How Tonglen Can Relieve Grief and Sadness
With the world in such turmoil, it's hard to know what to do and how to process it all. Grief and sadness weigh heavily, and we can become paralyzed by it.
My meditations this week have been focused on a prayer-like breathing technique referred to as Tonglen. Tonglen is a breathing practice to relieve grief and suffering for ourselves and others.
Tonglen is a Buddhist practice of taking and sending energy. It reverses our logical thinking in an effort to avoid suffering.
Inhale into what's painful
Exhale the freedom and relief
This practice is traditionally done for others who are suffering. But we first need to start with ourselves. We focus on what’s currently challenging for us and inhale those difficult emotions, and we exhale the opposite: the relief and freedom of them.
We can focus on a painful personal situation of feeling stuck. If you’re feeling inadequate, breathe into inadequacy, insecurity, and smallness, and exhale confidence, strength, adequacy, and relief.
We can then expand our compassion by inhaling and taking in what others are suffering and exhaling relief for them, sending out bigger ripples of freedom. If you practice for someone you love, you can extend it to others in similar situations and even to the whole world.
We inhale the suffering of the world and exhale relief and freedom for everybody. Several rounds can help us to connect to all living beings, reminding us that we are never alone in our suffering.
This practice liberates us from the age-old patterns of selfishness. It helps us feel love for ourselves and others. It awakens compassion and allows a much bigger view of reality.
Typically, we look away from suffering as it brings up fear. When we wish to be compassionate but are afraid, rather than beating ourselves up, we can use our personal stuckness as a stepping stone to understand what people are up against worldwide.
Inhale: Visualize the texture of the difficult feelings: the heat, the darkness, the heaviness, the loneliness, and the claustrophobia.
Exhale: feel the expansion and freedom.
We inhale what’s difficult – right into the center of it – and exhale the relief – the peace – through all the pores in our body.
Continue this until the visualization is in sync with the breath.
We are energy bodies that have a ripple effect on those around us.
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh gave an example of being on refugee boats when everyone was panicked. If one person on the boat could maintain a mindful breath and mindset, there was hope for survival. The ripples from that centered being emanated to the other passengers to help them calm down and think clearly.
When meditating, we can visualize the heart’s light shining on what needs to heal and be brought back into balance. This can simply be sitting and being with what’s challenging. We can allow the heart space to open and create an energetic field of loving awareness that holds our grief and sadness.
This loving, energetic space is like the ocean, including the waves. We include the heaviness of grief and let it float in the heart space. When we allow an emotion to be without resisting it or trying to change it, it typically lasts for about ninety seconds. Providing this space can transform our grief into benevolence when we allow the heart to hold the sadness.
By creating space for difficult emotions, we can transform them into compassion. We come to an understanding that all humans go through challenging emotions, and we are never alone with our pain.
As the author, speaker, and Buddhist nun Pema Chodron reminds us, at any moment when we’re feeling sadness and grief, remember that all over the world, thousands of others at that same moment are also feeling sadness and grief for the very same reasons.
Loneliness is one of the most challenging emotions we go through when dealing with difficult emotions. It’s another layer added to our suffering. The various forms of grief need to be included in the heart space: sadness, grief, isolation, shame, frustration, and exhaustion. Oftentimes, it’s not just one challenging feeling we’re experiencing but layers of them.
Speaking them out loud, with hands on the heart, creates space for them and acknowledges them.
When we can do this for ourselves, we then touch into our compassion for others who also are suffering. This is the heart fire transforming the metal (the element related to the lungs in the autumn) into alchemy to be of benefit to others. We are transforming base metal into gold. Otherwise, when we don’t address our grief and sadness, it makes our metal energy rust and creates disease.
The breath is the doorway into our longevity. The lungs access the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. The way we breathe affects our thoughts, and our thoughts affect the way we breathe.
From my long, slow breath to yours ~
Namaste,
Maggie