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

you’re not in them, but if you were, you could still be there with an open heart. The essence of the practice is willingness to share pleasure and delight and the joy of life on the out-breath and willingness to feel your pain and that of others fully on the in-breath. That’s the essence of it, and if you were never to receive any other instruction, that would be enough.
    Now for the instruction. The first step is called ‘flashing absolute bodhicitta,’ which basically means just opening up. The second step is working with the abstract quality of pain by visualizing it as black, heavy, and hot, and breathing that in, and working with the abstract quality of pleasure by visualizing it as white, light, and cool, and breathing that out. My understanding of this stage is that before you get into the real meaty, difficult stuff, you work with the abstract principles of pain and pleasure, synchronizing them with the in-breath and the out-breath. The first stage is just open space. Then you start working with what’s called the relative practice – the humanness, our everyday life situation – breathing pain in, pleasure out, black in, white out. Then you get to thethird stage, which is actually the heart of the practice. Here you visualize a specific life situation and connect with the pain of it. You breathe that in, feeling it completely. It’s the opposite of avoidance. You are completely willing to acknowledge and feel pain – your own pain, the pain of a dear friend, or the pain of a total stranger – and on the out-breath, you let the sense of ventilating and opening, the sense of spaciousness, go out.
    In other words, suppose there’s someone in your life that you can’t stand, the very thought of whom brings up all kinds of negative feelings. You decide to do tonglen to work with feeling more open and brave and gentle in that particular situation. So you think of that person and up come those awful feelings, and when you’re breathing in, you connect with them – their quality and texture and just how they grab your heart. It’s not that you try to figure them out; you just feel the pain. Then on the out-breath you relax, let go, open up, ventilate the whole thing. But you don’t luxuriate in that for very long because when you breathe in again, it’s back to the painful feeling. You don’t get completely trapped, drowned in that , because next you breathe out – you open and relax and share some sense of space again. Maybe you want to grasp on to the joy, but then you breathe in again. Maybe you want to dwell in the pain, but then you breathe out again. It’s like you’re learning how to touch and go – you touch again and then you let go again. You don’t prefer the pain tothe pleasure or the pleasure to the pain; you go back and forth continually.
    After you’ve worked with the specific object for a while and you are genuinely connecting with the pain and your ability to open and let go, then you take the practice a step further – you do it for all sentient beings. This is a key point about tonglen: your own experience of pleasure and pain becomes the way that you recognize your kinship with all sentient beings, the way you can share in the joy and the sorrow of everyone who’s ever lived, everyone who’s living now, and everyone who will ever live. You are acknowledging that the discomfort that you feel when you think of that particular person is something that all human beings feel, and the joy that you feel, the sense of being able to open up and let go, is also people’s birthright. You’re breathing in that same pain, but now you think to yourself, ‘Let me feel it so that no one else on the whole earth has to feel it.’ In other words, it becomes useful. ‘I’m miserable, I’m depressed. Okay. Let me feel it fully so that nobody else has to feel it, so that others could be free of it.’ It starts to awaken your heart because you have this aspiration to say, ‘This pain can be