Why the Out-Breath Is Often Judgment – Judith R.

okay so finding a way that you like to sit we'll just begin by settling down with the bells So, always begin meditating by stabilizing and entering into meditation. Which for me is I begin to notice my body sensations. I connect with my breathing. And I notice what's in my mind. And just take a few moments to, if there are certain things you're worried about or issues that are present in your life, just take the moment to let them rise up and invite them, put them on the shelf, the shelf in your mind. And just tell them, I'll come back to you later. and clear the space, letting go of the day and clearing a space for getting in touch with a deeper level of living. so in any meditation there is always an aspect of meditation that is training the mind to stay to be able to place your mind where you want it to be And that is like practicing a muscle. It gets stronger and stronger, your concentration you can cultivate so that your mind will stay put. But the most basic aspect of meditation is noticing when your mind has wandered off. noticing that at the moment you notice that you're awakened and you invite your mind back to the concentration point Now the concentration point for this meditation is going to be this feeling of loving kindness, of unconditional love. And one way I like to start is to find a memory from my life, it could be even a very little one where I notice someone being kind. It could be to me, to someone else, it would be my kindness, just a memory of a point in my life where I felt kindness or unconditional love, an example of that even if it's small. And just use that memory as a way to start the cultivation of the feeling in yourself. now some people who have had a very difficult past may not be able to think of something and then you can just use your wish for knowing what unconditional love is as the place where you start And have it be an uncomplicated memory if it can be. And as you start to feel it, begin to cultivate it in yourself and just circulate that energy all around yourself, all through your organs, all around the outside of your body. And just, if you can, see if you can, I sometimes think about sucking on it or bringing that energy into my being. Sometimes you can identify a certain place in your body or your emotional life that needs this kind of merciful mercy love and you can send it right to that place. And we can start just on your inhale, taking in that unconditional love. And on the exhale, spreading that out to yourself. Letting the loving kindness ride on your breath. Thank you. back without judgment. Breathing it in and sending it out. and letting your heart open and soften so that you have the possibility of receiving it and you can notice what changes occur in yourself maybe there's resistance just notice it investigate it Go back to your memory if you need to start over. Thank you. Thank you. you can just return to working with contacting loving-kindness and breathing it in and breathing it out. For those of you who want to, we'll move on then into Tonglen. What we've been doing is the out breath on Tonglen but the in breath is allowing yourself to touch more deeply the pain. So there's a classic imagery which is on the in-breath, the dark smoke, the feeling of the suffering comes in. This is really facing the suffering just playing out. out so you breathe in the dark smoke and the pain of it breaks open your heart and buddha or loving kindness is in the broken open heart and on the exhale you breathe out the images moonlight or unconditional love so on the inhale it's the dark smoke stick hot icky prickly feeling of the pain on the exhale is the smooth flowing white moonlight of loving-kindness so you can just stay with those images for a while, seeing if you can coordinate the images on your breathing. So I think we'll do Tonglen for ourselves tonight. So just pick an area that's painful in your life, and we'll use that as the beginning of the Tonglen. Think about, you know, place yourself with that person or in that circumstance, or maybe it's just someplace in your body, whatever you choose, and try to just take in the energy of the suffering, the pain on the inhale. Just be with it in a very matter-of-fact, plain way. Let it touch your heart and automatically loving kindness will come out and send it back to that place. And you don't have to do all of it. Just as much as an in-breath can take and as much love as the out-breathe can give. It can move around different parts of yourself that are hurting or different situations or you can just stay with one situation. This is the welcoming of difficulties that we've been working on the past month. It's the opposite of what we want to do. Usually we would give away what's painful and take in, so this is the opposite, allowing the pain to be just as it is and breathing it in, letting it break you open so that your Just an open heart would respond with care and love and gentleness. There is one more step which is what I call opening the Tongvang. So just say now, I have this pain but so do 10,000 or a million other people and contact all the other people in the world that might have a similar pain as you. And then do the Tonglen for yourself and all the other people who are also suffering in the same way. So, you're really making it larger and you're seeing that you're just a human being part of the human race and many people share this pain with you so you breathe it in as dark smoke and you send out mercy to them and to yourself on the exhale We are not alone. . . Thank you. Now I invite you to take someone that you're pretty close with and put that person in front of you, visualize the person in-front of you and do Tonglen for them. So on your inhale allow yourself to take in their pain and on the exhale give away your love and healing kindness towards them. And sequentially or simultaneously you can open the Tonglen and do it for all people who have a similar pain as your friend. . . . . . . . . . Thank you. and now for the last few minutes let's see if we can just let it go and return to a more present moment sitting Just let go of the issues and come back to now and your senses and the room. Practicing letting go. . you . Thank you. Turn the light on. So that's different. Anybody want to make a comment or ask a question? I found at the end when you said, no, just practice letting go, that my shoulders had all been stiff and my whole body was tight and I didn't even know it. So I was very surprised at that point to let it all relax again. Could people do the in-breath and the out-breathe? Somewhat? Hard? Yeah, what was difficult about it? I was having a hard time coming up with the imagery. Uh-huh. The imagery of the dark and the light, and also people or issues, or... Um, yeah. It was a challenge. But I like at the end, and I found myself kind of tightening up, trying to work this thing, where it was a little different than regular meditation. It's just kind of don't work anything. This is working something. And I found I was surprised that a pain that I thought was no longer around just sort of came up and my reaction was, I don't want to go there. I wanted to go with it. But I just stayed at it. It's just like, it's okay, it was okay, and then I started crying, actually. Like these two gentlemen, the same reaction at the end where I let it go, and I felt like, wow, I don't have to hold it, but I can't let it down. Well, it's not unusual to cry. Even with just loving kindness sometimes people cry. Especially, I think recovering people because many of us did not have gentleness or you know that's why I added if you can't find anything, mostly in a usual room people can find. But in a recovery room often you feel like there wasn't anything gentle in my past. So sometimes people cry right away. Sometimes people can't get in touch with it at all for a long time. So So if you're in that category, you're not alone. And sometimes people can't start there. It's just too painful, right, to start with. So just to bring that up. I will say though personally that Tonglen changed my life so that's one of the reasons why I'm trying it out you know to see what this group want to go there and maybe we won't go there too far but some of you might pick up pick up on it? Did you want to say something? Just that while I was, it was a very, um, flip-side day for me. Um, I had a very almost, um uh, angelic expression of kindness in me I was just overwhelmed. So while I was thinking about this pain that I did not want to even feel, but think about, at the same time I had this incredible gift for you today that was just shocking. It was so obvious. So I had that extreme negative and extreme obvious experience. Now, my experience is that different people have different issues on the in-breath and the out-breathe. And I also am seeing as I teach this that it sometimes has to do with ethnicity or how you're raised. Do you feel comfortable touching the pain? And do you know what loving kindness is? So one thing I found is, please forgive me if I'm too ethnic, but as a Jew, it's very – in-breath I'm real good at, right, because my culture is all about, you know, the in- breath. But the out-breathe has been very hard for me to cultivate. What is kindness? the whole first year that I did Tonglen, my out-breath was judgment. I would breathe in the negative and then I would have a judgment about it or what they should do or fixing it or you shouldn't, you know, just this ugly voice. And for a whole year I had a judgmental out-breath which I realized was the way I conducted my whole life you know so it was very interesting for me to work on cultivating the out breath then as I began to teach it when I teach did in Minnesota mostly taught here and a lot of people have trouble contacting the suffering which I thought was very kind this lutheran you know minnesota you don't get down too off you know it's denial you know right so it was very interesting for me to see that people had different issues with in breath and out breath um and uh what else did i want to say about that that if you're doing Tonglen really well when you get out of the meditation you should feel kind of equal like they balanced it out balanced out so if you finish Tonglen and you're feeling despair like you touched this yucky stuff then what you need to work on is strengthening your out breath the kindness part and if you end up feeling kind of puffed up in a bubble of kindness then you have to work on balancing that by touching the suffering and surely if you're in a good place then you just have to look around and you can find the in-breath outside yourself. Like you could do this disaster or other things so quickly you can figure out what to do. I feel like Tonglen is a type of prayer in Buddhism. It has a prayerful feeling of accepting. I also think it's, for those of you who are into the noble truths, the in-breath is really the first noble truth that human life has suffering in it and that our lives have suffering in them. And that it's our humanity, the suffering and the out breath is um the for the cessation it's the uh seeing the truth about life so that you can have equanimity and kindness and compassion for how hard human life is do you see what i mean so there is a an expression of the buddhism really strongly inside the Tonglen and the other thing that has changed my life I really believe that is the opening up of the Tonglan so that when I'm working on myself I include all the people who are like me so a we could say all the alcoholics all the addicts all the incest survivors all the fat people i mean whatever however you want to say it all of a sudden you're not alone and it's not self-pity anymore or it's not um self-absorption and i do this all the time open it up uh i have one funny example oh Well I do it a lot with parenting. When I'm very upset about my children or about how I'm being a parent, I just think about all the people who feel the same way as I do in this moment. And there's more than a thousand. You know? There's a lot of people! Or if you're afraid, or if you are angry, or you just lost your job, or someone just told you that you have cancer. Do you get what I'm saying? If you've been practiced in this, at that moment you can say, I and all the people who are sitting in the doctor's office hearing for the first time that you've got cancer, I pray for us. I send out love and mercy for this whole group of people. It has had a miraculous change in my life to extend the Tonglen. And I guess that's the word, as well. And I think what you keep showing me is that the translation of that stuff into my mouth doesn't seem to be as long as it actually can be done as well, because it's kind of formed in a way that you can't do it. It's fine, but I don't see it there. I'm not sure. So, I think there is a maturing process if you choose this as a practice. Again, I say this is a more intermediate kind of a practice, it's a hard practice. If you choose it as your practice, as you do it, you learn about that. You know, like people have said to me, well, my dad has cancer, but I don't want to breathe in his cancer. That might make me have cancer. There's some boundary problems there, you know. But the more you experiment with it, the more use begin to understand the energy of what you're doing and that it's. It's, and also, I mean, essentially we aren't separated. In the truth, there is no I and thou. And at the end of doing Tonglen practice, you really begin to understand that, that it's called exchanging oneself for another. that there is no differentiation, really, between my suffering and your suffering or my joy and your joy. If we really are moving and flowing, it's just what life is about. And you can get there through this practice. Now, you can do Tonglen as a formal meditation practice like we did, but the easiest way to learn it is on the spot. what you call on the spot like you know you see i don't know what to say you see someone suffering you're working at work and someone you know is suffering and you just right when you see them you do it like the three breath meditation similar to that you just do it right there for two or three breaths and then you go on that's very powerful or um as i said uh you find you extend the tonglen you know i'm in i get really really angry at something and then i realized i could say the i'll be with all the people who are really angry right now So you can use it on the spot as well as in meditation practice. Right, were you doing Tonglen for the person you're resenting or you were doing it for yourself? Well I think you have to be very, very flexible inside the Tonglen and know and see what's actually coming up. So, you start with, okay I'm going to do Tonglen for the person I'm resenting. But then what you notice is you're not willing to do it or you're still resentful. So then switch the Tonglen to your resentment and all the people in the world who are holding resentments and just do it for yourself for a while and then go back and try and do it for the other person. when you're doing it for a difficult person or someone you're really mad at have low expectations low standards just if you can just give them a little bit of i think it's okay for you to be alive do you know what i mean just start a little bit like i acknowledge your humanity or I acknowledge that what you did to me comes from your illness just any acknowledgement that's positive on the exhale yeah well that's like act as if right so you can do it that way too but the important point is for you to stay in touch with what you're actually feeling and to accept it okay I would suggest that you first start with yourself feeling the resentment that you feel, the hurt you feel and then sending the love to yourself for a while. Right? And then you can work on that difficult person seeing if you can do it for them but that's kind of advanced right? To do it for the person who hurt you. But in the end we do have to do it for the people who hurt us, right? That's what's all through the book, the big book. If you recall, you have to pray for the people who heard you because it was their illness or their misunderstanding or their suffering that caused them to do it. So in the end we have to learn how to forgive or see the other person's humanity but it doesn't necessarily mean that we have talk with them or have them in our life or anything like that but in our own heart we have to let it go eventually but if you can't right now you work in small increments until you can there was one story about a woman who his son this i'm taking from a story from Pema Chodron. Her son was an active heroin addict, and she had a lot of suffering about watching her son. And she kept saying, I try to do Tonglen for my son, and I can't do it. I won't do it. You know, just despair. And so they said, well, just try learning Tonglen on something little. Don't take your biggest thing. Just practice on something little. And And she was watching television, the local football team, the high school football team lost. And she said she would do it for those 18-year-old boys who had lost. And she says, you know, I started to get the feel of it in this small, you could say stupid thing. It wasn't stupid to the 18-year-old boys, but it was in consideration of everything kind of small. But she said that's how she started. And she built up her capacity, and then she ended up being able to do it for her son. And it's partly acceptance. Isn't the first, the in-breath is just accepting the way it is. And the out-breathe is just wishing for the best. you know, or for God's intervention, or however you want to put it. For yourself and for the other person. Tonglen classically is done for other people and for other groups of people. However, you can't do it for others unless you can do it for yourself. So you start with yourself. and for those of us who have a lot of self recrimination sometimes you can't start with yourself that's the hardest person so then you have to start with an easy person and practice and then do it towards yourself okay Well, you know, this is very, you just have to practice. I mean, especially the first time you do it, there's so many things to think about and you're noticing all your reactions and everything. You just have to practice. Now, again, some of us, again I would say that usually Tonglen is taught after you have some concentration or some ability to stay with your breath, right? So that's very hard to do, stay with the in-breath, stay avec the out-breathe, right ? If your mind is wandering, you can't really do that. and some people find it hard to switch like they say well I just got in touch with it and then I have to be nice you know they say it's too fast doing it on the in-breath and out-breathe so what I recommend then is just taking a chunk of time where you get in touch with the pain and then taking a chunk of time where you get in touch with the kindness and then start seeing if you can put it on your breath do you know but some people can't put it on their breath for a long long time see i came to tonglen after 20 years of working with breath meditation so for me it was easy to get it to go on my breath. But I know as a beginner, it's not easy. I was going to say, when I was doing it, I quickly realized that well, I couldn't get into a whole lot of detail with just loving breath and into a full lot of details. I couldn' t go through the whole story line about my tough brain. That was almost helpful, and I just kind of stayed with the kernel of the brain. And then I was like, oh, okay, that kind of works. So, I'm glad you brought that up. Who says that. It's a movie. Anyway, I'm glad you brought that up. I didn't do one instruction which is really great, which I've done before in here, which is Tonglen is a practice from your heart and it's an energetic practice. It is an energy practice. It's not about really the storyline and the instruction is to drop the storyline and just do the energy of the situation do you get what you were calling the kernel of the emotion and when I do tongue line that's one of my hardest things because I start doing it and then my mind starts analyzing and fixing it and starts to swirl so when I notice that my mind is swirling I go back down and say drop it. It's not about analysis or fixing it, it's just about accepting the emotion, the vibe, the pulse, the emotional tone on the in-breath and responding with God's love, with Buddha's love on the out breath. Do you get what I So that's really interesting, dropping the storyline. about it, and it was really easy for me to do it. I stayed focused, and so much better. Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? That sometimes facing it is the right thing. And not using meditation to run away from it, sometimes. Did you have...? Well, one thing is what we did tonight, I teach in a year's course. so please forgive me you know what I mean like we stood loving-kindness for a month or two and and tongue Glenn I teach over a long period of time so just accept that your initial exploration that this particular part was difficult that's fine and as i said many people well i've said this before in here i think recovery people should spend five years sending love to themselves period you know i just think we can't get enough of it and i done this for a long time now i still send love to my inner child because she's the part of me that screws things up you know she just is so needy and so unhappy that she just bubbles up in the wrong situations and i find myself acting because of her it has nothing to do with my adult life it's pretty clear now and many many things have changed and many healings I've you know I'm doing great and she's still there though really needy so really I think I can give her love for the rest of my life I think part of my meditation should be to her and calming her down and saying everything's fine and let's go on, you know. So I think a lot of recovery is learning and you have to cultivate it, how to send love to yourself, how to take time for yourself, how to find things that nurture yourself. This is not easy. It's easy to say, but it's not actually easy to actually do. And one thing that's neat, I think, about Buddhism is they actually give you practices to practice like piano players. You know, if unconditional love for yourself is a problem, you can take this practice up and do it for five or six years and see where you end up. And you do mature. You do cultivate it. Did you have something? Well, you know, I've talked a lot this year about particularly compulsive personalities or addicts, we have to learn how to increase our capacity to hold our negative emotions, right? This is a sentence I've said a million times. That part of meditation practice is learning how to stay with your emotions just the way they are, not fixing them, just watching them arise and digesting them and watching them go away. Now addicts usually interrupt that process because we can't hold it by doing something, right? Oh, I'm feeling my grief. So if I go for even me now with compulsive overeating, even just an apple is going to change how I'm feelin'. You know, even something that's supposedly okay for me to eat. It's very, very subtle, the compulsion, that I really want to work at learning how to just be with my emotions straight out, without anything. Well, I shouldn't say without anything because now I have a practice that's the thing that's helping me stay with what's actually arising. So this is one of the practices I've used to help me cultivate the ability to stay with the emotional, negative emotional states of mind. But as you say, you don't actually stay with it because you have to turn it around pretty fast. You have to put it in context pretty fast So it is, well again, I must say that Tonglen changed my life. The other thing about Tonglen that's very interesting and we've been talking about this is egocentricity or how what's the wording in 12 step is well just a self-centered life um in a self centered life the main thing is i want to keep what i like and I want to get rid of what I don't like. And I've talked about this before. But that thing of, if I like it, I'm going to grasp onto it and I wanna keep it. And if I don'T like it I'm gonna push it away and do everything I can to get it away from me. That's what a usual human mind does. But with Tonglen, Tonglen was built, was made a thousand or two thousand years ago to interrupt that process because in Tonglen, you do the opposite. You take what you don't want and you give away what you want. So on a deeper level than just a loving-kindness level, you are breaking up your sense of ego by reversing that. Am I making any sense? Right. So as you do Tonglen, you're actually practicing breaking up your self-centeredness, breaking up your desires, breaking off the things that will create your suffering basically. Because in Buddhism you can't hold on to what you want. Can you? It has a life of its own. It comes and it goes you can't hold on to the pain either i mean if and we know about that the pain changes too it's not the same pain it changes every day and by the hour it changes so this is a way of breaking up that sense of solidification that our minds do but that is not the truth of the situation no I'm saying you said it's a is it a good thing to put yourself in a place of suffering I don't think I think the sufferings always there you don't have to put your self there if your eyes are open the suffering is always there. So this is very truthfully looking at life and making the best choice you possibly can as your response. Do you know what I mean? A loving, merciful, understanding response. so it's not about making it worse for yourself or anything and as I said even when I'm very clear and I'm not having any problems I mean just read the paper and you have plenty of material you know you don't do it for yourself then you do it für others and as i said mostly this is This is a practice for doing for others, a way of praying for other people. Well I guess Tonglen's about what we're going to do today but it's interesting, was it interesting? How is that spelled? T-O-N-G-L-E-N, Tonglen. And Lojong is L-OJ-O N-G, the Lojng slogans. Now I'm going to pass these out. If you want one, take it. The first page are the slogans And the second page is a very short instruction from Pema Chodron on Tonglen. Now, what was I going to say? I lost my train of thought. Do you want to – should I keep going on this material? okay okay so the next few times will work so if you would just peruse the uh did you get two sheets stapled together yeah okay peruse those two sheets um this week and now again i usually I'm just going to introduce it very lightly and take a few slogans and talk about a few slogans, and then if you want to learn more, you could take a class or something on Tonglen. I just thought it was interesting for us. Could you talk a little louder? If you're put to resentful, so you're just focusing on your feelings about it, and then like on the out breath, you're focusing on giving yourself love for having these feelings? No, it's your resentment root is in being hurt or being afraid. There's a root to it. So you're sending healing energy or kind energy or loving energy to that root. you're sending mercy to yourself for being a human being who does have resentments you don't have to be filled with hatred that's just a human thing and it's shared how many people in this room do not have a resentment do you get what I mean There is room to send love for the humanness of that problem to yourself. So I think what you're getting confused on is you kind of separate, even though you're not two people, you separate yourself. One part of you is the part that's hurt, and one part ofyou is the God part. And the God parts sends the hurt part love. Do you get what I'm saying? So the in-breath is feeling the hurt part, and the out-breathe is the part of you that's in touch with loving kindness can send it back to yourself. That's a little bit unclear, you kind of have to do a little split. But when you're doing it for someone else it's easier, then you just take their pain And then the God part in you gives back the kindness or the mercy. But you can do it for yourself, kind of like that. And I've noticed that when I do it für myself, it will slightly shift. I'll start out with fear and then I'll find anger. You know, it shifts as you do it. So you have to be noticing, or I'll do it for someone else, and then I notice that I'm actually angry. So then I have to stop and do it myself for a while, and the I can go back. So there's a shifting quality as the onion skin layers start to get peeled off. It changes as you work. Okay, anybody else want to say anything? So shall we pass the basket? And, yes, go ahead, you. So there's going to be a second 12-step in Buddhism meeting at Common Grounds on Friday nights. I think there's one month where it's not happening, but it's on there. If you're interested in that, I'll just – I can – Yeah, we can just leave it, right. Yeah, so if you're interesting in a Friday night Buddhism in 12-Step meeting, you should get one of these I'm not doing that what no what yeah you know in the next two weeks I'll have my schedule out but I am teaching two classes this year I'm teaching a class on karma which i think is going to be really good at clouds and waters and center in february 1st to march 1st on tuesday nights so that's one and then i'm going to be teaching at dharma field which is in linden hill on monday nights in the like march to may something april something like that And that's going to be on Zen koans, the Zen stories. And learning about how to get instructions from these old Zen paradoxical stories. I can't pronounce it, but are you teaching the subject we're talking about tonight? Oh, this Tunglin Lozhan, I'm not teaching right now, but I think I might do it next year because it's great. I am also, I'll just tell the group, by the end of the month my website will be up. And on the website is all of the lectures I've done here in the last year and my old lectures on Tonglen I hope eventually to get on the web site. And it will be in an MP3 format so you can either listen off your computer or you can download it if you have a MP3, is that the right? An iPod or whatever it is. I don't even know that this technician is doing it. But I'm very excited that you'll be able to access the lectures, especially for newcomers. If they want to get the old lectures, that will be good. Well, it'll be White Lotus Regeer. my buddhist name byakaran is white lotus and a regeer is r-a-g-i-r but it's not it's Not up yet, but I would say it'll be up by well. He promised me by the February 1st. It'll be out and we're working on it. It will have my schedule on it and these tapes and Dharma tapes too but the tapes take a long time to get on it so it's kind of a slow process but it's coming along okay are we done I didn't do my what I had planned about this is good I think do you get how this is corresponding what we've been doing right it's kind of the natural outcome of learning about welcoming difficulties as the teacher as the path okay so let's do our clothes Thank you.