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754th Week: Psychological Support in Troubled Times
For mental health practitioners and others in the healing arts, it’s helpful to have a way to sit with people’s suffering and distress without getting caught up in it ourselves. In reality, for everyone, regardless of the focus of your work, it’s helpful to have a way to cope with the suffering and distress in the world so that you don’t become swept away by it.
For me, doing therapy with an open heart is essential and yet having my heart open means that I can’t ignore, deny, or distance myself from the suffering of others. Instead, I use the Buddhist practice of Tonglen to metabolize and manage the emotional experiences—my own and those of others—that touch my heart or threaten to overwhelm it. What I want to share is my version of this practice. In Sanskrit, Tonglen means taking and sending, and it’s a breathing practice that focuses on neutralizing activating emotions in oneself and in others in the world who feel the same way.
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June 2018 Audio Meditation
Here’s this month’s audio meditation on YouTube with visual accompaniment:
756th Week: A Subtle Activism Request
This week, I have a request to make of those who read these practices and are willing to engage in a subtle activism activity on behalf of our collective human family. I’d like to ask everyone to take five minutes each day—it doesn’t matter when—to do the practice of Tonglen. The specific focus of the Tonglen practice in this subtle activism activity is on breathing in our collective fear and hatred and breathing out compassion, peace, love, ease, or whatever quality you would like to offer to our human family. If this practice resonates with you, I would ask you to consider making it a daily practice on a regular basis, not just for this week.
I’ve written about Tonglen many times and there are links to the practice on my website under Written Meditations – https://www.nancynapier.com/category/meditations/. For this week’s activity, I’d like to write a brief version of a Tonglen-like practice for this subtle activism activity. Because many people may not have done Tonglen before, and may not be thrilled with the idea of breathing fear and hatred into their heart, I’ve written up a “derivation” of Tonglen drawn from my early spiritual upbringing.
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2023 September Meditation
Returning to what we explored earlier this year, notice any change in your experience over this time of recognizing the living presence of relationships, collaborative communities, that are everywhere in your life and that your radiating presence touches everyone and everything you encounter along the way.
Notice again your physical relationship with the environment around you: breathing in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide, exchanging resources with trees who emit oxygen and take in carbon dioxide; becoming aware of all the organisms and beings whose presence and activities contribute to what makes the world work for you, i.e., fungi, micro-organisms you don’t see and may not even recognize, insects, amphibians, reptiles, water beings, and many other participants in the collective, interrelated system that creates your local environment and ecology; offering gratitude and blessings to everything in the environment with which you have a reciprocal relationship. Notice your experience in your heart space as you do this.
Please remember never to listen to guided audio meditations while driving or using dangerous machinery.
Here’s the YouTube version if you’d like to see images of nature as you listen: