Oct 16 -- Compassion meditation (tonglen)

Hi, everyone.  Here's the transcript from last week's class.

This coming week, we're going to be doing a loving-friendliness meditation.  We are roughly following the Vajrayana model of conflict resolution, which is that first you offer the situation compassion, then loving-friendliness (which includes proposing solutions), then insight (which, roughly speaking, is similar to manipulation), then power/joy (essentially, forcing the issue in some way.)  So the following class will be on insight meditation, and the one after that will be another treatment of joy, but this time from the perspective of power.  The week after that, we'll cover how these work in an interpersonal conflict, and the following week will be on internal conflict.  This model isn't covered in Wake Up To Your Life.  If you want to find out more about it, the four phases of it are usually referred to as pacification, enrichment, magnetization and destruction/subjugation, and they're covered in this talk by Ken.

Again, all critical feedback on any aspect of this is welcome.

Best regards, 

Alex

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This is WUTYL, 16^th October, Compassion meditation.

Why don’t we go around the room and talk about what happened with the meditation from last week.  Any questions, comments, insights, problems which came out of that?  I’ve already heard about a couple of problems, and I’d be interested to hear more.

G:  It was good.  I practiced it quite a bit during the Saturday meditation, and that was good because it gave me something to actually think about.  No problems.

A: OK, great.

J: I had a problem if I only did one breath, because I had done a lot of breathing meditation in the past, so I found I had to do somewhere between five and ten breaths, probably deep breaths, because I’ve done all sorts of fancy meditation with breathing and yoga.  So it was like I couldn’t get far enough into it to sort of appreciate it, and then I couldn’t do the meditation on the breath.   So I had to do it long enough in order to sort of feel it.

A: Long enough on the breath meditation to feel it physically?

J: Yes.  And then I had to do it long enough on the joyful meditation to let that happen.  It took me time, and I had to make them quite separate, because if I didn’t take time to do the joyful meditation, it just disappeared. 

A:  Sounds like a good way of arranging things.  That’s good.

H: I really struggled with experiencing joy after Tuesday.  There wasn’t anything concrete that happened existentially in my life but there was less concentrated energy and I still kept up 10 minutes about every other day, I guess, sometimes less just informally when I remembered.  But it was difficult to connect to joy.

A: How am I going to maintain class discipline when the teacher’s wife is shirking off?

[laughter]

H: I’m setting an example.  Let’s be clear.

S: I had a very similar experience as [J] did with the breathing.  A couple of times it felt like I was hyperventilating.  I have done breathing meditation before, but it was like five years ago and I think some it was getting back into the swing of just learning how to breathe and just be aware of my breathing.  So I found myself, I think I mentioned to [A] on Sunday, I would have to do a few breaths,  focusing on my breathing, and then do the breathing and joy.  And your suggestion of thinking about love instead, because I was doing it in the evening just before bed, was interesting, but similar to what you were saying, “H”, the transition to actually focusing on the breathing was fine, but after that, switching to conceptualizing that feeling, maybe felt more intellectual or abstract.  I could think it, but I was finding it hard to feel it.

A: So, how were you trying to trigger the joy or love?

S: In both cases, it was a kind of transference.  I would think of something that gave me a feeling of joy, and then grafting that onto the feeling of achievement in thinking about the breath, or reminding myself to go back to thinking about breathing.  I think I was kind of caught between intellectualizing it and, you know, I’d be thinking about something like my son’s head, because that gives me the sense of joy, but I would have difficulty then just feeling it just on its own. 

A: Did you resort to thinking of your son’s head each time, or something like that?

S: Kind of.  Is that what I was supposed to do, because that’s what I did, and it seemed to work.   Basically, I was trying to skype with him once, and he was walking around and I could only see his head because he wouldn’t get up on the table to talk to me.  And I could imagine him doing that, and then breathe, and get a little bit of that feeling.

A:  That’s great, that’s a good way of doing it.

P: I had kind of a similar experience.  I would think about situations in which I feel joy.  And then I would think, “Well, am I really feeling joy?  Well, these are all the different emotions”, and then I would try to put myself in that situation, and I’d have trouble with that, and then to the extent that I succeeded, I still wasn’t getting the same emotion that I remember feeling in that situation, and then with all that thinking and trying to pay attention to my emotions, and I would realize it would make me anxious.  So, in terms of the meditation, I just focused on the breathing.  And I didn’t do it one breath at a time, I just breathed continuously.  I figured rather than trying to bring about an emotion, I figured I would just do the sort of non-judgemental part of the meditation, as in “not kicking the dog,” even if I wasn’t giving the dog a treat.

A: So what made you anxious, just the fact that you were supposed to feel joy?

P: Yeah, just the feeling like, “Well am I doing something wrong, or…?”

A: “Bad meditator!” 

A: So presumably for everybody, your attention wandered sometimes.  Were there consistent themes to the places you wandered to?

[Most people didn’t discern such a theme, and in fact most people were able to stay present with the breath for the full ten minutes.  “A” is pleasantly surprised by this.  One theme which does come up is the difficulty that “S” talked about, of not being sure that he was getting the feeling correct.]

G: I had two ideas to put out there.  My mind is a giant party [and was during the Saturday meditation], but that’s something I had to work on.  Because Seasonal Affective Disorder can get to me pretty bad, Jan, Feb Mar are pretty intense.  So what I did was rewire my brain by choosing to experience certain emotions more often.  So, my default emotion is joy, why because I told my brain to rewire itself.  The how, two things which work for me: force a smile when you’re walking down the street, brushing your hair, etc., cause that smile is joy, and that joy rewires your neurons.  You fake it till you make it, and then that just works.  The other thing which helped, because I don’t have a lot of time for sitting meditation, is when I’m just walking around, I’m looking at an object, I just look at the object, and that’s all I’m doing until I pass that object.  And then I choose another object.  That puts you in the present moment.  You do that enough times and you’re in the present moment.

A: That’s really cool.  Yeah, there are formal meditations for joy, loving-kindness, compassion, and the meditation we’re going to be covering today is one of those formal meditations, the one last week I just made it up, though obviously I’ve been using for a while, I wasn’t just using you all as guinea pigs.  But the really important thing about these meditations is the intention is to cultivate a certain attitude to what’s arising in your experience, so with joy it’s the enjoyment of what’s coming up, and there’s a lot of different ways that you can do that, and it’s good to keep that in mind, because sometimes different methods go flat for us, and it’s good to know that you switch to something else.  So that’s really useful.  Thanks.

So, all of you, it seems like your minds don’t wander as much as mine does when you do this meditation, so I guess you’re all actually more accomplished meditators than I am.  I was expecting more to come up, in terms of mind wandering, because that happens to me a lot.

P: My mind wandered, it just didn’t wander in any  specific direction! [laughter.]

A: OK, so we’re trying to cultivate a habit here, a habit of where we put our attention, and we’re trying to train a behavior for our attention which is very different from the way the world has trained us to attend.  That usually creates a certain amount of conflict.  And I’m glad that in this case, for the most part you guys didn’t run into that.  That’s really wonderful.  But there was some conflict, such as “H” not wanting to feel joy, at least that’s what you said to me earlier.

H: It was more like a dullness around my face.  I could feel some physical sensations, but when I wanted to connect to the sensation of lightness which I associate with joy, or warm tingling across my chest.  And I’d think “OK, now lean into that,” and the response would be “Uh uh.” [laughter]  So I’d think, “Oh, look, I’m not interested in experiencing joy, what’s that resistance feel like?

A: Perfect, this is good.

H: So I’d find “Oh, it feels a little bit like heaviness…”  So then I was more at ease with recognizing those emotions and sensations and thoughts, but whenever I thought “OK, time to feel joy!” the response was “Uh uh.”  Every time!  So in the end I thought “Well, OK, maybe this isn’t the week of joy…”

A: That’s perfect.  So, this is the direction we’re heading in this week.  Why don’t we start just by doing 10 minutes of the joy/breath meditation.  Everyone just notice if there’s any resistance coming up, and then go back to doing the practice.  In fact, if you notice resistance coming up, celebrate it, because that’s what this practice is about.

[10 minutes pass]

So the point of resistance which is always coming up for me with this is that I want to plan something.  So, when I was doing that just now, I kept planning what I was going to talk about when we were done, and then coming back to the breath, celebrating that, and so on.  And this technique that we’ve been practicing is very powerful.  It can lead you to some very deep, very very pleasant and very stable states of concentration, from which you can do some very powerful insight work.  But it’s not a complete practice.  You can’t actually train a human the  way that you train a dog.  So, joy is really connected to power.  A lot of the things that we celebrate in our lives are related to power in some way.   You know even things like birthdays, “I’ve survived another year!”  And in interpersonal relationships, power is often where we go [when in conflict] and often it’s an effective thing to do, and it doesn’t really impact the relationship.  If someone’s doing something that annoys me, and I just bring it up with them, and it doesn’t really bother them, then in a sense that’s an expression of power.  You know, they want to get along with me, so they’re doing what I ask.  The thing there is that there’s not any enduring, intractable conflict of interest there.  And the same thing goes for our internal lives and our relationships with ourselves to a certain extent.  A  lot of the time we’re doing something which is out of balance so we just stop.

H: Can you give me an example of that?

A: Yeah, my Mum used to smoke, and when she learned that she was having me, she just stopped.  But she didn’t smoke a lot, so it wasn’t as big a deal for her is it is for someone who’s smoking three packs a day.  And that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.  There wasn’t an enduring conflict between an addiction and a need to abandon the object of the addiction in that case.  But I’ve been addicted to the internet for over a decade, and I want to stop!  I really want to stop!  [laughter]

G: There’s nothing to do on it!

A: I have a lot of fun on the internet.  It’s tremendously entertaining.

P: I spend a lot less time on the internet now that I don’t have it in my apartment. 

A: Yeah, well actually “H” is going to Ohio for a week this weekend, and I’m asking her to take all the computing devices in the house because I want a break.  And we’re talking about me doing a retreat, like hiring a cabin out at Treman park or something like that, and “H” bringing food out to me, because otherwise, I know I’ll overeat!  Because I eat for entertainment, too.  And these [renunciations] are expressions of power.  You know, I can do this to myself because I see the benefit.  BUT, you can’t build a relationship on power.  Because sooner or later you come into some kind of intractable conflict, and when that happens you’re going to have power against power, and that’s when things get sticky.  But conflict doesn’t have to work that way.  It can simply be an accommodation, and ideally it works that way, but for that to happen there has to be some kind of sensitivity  so you see this in really good martial arts instruction sometimes.  Has anyone here heard of the “unbendable arm?”  So this is kind of a parlor trick.   So, I’m holding my arm really stiff now, I’m not going to let anyone bend it, and now, bend it.  [S bends it.]  So now I’m not going to hold my arm stiff, I’m just going to hold it out, and I’m going to respond to you bending it.  [S doesn’t bend it.]  So it’s a bit of a parlour trick.  In martial arts they’ll tell you to imagine the chi flowing through your arm, and whatever.  What’s actually happening is that when I hold my arm out stiff like this, the bicep is opposing the tricep, so I’m actually helping the person who’s bending my arm.  Whereas when I just hold my arm out relaxed and respond, the response just comes from the tricep, and so that takes a lot more force.

And this is a demonstration of compassion.  Compassion is sensitivity.  The etymology of compassion, even in English is literally “to suffer with.” And it’s become a little bit corrupted in modern usage, in that we talk about compassionate leave or showing compassion, which basically means how do I fix this situation.  But that’s not what compassion is about, at least in a Buddhist context.  Compassion is simply to suffer with.  And I say simply, and it is simple, but it’s not easy.  Because there are all these defenses that we erect, because to suffer with someone is to experience their pain.  And this is kind of the first step in conflict resolution.  This was Bill Clinton’s big schtick in the [presidential debate corresponding to tonight’s] in ’92, “I feel your pain…”  And there was a cynical aspect to that, but at the same time I think he was genuinely showing compassion there. 

S: That was a town hall debate, too.

A: Exactly.  I was reading about this yesterday.  People would ask him questions and he would go up to them and people got a sense that he was actually experiencing what was going on for them. 

So the question is how does this work for us internally.  I’m kind of racing ahead a bit here.  There’s this idea in Western Buddhism of compassion for yourself.  Well, looking after yourself is a good idea, but compassion for yourself in this context means something arises in your experience, and you really feel that.  You don’t do any of the tricks we usually do.  You don’t do any of the tricks we usually do, like run to entertainment or just find a way to ignore it.  You really feel what’s coming up.  So compassion is another one of the four immeasurables that I was telling you about last week.  Joy is one, compassion is another.  This is where conflict resolution actually starts, and this is where you really want to start if there’s a habit that you want to… I’m not going to say fix, because this is conflict resolution.  If you’re in a conflict with someone you don’t try to fix them.  The first thing you do is you listen to them, and that’s compassion.  So we’re trying to come into a better relationship with these conflicts within ourselves at the moment.  So pick something that is making a habit difficult for you develop or shift.  It could be something which is coming up in the 10 minute meditation we were doing, like “I don’t really feel like feeling joy today.”  Or, “I need to think what I’m going to do next, or “Am I doing this right?”  Or it could be something in the habits that you’re thinking of adjusting, like “If I can’t complain then I can’t defend my interests,” or “I don’t have time to meditate,” or something like that.

The technique that we’re going to learn is called tonglen.  The way it works, it’s again a breath-based meditation, and usually you start by doing it with an external person.  So you may find it easier to imagine a person who’s experiencing the sensations or the emotions or the thoughts that you want to work with, or if you feel like it makes sense for you, you can just work with them in yourself.  And what you do is, when you’re breathing in, you imagine breathing in this suffering, and feeling this suffering.  And often in traditional meditation, you imagine that the suffering you’re breathing in is this thick, oily, black smoke.  And then on the out-breath, you breathe out something positive in your life, something which would hurt for you to lose.  It could even be joy.  The thing that I often do is  I breathe in the sensation that I’m experiencing at the moment, and then I breathe out compassion, or I breathe out [loving-kindness].  And I don’t even really do it with another person in mind anymore, but you may find it easier to imagine another person to relate to.

Any questions?

S: So we do it the same we we were doing it with the breath meditation before, just imagine ourselves breathing in that suffering, and then breathing out a feeling of joy, or compassion, or can we imagine something which gives us joy, and then imagine breathing that out?

A: Yeah, like giving away your son.

H: What?  That’s confusing.

J: Yeah, what?

A: Imagining giving away your son.  You’re not actually going to give away your son.

S: Yeah, like giving away the feeling of joy that I get by thinking of my son.

A: Yeah.

S: Or selling him, because I want the money… [Laughter]

A: No, no.

S: So the experience of joy that I get when I think about him, giving that away.

A: Yeah, and it has to be freely giving that away.  Because part of what you’re trying to set up here is that there’s this identity that you have that you’re trying to defend, and this process breaks down that sense of defense.  Does that raise anything else?

S: No, I think that makes sense.  So instead of resisting somebody else’s suffering I’m actually bringing it in and cycling back something like love or compassion.

A: Yeah, that’s perfect.  That’s good.

H: I think I understand what you’re going towards in the sense of the dissolving self, but I wonder about that at this stage of practice, where you’re asking for a dissolution of one’s, the divestment of something that you hold dear triggers fear when I imagine it.  So then I’m stuck with inhaling all the fear that comes with that. 

A: Yeah, pick something you can handle.

H: Thank you, that’s what I guess… You went really pretty quickly to a pretty dramatic example. 

A: That’s true.

H: My memory when I was taught this meditation in a couple of different contexts is just to even play with the smoke for a period of time if the people or the sensations seemed like too much to handle.  Because it can go pretty deep kind of quickly.

A:  Yeah, I’m glad you’re here.  Because this is always a problem with this kind of meditation, that I push too hard with this kind of stuff.  Unlike the practice we were doing last week, which is a very, very good practice to do, this one is complete.  You can in principle go all the way just by doing tonglen.

H: Go all the way through stages of jhana?  Or through bodhisattvahood?

A: Yeah, all the way through bodhisattvahood.

G: Which you should explain.

A:  Yes, you can all the way to, you know, enlightenment, in the Buddhist sense, let’s not get into the definition of enlightenment.

G: Right.

A: You don’t want to do that quickly.  This is just like what I was saying with the martial arts.  Ideally you don’t want to trigger reactions really fiercely at any point.   You want to kind of worm your way in, kind of like you do with really good martial arts.  You don’t resist the person, you just blend with their motion.  And similarly here, when a reaction arises in your experience, you don’t want to resist that.  Just breathe it it, then breathe out something you can give away without an intense reaction, but still feeling it a little bit.

J:  What is this called?

A: It’s called tonglen, which literally means taking and sending.  Ken says that in Tibetan, putting two opposite words together like that combines to mean basically a swap, I can’t remember exactly… but they often compound opposite words like that.  So in this case it really means exchange.  So I’m going to exchange with you my happiness in order to take on your suffering.

H: One of the things that’s interesting to me about this meditation is that it reverses many other meditation practices where you’re breathing in all the clear good energy and exhaling all the negative, and it reverses that in a way that can be startling.  It takes a little bit of practice to see the benefit.

J: If the opposite meditation is also beneficial, how can they both be beneficial?

A: Well, they’re both beneficial.  The kind of meditation we were doing last week or the kind “H” was talking about, that’s taking care of yourself, establishing a peaceful, tranquil, alert, joyous, open state of mind.  And then the one we’re looking at now is actually good to do after you’ve done the other kind of meditation, because that creates a stable mind, and then you can see the reactions that are arising in you very clearly.  So you really need both.  In Tibetan terminology, the sort you’re describing is Shamatha, “calm-abiding” meditation.  And tonglen is a kind of vipassana.  It’s an insight meditation. 

G: I’ve practiced tonglen for a long while.  The reason that comes into play, and what’s different now than what I would have done five years ago, is that my grandma had a stroke, quite recently, and she’s suffering a lot, immense suffering, you know, losing speech, losing ability to move around.  So for me, that causes a lot of pain.  So the meditation, the other kinds of meditation, really help me in this moment when I’m continually faced with knowing that she’s facing this pain and wishing that she didn’t have to.  So what I would have done maybe five years ago is maybe drink too much, watch too many movies, eat chocolate all day, just escape, whatever your escapes are, I’d just do it, because then I could escape for a moment from this.  Because it’s terrible.  You’re faced with this in many situations.  But having that practice, I can breathe in her pain, and really breathe out the wish that her pain goes away.  And just breathe out the wish to ease her suffering.  And that’s a powerful thing, and that’s where it is [for me] right now.  And there’s absolutely no need to escape into all the fun things that your mind wants to do when it’s faced with a particularly painful situation.  So I don’t run away from it, I actually experience it, but then it doesn’t overtake you because you’ve done these little practices over time, you’re not starting out with the most intense emotion.  So when you’re faced with the most intense emotion, you can just experience it and it’s OK, because it’s part of the human experience and you’re not wishing for anything to be different. 

A: That’s a great example.  Thank you.

P: What’s confusing to me is that you breathe out, wishing that your grandmother’s pain goes away, but it seems like you were saying more like you’re giving something up, but that’s not giving something up, that would be beneficial to you, because you’re feeling pain for your grandma.  So it’s different from, say, giving away a son.  That just seems a lot harder to me.

A: Yeah, that was a mistake.  I mean, eventually the practice leads there.  But you could say that instead of “G” wishing for her grandmother to be better, that she’s offering up her compassion.

P: What does that mean, to give away compassion?

S: I guess the idea is selflessness to some extent, too.  The idea is that you’re giving away something that gives you joy.  Which is a very selfless act.  I think [P] is saying that if you’re taking in that pain and getting solace from it that’s different from taking in that pain and at the same time also exchanging it for some experience of joy of your own.

A: Yeah, there’s a kind of double-think going on here.  Because if you view it from the perspective of conflict resolution, there’s a conflict.  I’m in a similar situation, my Mum passed away last year, and I’ve had a very different experience than “G” has.  I quit my job, I watch a lot of TV, and I eat too much.  And that’s not where I want to be.  And “G” has found a way through that.  But the way she’s found through that is through the experience of this pain.  And you can go to deeper and deeper levels of this as you go on.  Now, if you try to do tonglen with the idea of “this pain is messing me up, and I’m going to do tonglen to fix myself or fix the pain,” it’s not going to be effective.  For example, have you ever taken a course in nonviolent communication or something like that?  You know, there are these courses where they give you these formulas like “What I hear you saying is this, and I believe this, and I’m feeling this,” and it’s just a formula, and if you’ve ever seen someone trying to communicate this way after they’ve taken one of these courses and they think it’s the answer to everything, they sound like a robot, and it just shuts their interlocutor down, because they can tell that they’re being manipulated.  At the same time, I agree with you that what “G” is doing is not exactly tonglen at this point, because she has found the  peace that she was looking for.  But that’s where this process leads.  When she started it…

G: It was difficult.  I mean, it is difficult, period.  When you see someone walking on the street and they don’t have a home, or you see someone in Ithaca pushing a cart of cans, it’s just heart-breaking, you know.  But to not shy away from away from that, to not go to your iPod and say “Well let me me quickly listen to some upbeat music so I don’t have to think about that, and I don’t have to feel their pain.  I’ve felt it, I’ve actually felt it, and it’s pretty intense.  And you can start with something that’s maybe a little easier for you, or someone who’s more distant from you so that it’s a less intense situation.  But what it leads to is that when you get to that intense situation, you simply allow yourself to feel the depth of that pain without escaping from it, and it’s just there, and when you’re not fighting it, it’s just OK.  There’s no resistance.  It’s like the willow tree.  Because there’s no resistance to the wind, it just bends, it doesn’t break so you don’t fall apart in those situations.  I think that’s how it was, so the idea of what tonglen was for me, was maybe it was slightly different, but  it was just breathing in the suffering of somebody who doesn’t have a house, or breathing out the wish that things would improve, or that things would heal, for someone who’s sick.   So for me that’s what it’s like, the idea that you could just sit at your sick uncle’s bedside and say “He’s suffering.  I take in the suffering and I just breathe out love and compassion for him at this moment right here.  Not running away from it, not going to the soda machine, just right here.  And that is actually a really powerful thing, if you’ve ever been in the same room with someone who’s suffering and you just try that, it’s incredible.

A: The other thing I’d say here is that the question you ask is really valuable, and keep asking when things don’t make sense, but an important thing to keep in mind about this stuff is that we’re trying to come into a different relationship with our lives.  And we’re not trying to come into a fixed relationship with the practice itself.  So if there are parts of the practice which don’t make sense, as long as you can see how to do the practice and you give it a try and it leads to peace, it leads to greater skillfulness, greater flexibility in your life, it’s a worthwhile practice on that level.  You see all these arguments about “Buddhism says there’s no self!  What does this mean?”  But no-self, which is part of what this giving-stuff-away is about, is just a practice instruction.  It’s not you, you don’t own it.  It’s just what’s arising in experience.  So the philosophy of it doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re capable of doing it.  But on the other hand, I don’t want to shut down intellectual queries, either.  Those are important, particularly if it means you’re not sure how to do the practice.

OK, so I thought of something else while we were talking.  Since we’re looking at internal conflict resolution, but for something like this, it might actually be easier to work with something that’s coming up in an enduring conflict in your life with somebody else.  So can everybody think about an enduring conflict you have with somebody, where you understand the emotional content that’s driving the conflict in the other person. [Laughter]  Just pick the one you think is going to be easiest to work with.  [P], you’ve got a good one already.  When you were doing the meditation before you weren’t sure if you were doing it right, and that was causing you anxiety.  So just imagine a person who is stuck doing a task and thinks they’re not doing it right, and is anxious about that.  So do tonglen with that.

OK, so why don’t we do this for say three minutes and see what comes up for people.

[three minutes pass]

Any questions, comments, problems?

S: In terms of breathing, should I just be breathing through my nose?  Out of my mouth, is there a particular rule?

A: No, there isn’t.

S: Any way is fine?

G: Just keep breathing. [Laughter]

S: That’s actually good advice.  Sometimes it’s like “Phew, that was close.”  No, actually, when I was saying earlier that I was focusing too much on my breathing, sometimes I was saying “OK, breathe [the one-breath meditation.]  Finish your breath, now joy,” and then I’d have to think, “Oh and breathe while you’re doing that.”  Because I was noticing that conceptually I was imagining breathing in smoke or sludge, and then breathing out sunlight, cool air, like that.  Because initially I was trying to imagine specific things like my son, breathing in this person’s pain and then breathing out thoughts of my son, that wasn’t working, and then I thought of this great remix I heard today like Frank Sinatra and this drum thing, and it made me like really happy, and I thought can I try that.  And then I was imaging smoke and this like sunlight, cool, breath, and when I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth I could actually make that work, and that worked.  Is that kind of right?

A: Yeah, definitely, definitely sounds good.  What were you experiencing on the in-breath and the out-breath?

S:  I started by thinking that when you breathe through your nose you kind of feel a little burning right here, and I was imagining that breathing in campfire smoke.  And I was imagining a difficult conversation I was having with my wife earlier, and I was imagining breathing in her feelings of worry and anxiety and so on, and breathing that in has kind of a smoking feeling, and then breathing out I was imagining sunlight in winter,  you know that really crisp brightness.  And I found that somehow I was able to do that, and that was working.  The drum beats didn’t work at all. [Laughter]

A: Great, that’s good.

H: I struggled with the breathing.  I noticed this in this short time, that if I focus  too much on my face it goes to my head ,and it starts giving me a headache.  So I have to think about first feeling the sensations of suffering in my chest mostly, so I found that if I breathe in, I have to remember with my whole body and not just with my head, or I’ll give myself a headache.

S: Diaphragm breathing.

H: Yeah.

J: My breathing was really sucking out the poison.  So I just saw the problem, I’d suck in the problem, and then I’d just breathe out the answer, then I was like, “Oh, no.”  And then it was more about being patient, and allowing the breathing in to sort of open up to the person that I was thinking about, and doing that, and breathing out compassion loosened up the situation for me.

[Inaudible]

A: Yeah, what often happens with me, once I got fluent with this , I would breathe in whatever it is, breathe out whatever it is, and in that cycle, some other reaction would be triggered, and that would become the topic for the next in-breath, so I would breathe in whatever was associated with that reaction, and breathe out something else good.  And I’m not saying people should do that now, you want to get fluent with the technique first, but that’s kind of where this is leading.  You don’t want to be a meditator who’s doing breath meditation in the end, you want to become an ongoing response to whatever’s arising in your experience.  I’m just bringing that up to say that if you get stuck with whatever’s coming up, like wanting to fix things, you can then make that…

J: The fixing things becomes the thing you breathe in.

A: Yeah.

H: I found a radical imbalance between the depth of pain that I could experience breathing in, and the (“blah”) that I was exhaling.  And I could see it as an imbalance, but I didn’t feel any dissonance about the practice.  But I didn’t know over time whether the balance would come over, or if I was simply trying to do something which was too difficult at first.  Because what I was experiencing was this person’s pain, but noticing that, “That’s really mine.”  I don’t know whether it’s theirs or not, but when I think of this person, I experience pain and suffering.  I don’t know if it’s this person’s or it’s mine.

A: It doesn’t matter.

H: But then there’s all this hurt, and [there’s nothing on the outbreath], and it’s just “Ahh, it just huuurts.” [Laughter]  So I don’t know if you have any… I mean I felt grateful to be attending to the suffering, I felt a sense of, well, compassion, in a sense gratitude that I was giving the suffering space to move, but there was [no exchange in the sense tonglen intends].

A: Was your attention stable?  Was there any resistance to the pain?

H: No, as long as I kept thinking about my breathing body.  As long as I didn’t lose attachment to [my breath].  It’s “Oh, I’m taking in the suffering while I push out my diaphragm.”

A: The classic instructions are that you shouldn’t be imbalanced.  That you should be breathing in about the same amount of pain as the happiness you’re offering.  But I don’t actually understand that instruction.  To me, it sounds like what’s going on there is fine.  I think the classic advice would be to choose something easier to work with that balances with the happiness that you feel able to offer at the moment.  But I think it would be fine to go on the way you are as long as you kept an eye on it.  The other thing I would say is that when you do this practice during the week, we’re going to do eleven minutes now, not ten minutes, so I’m shaping it like a dog, here [laughter].  So do the ten minutes of the one-breath celebration meditation that we did last week, then do a minute of tonglen at the end of that.  And you can either work with something in an interpersonal relationship, or something that’s coming up consistently in the meditation and seems to be evolving into a conflict, or something which is coming up in the [life] habits that you’d like to work with.  Any of those, but I keep things at around that balance.  Do the breath meditation for about ten minutes and do the tonglen for about one minute.  And that will both stabilize your attention, hopefully, and also may increase your sense of positive emotions which you have to offer in the process.  So why don’t we do five minutes of breath-celebration meditation to finish up?