Free The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World by Pema Chödrön Page A

space to connect with their own joy, intelligence, clarity, and warmth.
    The essence of tonglen practice is that on the in-breath you are willing to feel pain: you’re willing to acknowledge the suffering of the world. From this day onward, you’re going to cultivate your bravery and willingness to feel that part of the human condition. You breathe in so that you can really understand what the Buddha meant when he said that the first noble truth is that life is suffering. What does that mean? With every in-breath, you try to find out by acknowledging the truth of suffering, notas a mistake you made, not as a punishment, but as part of the human condition. With every in-breath, you explore the discomfort of the human condition, which can be acknowledged and celebrated and not run away from. Tonglen puts it right on the line.
    The essence of the out-breath is the other part of the human condition. With every out-breath, you open. You connect with the feeling of joy, well-being, satisfaction, tenderheartedness, anything that feels fresh and clean, wholesome and good. That’s the aspect of the human condition that we wish were the whole show, the part that, if we could finally clear up all our problems, we would have as our everyday diet. The menu would read, ‘Only happiness. No pain here.’ There would be all the things that you think would bring you everlasting happiness, maybe a little bittersweetness, a few little tears, but definitely no heavy-duty confusion, no dark places, no closet doors that you don’t want to open, no monsters under the bed, no ugly thoughts, no rage, no despair, no jealousy – definitely not. That’s the out-breath, the part you like. You connect with that and you breathe it out so that it spreads and can be experienced by everyone.
    All that you need in order to do tonglen is to have experienced suffering and to have experienced happiness. Even if you’ve had only one second of suffering in your life, you can do tonglen. Even if you’ve had only one second of happiness, you can do tonglen. Those are the prerequisites. In other words, you arean ordinary human being with pain and pleasure, just like everyone else. However, if you were just like everyone else, you would breathe in the good part and breathe out the bad part. Sometimes that makes a certain amount of sense. But this path, the path of the warrior, is a lot more daring: you are cultivating a fearless heart, a heart that doesn’t close down in any circumstance; it is always totally open, so that you could be touched by anything.
    There is a classic painting of the wheel of life with Yama, the god of death, holding the wheel. In the center is passion, a cock; aggression, a snake; and ignorance, a pig. The spokes of the wheel make six pie-shaped spaces that are called the six realms. The lower realms are the hell realm, the hungry ghost realm (also a very painful one), and the animal realm, which is full of fear and ignorance, since in that realm you are able to relate only to what is in front of your nose. The higher realms are the human realm, the jealous god realm, and the god realm. In each of those six realms stands the Buddha, which is to say, we ourselves. We can open our hearts to the point that we could enter into the hell realm, the hungry ghost realm, the jealous god realm, the god realm – any place. We could be there with our hearts, completely open and not afraid. That’s the aspiration of the bodhisattva. When we formally take the bodhisattva vow, we are given the tonglen practice to do. That means that we really wish to be fearless enough to help others; we are aware that weourselves have a lot of fear, but we aspire to have our hearts wake up completely.
    Breathing in, breathing out, in the way I have described, is the technique for being able to be completely awake, to be like a buddha in any realm that exists. If you start to think what it would be like in some of those realms, you just thank your lucky stars that