Tonglen

Tonglen is a form of meditation that was mentioned in Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression by James S Gordon. I thought his other book, The Transformation, was better over all, but it didn't mention tonglen and it was a good experience for me.

Here is a general article on the topic:

https://www.lionsroar.com/how-to-practice-tonglen/

This is from January. I finished reading the book early in October, and two months later (in early December), I tried it. The article came out a month after that, so it was not a part of my experience. However, it is good to have another explanation of it, from someone more experienced, because once again I am pretty sure I did it wrong.

This is how I understood it: you focus on someone in pain, and you try and do a trade, taking their pain away, and sending good feeling. Gordon recounted spending time with an ill friend, but noted that you did not have to be physically present. Its purpose is to cultivate unselfishness, but also seemed like it could relate to connection, with the individual and with the greater world. 

There was another meditation I had tried earlier, going back and forth focusing on people who have harmed you and people you have harmed, focusing on forgiveness. I'd had a good experience with that, which I am sure I will write about eventually. Tonglen felt like a similar activity but with a different focus. It felt important to do.

I was also scared to do it. Ready for another mission story?

I don't think this is common knowledge, but my family and I are furnaces. We run hot, which can include functioning well as a source of heat for others. This is why we prefer cooler weather.

Fresno does have hot summers, but there are still seasons. Also this might have happened in Modesto, which would often get a damp fog in winter. I just remember that Sister S was cold. 

I was not. We were sitting next to each other anyway, so I put my arm next to hers so she would feel that heat. That was just arms, though, and I kind of mentally pictured this transfer of heat to her. 

It worked! She felt better, but then I was feeling cold and a little queasy, which was weird. I guess I overdid it, but I hadn't really thought I was doing anything.

Certainly, it is possible to give too much, though it normally wouldn't happen that way. Maybe the issue was not that I gave her my warmth but that I took her coldness, which I had not visualized or intended. Maybe I didn't have enough warmth for both of us.

It was an experience that stuck with me, without me ever having derived a full meaning from it. It worried me in the context of trying this. I was not ruling out a mystical connection where his pain would be lessened and transferred to me, but I was not really expecting it either. However, sometimes you can fall into things. A memory can pull up deep sadness, or anger, or fear, and I was a little worried about that, but it still felt important to do.

I did not feel a mystical connection. I did feel light. 

As my breath went in and out and I tried to visualize, what I felt was tremendous peace. The source of that peace was the assurance that I was enough. I could absorb his pain, or help him with it... whatever it was right to do, I could do. 

The path from undefined knowledge that I was disappointing and lacking to clarity that I was not had a lot of stops along the way, so there had been groundwork laid for it. Even so, this was a profound shift.

I am enough. How was it possible? Yet clearly it was.

And amazingly, I was enough while still unemployed, and broke, and fat, and single, and everything else that had ever seemed like proof that clearly there was something wrong with me.

Still enough.

Which must mean that next week we will get into the unemployment crisis that started in 2008.