Taking and Sending on the Front Line

Last month I received an email from a social worker in Germany. I found it quite moving and she subsequently gave me permission to quote her email. 

Here, slightly edited, is what she wrote:

I had had many really bad experiences with Tonglen (taking and sending). At the best it sent me into a deep depression and it would take me months to climb out. If I tried it when I was not in a good state of mind, I became suicidal. 

Last week I was listening to a podcast from you about the 37 practices of a bodhisattva and you started to explain taking and sending. First I thought about skipping this part but finally decided that just listening to the explanation won’t harm me and that then I could still decide what to do with it. And listening to you finally there was someone who addressed my problem with Tonglen practice, a problem with which I have been struggling for about 15 years now. The teacher here had explained that I have to breathe in the bad stuff, let the heart transform it, and then breathe out the good stuff coming out of the transformation. My heart just would not transform the bad stuff I had breathed in into something positive, no matter how hard I tried. I just couldn’t do it. (This touched stuff inside me which directly sent me down the road of depression, meaning of life, why live at all...) To hear from you that this is not what the practice is about was such a relief that I gave it one more try. And it was amazing. Breathing in all the bad stuff other people experience and breathing out all the good in my life I have finally something I could do. What a relief! I couldn’t believe it. I kept doing the practice this way, and it was doable. 

The next day at work (I am a social worker in a big hospital in Munich taking care of palliative patients and severely burnt patients) I was visiting a young cancer patient and her daughter. The patient herself and her daughter have both worked as cancer researchers in alternative cancer treatment, convinced in their belief that the treatments they developed could cure people. But there she was now, in a normal hospital, dying, completely in panic. In addition to the grief and pain in the face of approaching death, their whole belief system about their life’s work was also breaking down. Just physically being in a room with them was excruciating. I felt myself retreating and trying to find something to do to make it more bearable at the same time. Instead I stopped myself from reacting and did taking and sending for two or three breaths. The effect it had inside me was amazing. Instead of trying to get away from the pain, I could move toward it. My ability to just be there (there was not anything more to be done at this point) changed the atmosphere in the room completely. When I visited them the next day, the daughter followed me out of the room and thanked me. 

After that I tried both ways of doing the practice, the way you describe it and the way my German teacher taught, trying to do the transformation in the heart. I wanted to get some understanding of what makes such a difference. As far as I can see at the moment, the transformation thing gets me out of direct experience and into a subject-object thing. I have to do something with the object to stop the suffering of the world. It feels like a battle lost before it had even started.

Now when I do the practice, I first just sit and let the experience of everything being mind arise, and then move into taking and sending. There is all the negative stuff but encountering it from there it is just experience happening and the good stuff is like an infinite space of joy which is just available, never getting less no matter how much I give away, not even if I try to give it all away.

This, of course, was a wonderful email to receive, and there are several points in her account that I’d like to touch on.

First, taking and sending (Tonglen) is an exchange, not a transformation in which you change the pain of the human condition into something good. As this person noted, “the transformation thing gets me out of direct experience and into a subject-object thing. I have to do something with the object to stop the suffering of the world. It feels like a battle lost before it had even started.”

This misunderstanding, which is now quite widespread, comes from an unwillingness to face the facts of the human condition, namely, that we struggle with life. We struggle with life because things are always changing. When our lives are going well, we struggle to keep them going well. When our lives are difficult, we struggle with the difficulties. We can, through practice, or through life, learn not to struggle with what arises in our lives. Taking and sending, when done as an exchange, not a transformation, leads us and trains us to be in what arises in our experience, good or bad. Or, as a friend of mine puts it, it undermines our tendency not to feel.

The second point is “let the experience of everything being mind arise.” How do you do that? Here is one method you can try. The idea for it came from a tweet by Brad Warner, a Zen teacher in LA. 

Ordinarily, we think of ourselves as being in the world. But in a dream, it’s the other way round. W e feel that the world of the dream is in us in some way. (That being said, other cultures see the dream state in different ways.) Take a moment now and open to everything you experience, feeling that you are in the world. Everything, your room, buildings, cars, roads, trees, mountains, wind, sounds, etc., is, in some sense, out there. Rest in that for a few minutes. Now, imagine that you are dreaming and that you know that you are dreaming (a lucid dream). Again, open to everything, your room, buildings, cars, roads, trees, mountains, wind, sounds, etc. Feel how everything is, in some sense, in you, without trying to define what “you” are. Rest in that for a few minutes. Now bring both views together and hold them at the same time. You may experience a shift, a few moments, or longer, in which there is no thought, just knowing and experience together. Rest there.

The third point is about the nature of compassion we cultivate in Buddhist practice. In our daily lives, if a person who is clearly in pain asks for help, we usually try to do something. We see a person who, like us, is struggling in the world, and we do what we can. Now, what do you do if you are dreaming, and you know that you are dreaming, and a person in your dream who is clearly in pain asks for help? Some people say they would try to help. Other people say that there would be no point, because the person is not real. He or she is only a figment of the dream. 

When we see the person as like us, a person in the world, experience arises in one conceptual frame. When we see the person as a figment of our dream, we bring another conceptual frame to our experience. Use the exercise in the second point above to elicit a shift in awareness and experience. In that way of knowing, the sense of self is not present in the usual way. Nor is the sense of other. The compassion that arises has a different quality because it is not based in a sense of I and other. Do taking and sending from there. Then the compassion you cultivate in tonglen practice is not based in a conceptual frame. 

The next point is about effort. Even though this woman had been given incorrect instruction in taking and sending, she had worked at it for a long time. Was all that time and effort a waste ? Perhaps not. When she happened across the correct instruction, she could move into it quickly and effectively, possibly because of the effort she had already made.

Finally, and this is probably the most difficult point, in today’s world, you probably need to check on the instructions you are receiving. From basic meditation to taking and sending to meditation on emptiness to vajrayana practice, I have come across mistaken, misleading, and incompetent instruction over and over again. Find the best teachers you can (and the best is often not the most famous, the most well-known, the most articulate, or the most successful). Talk with other students and see how they are. Do your research here. It may save you years of problems. It may save your life.

That being said, practice rarely proceeds linearly. We may spend years at practice, struggling with feelings of futility, incompetence, or inability. Then, seemingly out of the blue, something happens. It may be an internal shift. Or it may be something we hear or see for the first time. Suddenly a way becomes clear. That’s how it is.