Compassion in Action

Breathe in the world's pain, breathe out love, and let karuna (compassion) blossom in your life.

By Anne Cushman

One formal way of cultivating that sense of kinship is through the practice of tonglen meditation. Tonglen--literally, "breathing in and breathing out"--is a powerful Tibetan Buddhist practice designed to awaken karuna by reversing our instinctive tendency to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Tonglen is based on the potent assumption that within each of us is not only a vast river of sorrow but a truly limitless capacity for compassion.

Tonglen instructions are deceptively simple. While sitting in meditation, we invite into our awareness someone we know is suffering: a parent with Alzheimer's; a dear friend dying of breast cancer; a terrified child whose face we've glimpsed on the evening news, hiding in the rubble of a bombed-out street. As we inhale, we breathe in that person's pain as if it were a dark cloud, letting ourselves touch it in all of its immensity. As we exhale, we send the person the bright light of joy, peace, and healing.

While doing tonglen meditation, we can use the sensitivity we develop in our asana practice to imagine the other person's pain vibrating in our own body and heart. With the same nonjudgmental precision with which we track our responses to our own struggles, we notice the responses that arise within us as we contemplate another's hurt and despair. Do we flinch and go numb? Do we instantly seek to ascribe blame for the pain? Do our minds leap to the rescue, spinning schemes to fix the situation? Or can we simply hold the situation in our hearts with compassion?

Tonglen can be a powerful method for helping us use our own pain not to isolate ourselves in a prison of self-pity but to open our hearts to connect with others. Even our small pains can be a way of connecting with the collective realities of loss and impermanence. A knee that throbs when we sit cross-legged can remind us that all people are fragile. An aching hip joint can remind us that this body, like everyone's, is bound for the grave. And our deeper pains can lead us straight into the heart of compassion. We can call up our physical and emotional suffering, holding it tenderly in our hearts in all of its painful specificity, and then visualize all the millions of people in the world who, right at that moment, are suffering the same way we are. A woman facing a mastectomy can open to the pain and fear of cancer patients all over the world. A man whose child has died can touch the grief of hundreds of thousands of other bereaved parents.

However, as Chödrön points out, "we often cannot do this [tonglen] practice, because we come face-to-face with our own fear, our own resistance, anger, or whatever our personal pain, our personal stuckness happens to be at that moment." At this point, she suggests, "you can change the focus and begin to do tonglen for what you are feeling and for millions of others just like you who at that very moment of time are feeling exactly the same stuckness and misery." If we're so stressed-out and preoccupied with our own concerns that we can’t summon an ounce of genuine compassion for starving people on the evening news, we can practice tonglen for our own stressed-outness--and then for all the millions of people who, like us, are too numb to connect easily with their innate compassion.

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