Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chödrön Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    The other thing that’s very important is absolute bodhichitta. In order to do tonglen, we’ve first established the ground of absolute bodhichitta because it’s important that when you breathe in and connect with the vividness and reality of pain there’s also some sense of space. There’s that vast, tender, empty heart of bodhichitta, your awakened heart. Right in the pain there’s a lot of room, a lot of openness. You begin to touch in on that space when you relate directly to the messy stuff, because by relating directly with the messy stuff you are completely undoing the way ego holds itself together.
    We shield our heart with an armor woven out of very old habits of pushing away pain and grasping at pleasure. When we begin to breathe in the pain instead of pushing it away, we begin to open our hearts to what’s unwanted. When we relate directly in this way to the unwanted areas of our lives, the airless room of ego begins to be ventilated. In the same way, when we open up our clenched hearts and let the good things go—radiate them out and share them with others—that’s also completely reversing the logic of ego, which is to say, reversing the logic of suffering. Lojong logic is the logic that transcends the messy and unmessy, transcends pain and pleasure. Lojong logic begins to open up the space and it begins to ventilate this whole cocoon that we find ourselves in. Whether you are breathing in or breathing out, you are opening the heart, which is awakening bodhichitta.
    So now the technique. Tonglen practice has four stages. The first stage is flashing openness, or flashing absolute bodhichitta. The slogan “Rest in the nature of alaya, the essence” goes along with this flash of openness, which is done very quickly. There is some sort of natural flash of silence and space. It’s a very simple thing.
    The second stage is working with the texture. You visualize breathing in dark, heavy, and hot and breathing out white, light, and cool. The idea is that you are always breathing in the same thing: you are essentially breathing in the cause of suffering, the origin of suffering, which is fixation, the tendency to hold on to ego with a vengeance.
    You may have noticed, when you become angry or poverty-stricken or jealous, that you experience that fixation as black, hot, solid, and heavy. That is actually the texture of poison, the texture of neurosis and fixation. You may have also noticed times when you are all caught up in yourself, and then some sort of contrast or gap occurs. It’s very spacious. That’s the experience of mind that is not fixated on phenomena; it’s the experience of openness. The texture of that openness is generally experienced as light, white, fresh, clear, and cool.
    So in the second stage of tonglen you work with those textures. You breathe in black, heavy, and hot through all the pores of your body, and you radiate out white, light, and cool, also through all the pores of your body, 360 degrees. You work with the texture until you feel that it’s synchronized: black is coming in and white is going out on the medium of the breath—in and out, in and out.
    The third stage is working with a specific heartfelt object of suffering. You breathe in the pain of a specific person or animal that you wish to help. You breathe out to that person spaciousness or kindness or a good meal or a cup of coffee—whatever you feel would lighten their load. You can do this for anyone: the homeless mother that you pass on the street, your suicidal uncle, or yourself and the pain you are feeling at that very moment. The main point is that the suffering is real, totally untheoretical. It should be heartfelt, tangible, honest, and vivid.
    The fourth stage extends this wish to relieve suffering much further. You start with the homeless person and then extend out to all