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spiritual_emergency · Jun 03, 2009, 01:30 PM

A few more meandering thoughts...

I don't believe the intent of this topic was to talk anyone into engaging in DBT but I did think it was admirable of you to raise the issue Pomegranate because it brings up unpleasant feelings for you. It's been my experience that it's beneficial to hang out with unpleasantness for awhile to see what it's all about for us.

You seemed to be expressing your own unpleasantness quite succinctly when you said: What if my circumstances are intolerable? How do you tolerate the intolerable? Why should I even be expected to?

These seem to be common feelings for people who have been through experiences we identify as traumatic. There is a keening cry which resounds in a voice that says, very loudly: NOT FAIR!

Any human being might face circumstances they find to be intolerable or unjust. Sometimes the surprising thing is, we make it through and discover that what we thought was intolerable was tolerable after all, even as it was also brutal, painful and highly unpleasant.

A practice which I found helpful when I got stuck in such places of my own is tonglen. I've shared this around before but it's mostly been in the schizophrenia topic -- I don't know if you read there so you might not be familiar with it. Note that I'm not sharing it with a sense of "shouldness". There are no "shoulds" when it comes to what's going to work best for us as individuals. I found the practice helpful because it took me out of my sense of aloneness. I also found that if I was stuck in a painful place, it became more bearable if I could find some purpose for that pain. With those modest disclaimers in place, I share it with you in the same spirit. If you don't find it helpful, I suggest you simply leave it lying there. If you do find it helpful, pick it up, carry it and walk with it for awhile...

Quote:

During this session I'm going to teach tonglen practice. And I'd like to talk first about different styles of tonglen.

The very simplest style... which I think would be helpful for every single one of us, and something well worth cultivating in one's life, is taking a tonglen attitude towards pleasure and pain whenever it arises in your life.

I've gotten into the habit of doing this, and I don't always remember to do it. But more and more, it becomes spontaneous and natural. When things are painful -- in any form -- when things are difficult, usually that in itself will remind me, just the quality of difficulty, the quality of struggle, or pain, or dissatisfaction, or unpleasantness. That itself will remind me to just have the simple thought: "Other people feel this."

Now that sounds so simplistic, maybe not all that important. But, believe me, it makes a big difference because what happens with pain is the sense of isolation get so strong, and the sense of our particular personal burden, and the loneliness of that, and the desperation of that. So this simple thought, which sometimes is quite challenging to people -- you say it but you don't quite believe it -- you think ... you're the only one. And I've had people, many times, say to me, "This pain that I feel, I think no one else in the world feels this." And then I can say to them with tremendous confidence: "Wrong."

But what is not wrong is that we do have that feeling often, that I am the only one that has this particular pain. So maybe it will be quite a challenge to you to say this and it might not seem genuine. But even that is beginning to shake up your complacency about pain being just your individual burden. It somehow shakes it up just to even contemplate that other people feel this.

And in many cases my own experience is just that, that which could become so introverted, a downward spiral of depression and isolation -- just the thought that other people feel this opens it up. It's what Trungpa Rinpoche used to call, "Thinking Bigger".

And I think I've said this before, I'll say it again, that compassion or the sense of shared humanity, of our kinship with each other, this is what heals. This is what heals the desperation we can feel, the darkness we can feel and the chain reaction of aggression, or chain reaction of misery that gets triggered off by just sometimes a slight shift in the energy and we feel uneasy, or agitated, or unhappy in some way, and then that spirals into a chain reaction of ... pain. One thing leading to another, a sort of struggle to try and get away from that uneasy, uncomfortable feeling.

So this is a basic tonglen logic: When you feel the discomfort, just have the thought: "Other people feel this." And then if you want to take it a rather dramatic step further, you can say, "May we all be free of this." But it's enough just to acknowledge that other people feel this. And then the most dramatic and probably the most difficult, taking it even a step further would be to say: "Since I'm feeling this anyway, may I be feeling it so all others could be free of it."

So it's kind of three levels of courage. The least courage is just to say, "Other people feel this," and that is enough. But if -- in that particular moment of time -- it feels genuine, say, "May this become a path for awakening the heart for all of us." And then the one that sometimes you might feel really genuinely able to say just because of how you're feeling in that moment of time, to take it the deepest level of courage, is to say, "Since I'm feeling this anyway, may I feel it so that others could be free of it."

This is the tonglen attitude towards pain. It doesn't involve the breathing in and breathing out, but it's the spirit of tonglen.

Source: The Spirit of Tonglen

See also: The Practice of Tonglen

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