At the core of the Ripple Revolution model is the Heart Base. The essence of the Heart Base is love and compassion, both for yourself and for the rest of the world.
It would be nice if there were a switch you could flip and automatically turn on the love & compassion light but, alas, there’s not. You can resolve to come from a place of greater love and compassion, but that’s only going to take you so far.
So how do you develop it? There are many tools and techniques to help you along the way, and I’ll be spotlighting them now and then in the coming months. Today I want to talk about one that I resisted for years, but that I ultimately found to be incredibly powerful: Tonglen meditation.
What exactly is it? This excellent article on a teacher’s experience teaching Tonglen (a PDF file) describes it this way:
“In Tonglen, you are asked to acknowledge that suffering is real, yes. But, you are breathing the suffering of yourself and others into an Infinite Love which transmutes the suffering into healing. With your willingness, this Love offers itself through you.”
Put another way, breathe in suffering, let it transform, breathe out love.
When I first read about it I thought, “No way! There’s no way I’m going to take in the pain in the world! I’ve got enough of my own, thank you very much. This would eat me alive!”
Finally one day I had a realization. Tonglen wasn’t about taking in suffering and storing it along with my own. It was about becoming a pain transformer. I didn’t have to worry about taking on more pain, because the pain didn’t stay in that form.
The image that comes to mind for this meditation is the heart as a blast furnace, the ultra-hot furnace used for transforming raw materials into iron. The raw materials go in and through the intensity of the heat, they’re transformed into something else. Maybe a more aesthetically pleasing way to think about it would be a glass-blowing furnace.
In the case of Tonglen, the raw materials of pain and suffering are taken into the space of the heart and through the intensity of Love, they’re transformed into love, light, and healing. And none of it is my doing.
One of the characters that hangs out in my brain is a spiritual skeptic who rolls his eyes any time I start talking about things like this. So if you have a similar reaction to this, I totally get it.
I would also encourage you to try it. Experiment with it. See where it takes you.
In my own experience, it has a consistently heart-opening effect. I have no idea if it really transforms suffering out there (my inclination is to believe that in some manner it does), but I can tell you that it has an impact on how I feel in my own life.
The article I linked to above gives an excellent overview. If Tonglen piques your interest, I recommend you read it.
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