presume these 'ignorances' in anyone else? What may look like miserliness to me may be something entirely different if I knew everything, could see everything, understood everything.
I can work on releasing difficult negative emotions in myself, and I do that frequently. But I cannot make assumptions about another's path.
When I practice loving-kindness, then, I fill my heart with as much love as I can, to overbrimming, and more, I am full to overflowing with love, and it feels very powerful, unifying, clear, creative, blissful and then I let it overflow in its abundance towards whoever I'm focusing on.
At this point I may perhaps be working mostly on my relationship to them, and there have been some amazing responses. It's like the air clears, what's most important shines through. There's real and actual connection that makes the world feel more intimate, closer, loving, validating.
I can, in my thoughts as this great ocean of love comes pouring out of my heart, focus on a difficulty they have and suggest to this loving-kindness energy to help them break down barriors so they may achieve what they wish.
Mostly what I do is pure feeling, it's not in words or images.
But these meditations we do shift and change through time, they evolve as we do reflecting wherever we are in the present.
What I say today may be different tomorrow.
It would be wonderful to hear of how we each approach our meditations, how we construct them in language to share with each other.
The speaking of them is a meditation in words too.
To allow that feeling of the overbrimming cornucopia of love in the heart I have often to work through much in myself, fears, angers, pain, grief, resistances, so, yes, Dale, there has to be a release of the constricting energies before the liberating energies can manifest fully.
Oh, but the article's dead wrong. It has nothing to do with other people's anger & jealousy & so forth. It has to do with the anger & jealousy & so forth that we all -- except buddhas, I suppose -- imagine them to have. Tong Len really, in a way, has nothing to do with other people at all.
We take in all that anger and jealousy & what-not, that ordinarily we impute to people out there, and accept it into ourselves -- which of course was where it really was to begin with. That's why the practice iss so powerful. And we give away our joy and serenity and what-not, not because we have it and we're giving it to people who don't have it -- but because it never belonged to us in the first place. Tong len sounds at first like a silly martyr-fantasy of taking all pain on yourself and giving happiness to everyone else, but it's really just rigorously retraining yourself to see things as they are. We tend to reject all the stuff we don't like that's going on in our hearts and project it onto other people; and we tend to cling to what we do like as if it could belong to us. But fear and anger really is in us, and we really don't possess the joy and serenity.
(Tong len, for those of you who have no idea what we're talking about, is a practice in which you imagine breathing in all of the evil afflicting other people, taking it on yourself, and breathing out all the things you treasure and giving them away to others. It is NOT supposed to "work" -- that is, it isn't supposed that you're actually reducing other people's suffering or reducing your own happiness.)
I'd love to hear more about your thoughts Barbara.
I also come from a 'non-religious' perspective (although even that seems too much of a label for me) so I for one really appreciate your presence here.
(especially as I know you like a nice glass of wine!)
I have to say that for me the practice of Tong len has been one of the most powerful ones in sensing the separation from others I so easily construct for myself, and see my projection for what it is without judgement. This isn't spiritual as such except nothing could be more so to me.
I think it is a very interesting question to pose: what each of our meditation means to us. personally, the more we communicate about this the fewer divisions there will be between us and that in itself is part of the practice, no?
I sit with absolutely no spiritual aspirations, although the kind of clarity, connection and love that can sometimes start to be generated at that simple point of nothingness is good enough for me as an aspiration. However, mechanical and tooth cleaning is also good, as I imagine people may sometimes experience their daily prayers?
I am also open to it changing.
for me meditation also has quite a connection to therapy - dissolving ego boundaries; feeling safe in the world and dealing with fears and desires I no longer need to hold on to simply by observing them. I would love to hear if you Barbara, as a consellor, see any connection. It has been the best therapy I have done (and I've done alot)next to core process which anyway is based upon Buddhist principles.
beth, interesting question too. I am not turned off by traditional religion. When I was young my parents said that religion was important and fascinating; that I should be open to all religions and that if ever I felt a desire to choose one, they would support me. I seem to have found some kind of path through music which, for me, is very spiritual and indeed, like meditation, a practice any other thoughts?
Speaking as the resident warthog, my reason for being here is neither spiritual nor religious, but simply a practical one of wishing to de-stress and calm down my life, and to even out the (stress-related) emotional rollercoaster. It works quite well :-)
Dale said a while back (on his blog) words to the effect that "the way to become a Theraveda Buddhist is by acting as though you already were a Theraveda Buddhist" meaning (as I interpret it) that the positive experience of practicing will change your habits of mind; and this has certainly been my experience of meditation.
I always copy my words into a text file before clicking on "post", because Blogger is too flakey too often to risk losing a lot of work. If you have a Mac, it's easy: just select "Services/TextEdit/Selection to new window" from the Safari menu (I'm guessing at the name, I use a German-language OS). On Windows it is trickier, but still possible.
I love the eclecticism of this group. It helps me feel comfortable. Because I suspect that, even within one tradition, there really is a whole lot of eclecticism anyway.
Another non-religious one (who enjoys a good glass of wine)... I began with the notion of relieving stress. But quickly began to see its connection to the spiritual aspect of myself which I (not being part of a tradition per se) find difficult to put into words.
For me, loving kindness meditation has not been specifically tong len, but my own concoction that involves acknowledging the negative energies and perceptions I carry, letting them go, then beginning to shift to acknowledging all that I have to be grateful for. This is the beginning of my tapping into what I think of as the Big Love (love/kindness/compassion), that love which seems to me everywhere and bigger than me. When I feel that I have that centered inside me again, then I turn to thoughts of others or just of Other/Not Me, and feel a unity through love, just holding that emotion. Bathing in it, as it were.
Reading Dale's description, it sounds perhaps not unlike tong len (maybe?), but since I am not taught in that tradition I can't say. I have instinctively felt that I can't access the love without letting go of negativity, and that the love is not generated from me... I need it as much as everyone else... and that I can't participate in it on behalf of someone else without being centered in it first myself.
I should add that I try not to think a whole lot about other people's anger, jealousy and so forth, preferring instead to simple hold them in the love. I haven't felt it was my place to do more than that.
Dale, I'd be interested to hear how you think what I'm doing fits (or not) with tong len.
A technical point: I think I was probably talking about Vajrayana, not Theravadin Buddhism -- the Tantric approach to enlightenment might be described as pretending to be enlightened in order to attain enlightenment. The Theravadin approach is more that of freeing yourself from desire.
MB & Ruth, it sounds lovely and important, but it doesn't sound at all like tong len. The heart of tong len is reversing attitudes -- welcoming what we usually reject and giving away what we usually cling to.
The Tibetan equivalent to what you're describing would probably be Chenrezig practice, in which you contemplate (& become) the yidam of compassion, & generate compassion toward all sentient beings.
If you were practicing tong len, you might do something such as, for instance, taking on all the hatred of a white supremicist, trying to experience it and make it your own suffering, and giving away to him your sensitivity and compassion and all the joy those things bring you. It's a deeply counterintuitive, often very disturbing practice.
Dale, you wrote: "But fear and anger really is in us, and we really don't possess the joy and serenity." Is that really what you meant? Or do you mean that all emotions are just energy that flows through us, rather than something that "sticks to us" as part of our identity?
What I do is more like what Brenda describes: I try to feel the tension between me and another, to walk in their shoes if I can in order to better understand them, and to see what the resistances are in myself - often this means coming face-to-face with some difficult things, like my own feelings of superiority which the other person no doubt has felt! Then I try to feel my heart filled with love, healing, and positive energy and to let that spill out into the space between us and toward that person. I find it is a very powerful thing which has had real effects; it somehow alters the emotional energy field. I KNOW that it changes ME.
Thanks, Dale. You're right; as you describe it further, it sounds very different.
So, for tong len, what do you do with, how do you deal with, the suffering that you try take on from another? When I consider the prospect of taking on and experiencing such hatred, frankly I find it alarming. I envision myself spiralling into depression or something... So, I'm wondering what happens, what is one supposed to "do" with it, how does one handle that? Heck, I have trouble listening to the evening news, let along investing someone else's hatred into myself... but I'm aware that I may not be fully understanding this.
MB, I think people with depressive tendencies should be cautious about tong len; it may just not be the practice for them. Or anyway, it's a much trickier practice for them than for others, because a lot of the mental moves are superficially similar (although I think they're fundamentally very different.)
Geez, I can't get away with anything around here. No, that's not really what I meant, Beth.
I meant something more like this: suppose someone is furious at me, yelling at me, getting in my face. I'm distressed. I'm likely to take my distress as "what their anger is doing to me" -- that it's my reception of their anger that is distressing me.
But in fact my distress is not (primarily) a matter of receiving their anger. My distress is caused by wanting their anger to go away, to not be a part of me. I want it to go away. Or I want them to go away. Failing that, I want to be able to discount them somehow, so that their anger doesn't count. I need to characterize them as unreasonable, or vicious, or something along those lines.
Deliberately receiving their anger, giving it a place in me, cuts against my habitual response in really interesting ways. For one thing, the relief is often immediate, palpable. It really is the resistance that makes it distressing. And it can open extraordinary avenues of connection -- I no longer need to defend myself against this person's anger. I'm a fellow-sufferer of it. (I may well need to defend myself against him, but that's a different matter.)
Or suppose I'm giving away something precious to me on the outbreath -- my intelligence, say; suppose I think this man's stupid. My intelligence is a thing I cling to and identify with really strongly. So I give it away -- really try to imagine me not having it any more, and this other person having it.
I may learn to have a better idea of what it's like to be stupid, but probably what I'll learn the most from is that -- nothing happens. I can't give away my intelligence. And that means that I don't need to defend it. The things that we hold most precious, that we resist giving away with panic -- those are huge sources of suffering and enslavement for us. If someone says something that implies I'm stupid and I just HAVE to demonstrate the contrary, no matter what the cost, I'm completely enslaved. So it can be very liberating to give something like that away.
You don't know how hard you're holding on to some of these things until you try to give them away. Even "pretend," like this. Try giving away your delight in beauty, or your compassion. Things like that. Even though you know it's not going to work, it can panic you.
What I learn from this is that I really do believe, on some level, that I have these things because I'm protecting them, that I have them *because* other people don't have them. Not consciously, of course. But as it turns out I have a huge stake in denying these qualities to other people. Somebody has to be stupid, so I can be smart. Somebody has to be intolerant, so I can be tolerant. It shows me why I have to construct a perceived world well-populated with idiots and villains.
This is very interesting, Dale, thank you. Particularly on the heels (so to speak) of a long walk I just took while thinking about a few things to which I cling, clutch, or otherwise fear letting go, because I want them or want them to happen again... the wanting being related to trying to control... and, of course, the trying to control being completely ineffectual.
What's interesting to me, though, is the distinction between that wanting and the kind of dreaming or envisioning that is far less possessive and more constructive. I suppose that still counts as unenlightened?
i just stopped by to check in and say that today is day 6 for me. i was able to sit zazen for a good 25 minutes this afternoon in between loads of laundry.
with these consecutive days of sitting, i'm beginning to feel a calm thoughtfulness throughout my daily activities. even though my sittings haven't been that calm or steady. this shows me that i just need to keep on sitting everyday, no matter if i feel like it or not; no matter if the sitting is a disjointed, agonizing 20 minutes. it's more the regularity and consistency that's important right now to me.
Oh, Dale, thank you for such a long thoughtful response.
What you say is very profound and I'm going to think about it a lot. I've been very bothered, for example, by how certain people on the political left continually ridicule Bush's intelligence or lack thereof, but I didn't quite know why it bothered me - it is the way their insistence on his stupidity is an affirmation of their own intelligent superiority. Like you, it bothers me to be thought stupid, or even wrong, and I've been working for a long time on trying to shed that reaction. Would you agree that much of Buddhist practice is about getting into that space between an action and our own reaction to it and seeing what we do in there - how are we labeling the other person and his/her behavior; why does it push our buttons; how can we change these habitual patterns to create more spaciousness? What you say about anger is very true; something similar happens around praise. I've noticed that sometimes, if I listen hard, I can "hear" myself rehearsing a person's expected reaction - that tells me a lot about myself too. I wonder if it will ever stop!
Going back to Barbara's initial remark...Zen is almost entirely un-religious, so I probably feel a lot like you do. The loving-kindness practice that others here often talk about it something that isn't emphasized in my tradition, so I can't say I understand exactly what it is/isn't.
I guess what I like about Zen is that it *is* so simple (another word for "more mechanical...like cleaning my teeth or eating"). There's really nothing to understand--no way you're "supposed to" think or feel.
So although I sometimes get a bit jealous of the exotic fun that folks like Dale or Brenda seem to have with their technicolor practices, I enjoy the fact that even a bonehead can do plain ol' b&w Zen practice. It's not exciting, but it's simple. There's no way, really, to do it wrong. And you get "points" simply for showing up, with is the one thing I'm good at. :-)
Speaking of showing up, I sat for about 10 minutes today...and then I took a much-needed nap, which felt just as useful as the meditation did. :-)
Beth, I thought I'd add that last year when Soen Joon & I went to hear bell hooks speak at the Women & Buddhism conference at Smith College, hooks talked about this issue of political compassion. She said she'd come to a place where she realized that although she & someone like Colin Powell might have very different politics, she & he had a lot of other things in common. She felt that tagging a Republican as "Other" was just as hurtful as hating someone because of their race, and she remarked that she'd gotten booed at one lefty conference for suggesting that Bush might actually be a *good man* regardless of his politics.
In her talk, hooks also suggested that compassion involved allowing the possibility for someone to change. She felt that some folks on the left had given up hope of ever "connecting" with folks on the right, and that was a sign of a closed (not a compassionate) mind.
Maybe this sort of compassion is the most radical thing a person could do: a rare thing on either side of the political spectrum.
Lorianne - that's the way I feel too, and probably it's one reason I get so discouraged by the black-and-white polarity we see and feel everywhere these days. Thanks for replying. Now - on to Day 65!
23 Comments:
Rats - just spent ten minutes writing some thoughts about how I feel being here and coming from a different philosophical base and then managed to lose it somewhere in the ether! Mostly I wanted to say I'm still here and pondering how my meditation seems to be a much more mechanical thing like cleaning my teeth or eating (or sometimes sleeping!!)as it has no roots (for me) in spiritual or religious practice ...sometimes I wonder if it is right for me to be here ..but here I still am. Ruth I relate so much to your comments about red wine and also thought "Oh no! You don't have to deprive yourself completely! Why shouldn't we be drinking at all??!!" (Note the tone of incipient panic ...) For me it is about how I do things rather than what I do ...something about when I cling to things (like red wine)it's different from the times that I don't cling, can come and go with them ... and then too I think it is such a pleasure - and so is good chocolate! Perhaps I am lost to earthly pleasures ...
Well, drat, Barbara I'm sorry because I would certainly have wanted to read those thoughts.
I suspect that you're perceiving more distance between us than there is, and that the problem is largely one of vocabulary -- if you move (as I do) in largely religious circles you develop a whole language for talking about experience which is quite different from the one you use in secular circles. But the experiences you're talking about aren't nearly so different as the languages are.
But -- having said that -- I certainly get bewildered by the variety here. I'm always finding myself lost. For instance, I was going along thinking that I knew what people meant by "loving-kindness" meditation, because there's a very specific practice in my tradition, called more precisely tong len, or "taking and sending" -- and then I realized that people weren't talking about that at all. Or maybe some were and some weren't? Anyway, it's easy to get lost.
One thing I'm certain we don't have, you and I, is similar definitions of "spiritual" and "religious," because I can't imagine meditation without any roots in those things as I define them. But that doesn't mean I disagree with what you mean when you say that -- it just means I need to find out what those words mean to you. I rather suspect that if I were using your definitions, I too would consider my meditation practice not to have any religious or spiritual roots --but that's just a guess.
I'm very interested in how people who are self-identified as religious or secular tend to mistake each other, so if you have any inclination to collect those thoughts again, I'd love to hear them!
Me too. I especially want to understand how people who have been turned off by "traditional" religion are dealing with its absence in their lives - the whole gamut from those who define themselves as atheist and secular to those who are inventing or combining forms into something that thats feel right to them. I supect, like Dale, that the differences between us are more in language than in substance - especially when we talk about what we are seeking.
I'd like to focus in on the meditation Dale mentioned, tonglen in the Tibetan tradition, or loving kindness. I was past the point of joining any group when I began reading about Tibetan Buddhism (mostly through Miranda Shaw, initially), so while I have had a first level initiation, at a Buddhist house one night, by the same monk who initiated Trudeau in the 60s, one of the first out of Tibet, though I can't remember his name, nothing more. So I speak without knowing, if you know what I mean.
I just looked up tonglen. Yes, when I taught yoga we did this particular breath always at the beginning of the guided meditation. It's very a powerful and effective loving healer.
It's not what I'm doing when I now practice loving-kindness though. I can't presume to find fault with anyone. The article says, "to care about other people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean — you name it — to have compassion and to care for these people, means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves." But how can I presume these 'ignorances' in anyone else? What may look like miserliness to me may be something entirely different if I knew everything, could see everything, understood everything.
I can work on releasing difficult negative emotions in myself, and I do that frequently. But I cannot make assumptions about another's path.
When I practice loving-kindness, then, I fill my heart with as much love as I can, to overbrimming, and more, I am full to overflowing with love, and it feels very powerful, unifying, clear, creative, blissful and then I let it overflow in its abundance towards whoever I'm focusing on.
At this point I may perhaps be working mostly on my relationship to them, and there have been some amazing responses. It's like the air clears, what's most important shines through. There's real and actual connection that makes the world feel more intimate, closer, loving, validating.
I can, in my thoughts as this great ocean of love comes pouring out of my heart, focus on a difficulty they have and suggest to this loving-kindness energy to help them break down barriors so they may achieve what they wish.
Mostly what I do is pure feeling, it's not in words or images.
But these meditations we do shift and change through time, they evolve as we do reflecting wherever we are in the present.
What I say today may be different tomorrow.
It would be wonderful to hear of how we each approach our meditations, how we construct them in language to share with each other.
The speaking of them is a meditation in words too.
To allow that feeling of the overbrimming cornucopia of love in the heart I have often to work through much in myself, fears, angers, pain, grief, resistances, so, yes, Dale, there has to be a release of the constricting energies before the liberating energies can manifest fully.
There are similarities, I see.
Oh, but the article's dead wrong. It has nothing to do with other people's anger & jealousy & so forth. It has to do with the anger & jealousy & so forth that we all -- except buddhas, I suppose -- imagine them to have. Tong Len really, in a way, has nothing to do with other people at all.
We take in all that anger and jealousy & what-not, that ordinarily we impute to people out there, and accept it into ourselves -- which of course was where it really was to begin with. That's why the practice iss so powerful. And we give away our joy and serenity and what-not, not because we have it and we're giving it to people who don't have it -- but because it never belonged to us in the first place. Tong len sounds at first like a silly martyr-fantasy of taking all pain on yourself and giving happiness to everyone else, but it's really just rigorously retraining yourself to see things as they are. We tend to reject all the stuff we don't like that's going on in our hearts and project it onto other people; and we tend to cling to what we do like as if it could belong to us. But fear and anger really is in us, and we really don't possess the joy and serenity.
(Tong len, for those of you who have no idea what we're talking about, is a practice in which you imagine breathing in all of the evil afflicting other people, taking it on yourself, and breathing out all the things you treasure and giving them away to others. It is NOT supposed to "work" -- that is, it isn't supposed that you're actually reducing other people's suffering or reducing your own happiness.)
I'd love to hear more about your thoughts Barbara.
I also come from a 'non-religious' perspective (although even that seems too much of a label for me) so I for one really appreciate your presence here.
(especially as I know you like a nice glass of wine!)
I have to say that for me the practice of Tong len has been one of the most powerful ones in sensing the separation from others I so easily construct for myself, and see my projection for what it is without judgement. This isn't spiritual as such except nothing could be more so to me.
I think it is a very interesting question to pose: what each of our meditation means to us. personally, the more we communicate about this the fewer divisions there will be between us and that in itself is part of the practice, no?
I sit with absolutely no spiritual aspirations, although the kind of clarity, connection and love that can sometimes start to be generated at that simple point of nothingness is good enough for me as an aspiration. However, mechanical and tooth cleaning is also good, as I imagine people may sometimes experience their daily prayers?
I am also open to it changing.
for me meditation also has quite a connection to therapy - dissolving ego boundaries; feeling safe in the world and dealing with fears and desires I no longer need to hold on to simply by observing them. I would love to hear if you Barbara, as a consellor, see any connection. It has been the best therapy I have done (and I've done alot)next to core process which anyway is based upon Buddhist principles.
beth, interesting question too. I am not turned off by traditional religion. When I was young my parents said that religion was important and fascinating; that I should be open to all religions and that if ever I felt a desire to choose one, they would support me. I seem to have found some kind of path through music which, for me, is very spiritual and indeed, like meditation, a practice
any other thoughts?
Speaking as the resident warthog, my reason for being here is neither spiritual nor religious, but simply a practical one of wishing to de-stress and calm down my life, and to even out the (stress-related) emotional rollercoaster. It works quite well :-)
Dale said a while back (on his blog) words to the effect that "the way to become a Theraveda Buddhist is by acting as though you already were a Theraveda Buddhist" meaning (as I interpret it) that the positive experience of practicing will change your habits of mind; and this has certainly been my experience of meditation.
I always copy my words into a text file before clicking on "post", because Blogger is too flakey too often to risk losing a lot of work. If you have a Mac, it's easy: just select "Services/TextEdit/Selection to new window" from the Safari menu (I'm guessing at the name, I use a German-language OS). On Windows it is trickier, but still possible.
I love the eclecticism of this group. It helps me feel comfortable. Because I suspect that, even within one tradition, there really is a whole lot of eclecticism anyway.
Another non-religious one (who enjoys a good glass of wine)... I began with the notion of relieving stress. But quickly began to see its connection to the spiritual aspect of myself which I (not being part of a tradition per se) find difficult to put into words.
For me, loving kindness meditation has not been specifically tong len, but my own concoction that involves acknowledging the negative energies and perceptions I carry, letting them go, then beginning to shift to acknowledging all that I have to be grateful for. This is the beginning of my tapping into what I think of as the Big Love (love/kindness/compassion), that love which seems to me everywhere and bigger than me. When I feel that I have that centered inside me again, then I turn to thoughts of others or just of Other/Not Me, and feel a unity through love, just holding that emotion. Bathing in it, as it were.
Reading Dale's description, it sounds perhaps not unlike tong len (maybe?), but since I am not taught in that tradition I can't say. I have instinctively felt that I can't access the love without letting go of negativity, and that the love is not generated from me... I need it as much as everyone else... and that I can't participate in it on behalf of someone else without being centered in it first myself.
I should add that I try not to think a whole lot about other people's anger, jealousy and so forth, preferring instead to simple hold them in the love. I haven't felt it was my place to do more than that.
Dale, I'd be interested to hear how you think what I'm doing fits (or not) with tong len.
A technical point: I think I was probably talking about Vajrayana, not Theravadin Buddhism -- the Tantric approach to enlightenment might be described as pretending to be enlightened in order to attain enlightenment. The Theravadin approach is more that of freeing yourself from desire.
MB & Ruth, it sounds lovely and important, but it doesn't sound at all like tong len. The heart of tong len is reversing attitudes -- welcoming what we usually reject and giving away what we usually cling to.
The Tibetan equivalent to what you're describing would probably be Chenrezig practice, in which you contemplate (& become) the yidam of compassion, & generate compassion toward all sentient beings.
If you were practicing tong len, you might do something such as, for instance, taking on all the hatred of a white supremicist, trying to experience it and make it your own suffering, and giving away to him your sensitivity and compassion and all the joy those things bring you. It's a deeply counterintuitive, often very disturbing practice.
I am learning a lot, thank you Dale.
It is very difficult to talk of what we do at our depths.
What you describe is profound, moving, loving, and disturbingly honest in its appraisal of the other who is the self all at once.
And as if this could shift the world itself, though that is not an aim or the point of it.
I love reading about everyone's practice and thoughts on this, and am learning much from you all too.
Dale, you wrote: "But fear and anger really is in us, and we really don't possess the joy and serenity." Is that really what you meant? Or do you mean that all emotions are just energy that flows through us, rather than something that "sticks to us" as part of our identity?
What I do is more like what Brenda describes: I try to feel the tension between me and another, to walk in their shoes if I can in order to better understand them, and to see what the resistances are in myself - often this means coming face-to-face with some difficult things, like my own feelings of superiority which the other person no doubt has felt! Then I try to feel my heart filled with love, healing, and positive energy and to let that spill out into the space between us and toward that person. I find it is a very powerful thing which has had real effects; it somehow alters the emotional energy field. I KNOW that it changes ME.
Thanks, Dale. You're right; as you describe it further, it sounds very different.
So, for tong len, what do you do with, how do you deal with, the suffering that you try take on from another? When I consider the prospect of taking on and experiencing such hatred, frankly I find it alarming. I envision myself spiralling into depression or something... So, I'm wondering what happens, what is one supposed to "do" with it, how does one handle that? Heck, I have trouble listening to the evening news, let along investing someone else's hatred into myself... but I'm aware that I may not be fully understanding this.
MB, I think people with depressive tendencies should be cautious about tong len; it may just not be the practice for them. Or anyway, it's a much trickier practice for them than for others, because a lot of the mental moves are superficially similar (although I think they're fundamentally very different.)
Geez, I can't get away with anything around here. No, that's not really what I meant, Beth.
I meant something more like this: suppose someone is furious at me, yelling at me, getting in my face. I'm distressed. I'm likely to take my distress as "what their anger is doing to me" -- that it's my reception of their anger that is distressing me.
But in fact my distress is not (primarily) a matter of receiving their anger. My distress is caused by wanting their anger to go away, to not be a part of me. I want it to go away. Or I want them to go away. Failing that, I want to be able to discount them somehow, so that their anger doesn't count. I need to characterize them as unreasonable, or vicious, or something along those lines.
Deliberately receiving their anger, giving it a place in me, cuts against my habitual response in really interesting ways. For one thing, the relief is often immediate, palpable. It really is the resistance that makes it distressing. And it can open extraordinary avenues of connection -- I no longer need to defend myself against this person's anger. I'm a fellow-sufferer of it. (I may well need to defend myself against him, but that's a different matter.)
Or suppose I'm giving away something precious to me on the outbreath -- my intelligence, say; suppose I think this man's stupid. My intelligence is a thing I cling to and identify with really strongly. So I give it away -- really try to imagine me not having it any more, and this other person having it.
I may learn to have a better idea of what it's like to be stupid, but probably what I'll learn the most from is that -- nothing happens. I can't give away my intelligence. And that means that I don't need to defend it. The things that we hold most precious, that we resist giving away with panic -- those are huge sources of suffering and enslavement for us. If someone says something that implies I'm stupid and I just HAVE to demonstrate the contrary, no matter what the cost, I'm completely enslaved. So it can be very liberating to give something like that away.
You don't know how hard you're holding on to some of these things until you try to give them away. Even "pretend," like this. Try giving away your delight in beauty, or your compassion. Things like that. Even though you know it's not going to work, it can panic you.
What I learn from this is that I really do believe, on some level, that I have these things because I'm protecting them, that I have them *because* other people don't have them. Not consciously, of course. But as it turns out I have a huge stake in denying these qualities to other people. Somebody has to be stupid, so I can be smart. Somebody has to be intolerant, so I can be tolerant. It shows me why I have to construct a perceived world well-populated with idiots and villains.
This is very interesting, Dale, thank you. Particularly on the heels (so to speak) of a long walk I just took while thinking about a few things to which I cling, clutch, or otherwise fear letting go, because I want them or want them to happen again... the wanting being related to trying to control... and, of course, the trying to control being completely ineffectual.
What's interesting to me, though, is the distinction between that wanting and the kind of dreaming or envisioning that is far less possessive and more constructive. I suppose that still counts as unenlightened?
wow! lots of good discussion here!
i just stopped by to check in and say that today is day 6 for me. i was able to sit zazen for a good 25 minutes this afternoon in between loads of laundry.
with these consecutive days of sitting, i'm beginning to feel a calm thoughtfulness throughout my daily activities. even though my sittings haven't been that calm or steady. this shows me that i just need to keep on sitting everyday, no matter if i feel like it or not; no matter if the sitting is a disjointed, agonizing 20 minutes. it's more the regularity and consistency that's important right now to me.
Oh, Dale, thank you for such a long thoughtful response.
What you say is very profound and I'm going to think about it a lot. I've been very bothered, for example, by how certain people on the political left continually ridicule Bush's intelligence or lack thereof, but I didn't quite know why it bothered me - it is the way their insistence on his stupidity is an affirmation of their own intelligent superiority. Like you, it bothers me to be thought stupid, or even wrong, and I've been working for a long time on trying to shed that reaction. Would you agree that much of Buddhist practice is about getting into that space between an action and our own reaction to it and seeing what we do in there - how are we labeling the other person and his/her behavior; why does it push our buttons; how can we change these habitual patterns to create more spaciousness? What you say about anger is very true; something similar happens around praise. I've noticed that sometimes, if I listen hard, I can "hear" myself rehearsing a person's expected reaction - that tells me a lot about myself too. I wonder if it will ever stop!
Wow, look at all these comments!!!
Going back to Barbara's initial remark...Zen is almost entirely un-religious, so I probably feel a lot like you do. The loving-kindness practice that others here often talk about it something that isn't emphasized in my tradition, so I can't say I understand exactly what it is/isn't.
I guess what I like about Zen is that it *is* so simple (another word for "more mechanical...like cleaning my teeth or eating"). There's really nothing to understand--no way you're "supposed to" think or feel.
So although I sometimes get a bit jealous of the exotic fun that folks like Dale or Brenda seem to have with their technicolor practices, I enjoy the fact that even a bonehead can do plain ol' b&w Zen practice. It's not exciting, but it's simple. There's no way, really, to do it wrong. And you get "points" simply for showing up, with is the one thing I'm good at. :-)
Speaking of showing up, I sat for about 10 minutes today...and then I took a much-needed nap, which felt just as useful as the meditation did. :-)
Beth, I thought I'd add that last year when Soen Joon & I went to hear bell hooks speak at the Women & Buddhism conference at Smith College, hooks talked about this issue of political compassion. She said she'd come to a place where she realized that although she & someone like Colin Powell might have very different politics, she & he had a lot of other things in common. She felt that tagging a Republican as "Other" was just as hurtful as hating someone because of their race, and she remarked that she'd gotten booed at one lefty conference for suggesting that Bush might actually be a *good man* regardless of his politics.
In her talk, hooks also suggested that compassion involved allowing the possibility for someone to change. She felt that some folks on the left had given up hope of ever "connecting" with folks on the right, and that was a sign of a closed (not a compassionate) mind.
Maybe this sort of compassion is the most radical thing a person could do: a rare thing on either side of the political spectrum.
Lorianne - that's the way I feel too, and probably it's one reason I get so discouraged by the black-and-white polarity we see and feel everywhere these days. Thanks for replying. Now - on to Day 65!
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