A Bonus: Consideration of Tonglen

     I found this single page of guidance in the practice of Tonglen, lying around our home meeting place, the Mindfulness Center of Milwaukee. I would suspect that it was written by Paul N.

     Tonglen, The Practice of sending and taking.

     Tonglen is an old Tibetan practice for the development of compassion. It basically consists of a visualization of other's suffering and learning to transform it.  There are many good authors who talk extensively about tonglen. Pema Chodron is one of my favorite teachers who explores this method. It is a bit presumptuous to try to summarize this practice in just a few words, but I will try. If you find this useful, I strongly recommend you read further.

     The important part of tonglen is the wide open bodhicitta heart. If our hearts are small, then when we experience discomforts, we are unable to handle it, like a glass of water becoming undrinkable with a handful of salt in it. If our hearts are large, we are like the river that flows along unphased by the handful of salt, open to accepting. How do we get there?  Practice, Practice, Practice.

     There are four parts:

     First we open our minds and hearts as wide a we can, what is sometimes called bodhicitta. By being centered and calm, we do our best to open up to the wide world of sentient beings around us.

     Secondly, we work with the visualization of breathing. We see ourselves breathing in a hot, gritty, dark, smelly substance. We exhale something cool, fresh, light and sweet smelling.

     Thirdly, we imagine ourselves being with a person who is suffering, be it physical, emotional, or whatever. Using the great vehicle of our breath, along with our wide open heart, we take in their suffering and breathe out comfort, compassion, and lovingkindness.

     Fourthly, we extend this compassionate heart. We can give our comfort to those like the single person we visualized, i.e., if that person had AIDS, we might visualize and try to transform the suffering of all people with AIDS. If we feel adventurous, we might extend our thoughts and energy to all who suffer.

     Tonglen is certainly a daunting practice. it takes some courage and some patience. It does not usually feel as easy as metta practice. But it can be very powerful.

     Tonglen can be done for oneself as well. If you feel uncomfortable, or don't feel you are grounded enough to do this well, you might start with tonglen for yourself.

     Tonglen and Anger:
     When confronted with an angry person, it is useful, if you can, to extend kindness to that person. This is where gounding in tonglen may help. Imagine that you are breathing in that person's distress and energy, and breathing out calmness. If nothing else, you might feel calmer and more ready to make the right decisions, without being hijacked by emotions.


  

May 19: Tom Ryan on "Focusing"

     I am afraid our group almost didn't let Tom complete his presentation on focusing. We couldn't focus or else everyone just had a lot to contribute.

     Tom presented some ideas about focusing. He has long experience in working with people who need such instruction. Several practices for learning to focus were discussed.

     Several books came up in the discussions: Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy by Eugene Gendler.  There is a Phase I self exploration. Notice what is going on as when we do Heart Math. Then we take an inventory of our body and the inner self. Try to take control of the issues and ask the heart for guidance.

Also Working with the Dreaming Body by Mendel. In this case you amplify what you are feeling. This drives you to a different state of mind. The brainstem contracts what you don't like. So if you amplify you drive it from the brainstem to the neocortex.

     The psychologist Carl Rogers says to amplify changes what the person thinks. We tend to do opposite in psychiatry. We try to talk people out of bad feelings, and make people pick out good things to think about if they are depressed. By amplifying, we can change the thinking.

     Another model outlines that you enter into a dialogue with parts of your body, as in negotiation. Get two sides to agree on what they disagree on. We don't realize that two parts of us can be fighting  with each other. We denigrate ourselves when we think about this. If you can embrace your two different sides, it allows freedom.

     Anger sometimes comes up frequently in our discussions. We all agree sometimes anger is hard to let go. On the other hand, you do need to deal with anger for a while. You need to face it, and not get rid of it too soon. It is a fallacy that you can get stuck on anger. The only way you get stuck on anger is that you deny it. If you are inviting it in to deal with it, you must experience the feelings associated with that anger, not just verbalize it. Anger is a very basic feeling, but we need to ask: "What fear am I feeling? What am I afraid of?"
Religion tells us to deny the anger, or ignore it, or give it to God, but organized religion usually doesn't encourage us to embrace or accept the anger. 

Sept 2, 2010 Bake Off

     Again Bake Off for our spiritual group showed that we definitely have a need for this type of free-for-all session periodically. Spirit Mind Body without a BakeOff is like trees without the wind, flowers without the sun, or soil without the fertilizer. However this photo certainly expresses the friendly discussions that we have at our BakeOffs. It should be noted that these impala disagreements in Africa never really hurt either of the two ungulates.

     Law of the Garbage Truck

One day I hopped in a taxi and we took off for the airport
We were driving in the right lane when suddenly a black car jumped out of a parking space right in front of us.
My taxi driver slammed on his brakes, skidded, and missed the other car by just inches!
The driver of the other car whipped his head around and started yelling at us.
My taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy.
And I mean, he was really friendly.
So I asked, 'Why did you must do that?
This guy almost ruined your car and sent us to the hospital!'
This is when my taxi driver taught me what I now call,

The Law of the Garbage Truck

He explained that many people are like garbage trucks.
They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment.
As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it and sometimes they'll dump it on you.
Don't take it personally.

Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on.
Don't take their garbage and spread it to other people at work, at home, or on the streets.

The bottom line is that successful people do not let garbage trucks take over their day.
Life's too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, so ... Love the people who treat you right.
Pray for the ones who don't.

Life is ten percent what you make it and ninety percent how you take it!

Have a garbage free day.

The group liked this little piece. We spoke of ways to express this same goal. Members presented various anecdotes :
One person witnessed the frustration of a couple standing in a grocery check out line: The woman turned to the man and said: "I am not going to let this woman steal my joy."

"I am not going to let this person live in my head rentfree" ie with all the resentments that such a person might build up in us.

   Now came the fireworks. One attendee brought up that there are not really any differences between man and woman, but rather just social styles that are prominent. An author she had read introduced this idea and thought this would level out gender differences and disagreements. The group had a lot to say about this idea. Many thought that there really is a hard wiring in the brain that determines differences between men and women. Indeed this has been shown scientifically. But could even these so-called hard wired personality characteristics be altered by social style and environment? There are certain gender rituals that become ingrained in our behavior and that is socially OK but one should not expect another to follow those rituals. In general in conflicts once the conflicting parties agree on what the disagreement is about, there can be harmony ie agreement to disagree. The group balanced their discussion by talking of ethnic and nationalistic effects on social style. To demonstrate how the gender difference discussion proceeded during this BakeOff, at one point we not only discussed but actually took a poll on which way the toilet paper should be mounted in the bathroom -- under or over. No agreement was reached and we agreed to disagree. Hard wired gender differences are well represented in the following photo. Enough said!

July 15, 2010 Unplanned Bake Off

Varanasi, India: cleansing meditation in the Holy Ganges River

  
     Chuck was supposed to lead the discussion this week, but there might have been some miscommunication. At any rate we ended up doing a make shift Bake Off.

     Eric mentioned that he had been angry at someone and he went to mow the lawn. At first he was aggressively mowing the lawn and thinking aggressive thoughts but then there was a switch to accepting the anger, naming it, and then focusing on the present moment. We discussed how this could have happened. The Buddhists, if angry, often do walking meditation.
    
    You need to name the anger, recognize it, tell the person you are angry and that you are suffering with it, try to talk it out, then one needs to let it go. Forgiveness may be involved at this point. Anger itself if allowed to proceed reinforces the process of getting angry. If we are able to stop this circling process, we will be able to take the novelty and surprise out of the anger, move the anger from the amygdala and put it in the frontal lobes where it becomes less threatening and less damaging.

     Our heart become involved in this as well and even as in HeartMath, gratitude and appreciation enter into the thinking. We may even be able to walk with tonglen during our walking meditation. Some traditions try to throw anger and negative emotions into the earth just as we do with our human waste at the dump site, and earth will transform these wastes into flowers and trees. Just so with our anger, it will transform the anger into positive emotions.

     Hitting pillows does not work. You just get very good at hitting pillows. The only value to such an aggressive practice such as hitting pillows would be to get over repression of the anger to bring it forward so that it might be recognized, named and then dealt with.

     The idea that someone made you angry is a faulty perception. This perception waters the seeds of anger. A better term is to say or think: "I have anger" rather than "I am angry."

     Dick showed us a form of walking meditation that uses the phrase: "Lift up your heart." While walking, hold one hand on your heart and the other hand over your abdomen. While meditating and walking, try to separate these hands slightly; the movement apart with only be a centimeter or so. But this is actually lifting up your heart, as it says in the Bible. We tried this walking meditation briefly. Someone else recalls a form of meditation where one puts one's hand on another's heart and even breath together with the other person. Some say in certain yoga practices, your "lead with your heart." Jean described that during her yoga practice she has moved to put her hands one on top of the other in front of her heart with the palms facing upward as though receiving a gift. All of these comments proved to us how important posture is during these different practices, especially if the posture is symbolic and becomes a natural part of the practice.

     Again we discussed about the necessity of regular meditation practice. People often give excuses why they are not meditating regularly, sometimes saying they forgot to meditate. Indeed, change to a regular practice is hard. There is a part of our brain that doesn't want us to meditate because such regular practice is putting that part of the brain out of business, so to speak. There are two recommendations for overcoming these excuses and moving to regular meditation practice: 1.) Have a place set up for meditation that you go to regularly. It might be set up with your cushion, with a Buddha, or with candles, other paraphenalia for meditation, or it just might be a corner or wall with a comfortable chair. 2.) Hook meditation to something that you do every day. For example, take your toothbrush with you to meditation and only put the toothbrush away after your meditation. Then if you do not do the meditation, and put your toothbrush away first, you will feel strongly that something is missing.

     In the end, our discussion shifted to work and jobs Sharleen asked two questions about work. 1) Do we work to serve others in the workplace? or 2) What in the work makes you happy? The former is extrinsic, and the latter intrinsic. Tim discussed this briefly and gave us a preview of his planned discussion on the schedule for August.

     Next week is Jean's healing prayer service for Todd. Be sure to come.

  

Mindfullness Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Todd D. presented a summary of some of the lessons that he teaches in a course he is leading, called Minfulness Based CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy).  He calls this Emotional Recalibration.