A Soft Spot for Suffering? Embracing the Practice of Tonglen

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I climbed the rocky outcropping behind my neighborhood and sat looking at my small town below. Off in the distance, I could see a cluster of copper-colored buildings that I have come to know well: the mental and behavioral health clinic where roughly a hundred souls at a time huddle together in the fight for their lives, battling everything from depression, anxiety, trauma, suicidal ideation, and addiction. 

As I looked across the distance, I could feel their pain—a palpable mix of despair and hope, suffering and salvation, slavery and liberation—emanating back out over the valley. I recognized it because I’ve lived it and still live it. The only thing I knew to do at that moment was to sit in solidarity with my friends, breathing in all their pain, fear, and loneliness and gently breathing out a peace that I prayed would penetrate those walls. 

Buddhists call this prayerful practice of receiving someone else’s agony and sending back love “tonglen.” It creates the capacity to come close to pain, to feel what another is feeling, to embrace, acknowledge, and respond compassionately to heartache. And it completely reverses our well-established habit of doing just the opposite.

Tonglen is compassion in action. The Latin word for compassion, misericordia, directly translates as a heart full of misery, or simply stated, a heart that shares in the suffering of another. Sharing someone else’s pain destroys the cruelty of indifference, and in so doing creates a wound in your heart bursting with love. “This kinship with the suffering of others, this inability to continue to regard it from afar, is the discovery of our soft spot,” writes spiritual director Pema Chodron. 

It was only after learning about tonglen that I realized that perhaps it’s because Jesus knew so much pain that he felt so much compassion and ran toward the suffering of others instead of away from it. The entire summation of Jesus’ life and Gospel message can be found in one simple sentence: “Be compassionate as I am compassionate.” The active mercy of compassion draws misery unto itself, sharing and often transforming pain through suffering love. 

I’ve come to understand that I struggled to offer compassion to myself and others because I, like so many of us in modern America, had inoculated myself against suffering. My heart might have been safe, but it was growing hard and cold. Can you relate? Coming close to pain, sharing the suffering of others is the only way to soften our hearts. In the words of Gyalwa Karmapa, “You take it all in. You let the pain of the world touch your heart and you turn it into compassion.” 

A Guided Tonglen Meditation

To help cultivate your soft spot, practice the art of taking in pain and sending out love with the Tonglen meditation below.

Begin by taking a few deep breaths in and out to center your mind and still your soul. Allow your natural breathing to create a sacred space for your heart to open in love. Envision your heart expanding, revealing the soft spot within you. As you sit in a state of openness and acceptance, bring to mind a friend, family member, or colleague who is suffering. Maybe you envision the innocent women and children victimized by the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the lives torn apart by the earthquake in Haiti. Holding them close, breathe in all their pain, fear, trauma, and abuse. 

As you repeat this process, notice how you are becoming intimate with their pain by allowing it to come into yourself, flowing all the way down through your body. Holding that pain, transform their misery with mercy by sitting in union with them. Feel their fear. Gently and compassionately breathe out grace, peace, love, and blessing. 

Continue breathing in their misery and breathing out mercy. Slowly recognize your heart expanding and your soft spot opening. Continue breathing in and out for as long as you wish, using this simple practice to cultivate compassion in your daily life. 

If you feel stuck, do the practice instead for your own pain and for all those who feel the same kind of suffering. For instance, if you are feeling anxious, breathe that in for yourself and all the others in the same boat and send out peace and relief in any form you wish.

What We’re Reading, Listening To, Watching

Melanie

• Reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

• Watching: Fantastic Fungi (Netflix)

Gary Alan

• Reading: The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

• Watching: Penelope Keith’s Hidden Villages (Prime)