Individual Practice (Jake) 1/15/2008
January 16, 2008
With all the talk of Tonglen I’ve been doing as of late I thought it only right to choose it for my individual practice today. I don’t have much academic knowledge of Tonglen so I used the greatness of the internet to inform me of how I might proceed. I found a short article (http://www.naljorprisondharmaservice.org/pdf/Tonglen.htm) on the Naljor Prison Dharma Service website that was extremely helpful in giving me a very direct and immediate path to follow. (I don’t want to imply I am knowlegable about Naljor Prison Dharma, I found the link through wikipedia, but I am intrigued by them… I’ll have to read a bit about them)
Following those guild lines I tried to use the visualization the suggested. Considering it was my first time practicing Tonglen I thought it would be wise to do something on the easier side of things, so I picked a single individual I care a lot for to focus on. I found it distracting to focus on a clear physical image of the person, and instead focused more conceptually on them. I did attempt to use their specific imagery of black smoke and the like, but found that it was not a detail I could maintain, and felt it better to maintain concentration on the idea rather than spend my energy correcting my lack of correct imagery. Through some of our group discussions, it has been expressed by other members that a powerful tool during meditation is the ability to watch oneself during the practice rather than use a lot of force trying to practice. For some reason that came to mind several times during my meditation, and I chose to follow that. While focusing on the suffering, pain and negative aspects the original person I had intended (and using that force to cleanse what I would think of as ego related personality traits) I found myself having compassion for the person, not despite these negative traits, but with those included. I even had a feeling of love and acceptance for these traits and their suffering (it was an odd feeling to have). These thoughts evolved quickly, and I found myself concentrating on people that I had less compassion and understand for; eventually concentrating on larger groups of people and in a more global sense. I even had a good portion of time when I found myself feeling compassion, love and acceptance for negative traits I saw in myself (which wasn’t really suggested in what I’ve read so far). I had not really intended for all of this to take place when I started the practice, and I don’t mean to imply in any way that I am some fantastically compassionate person; instead, I found that the practice seemed to build on itself naturally. Eventually the practice moved to a more relaxed state of consciousness, and I found myself spending my time just laying there letting my body breathe and observing that.
I had a wide range of feelings throughout the practice. It was difficult to let myself feel, or even conceptualize, the pain and suffering of someone else. I am a bit of a new-age weirdo, so I have a substantial amount of fear that if I accept negative energies into my body they could do damage. I did not feel that to be the case. I initially did experience a feeling of sadness, but having a place to direct these negative “energies” was extremely beneficial to me. After a time I no longer even felt that these energies or aspects of people (or the universe) we negative at all, they simply were and they were all something worthy of my compassion and love. Other feeling I had were bliss and joy. Physically speaking I had some brief moments of increased comfort and towards the end had short burst of out of body feelings, that corresponded to the idea of observing rather than participating in the practice.
If you had a chance to read the notes I wrote on our last group meeting I had mentioned that tonglen might be viewed as a more feminine practice. Although this conjecture was my own and not Ken Wilbur’s, I don’t think it was a very big leap and it was based more on concepts he presented than my own feelings. After practing this though i would say the whole masculine feminine buisness is either toltal bubkis, or Tonglen is not a good example of such.
Overall I found this practice to be quite good for me. Lately I have been struggling with getting anything out of any of my meditation, I often find I spend the entire time trying to quite my mind, never succeeding. Directly after doing Tonglen I find myself having a desire to be more humble and careful about how I speak to others, a noble side effect. I had chosen this practice because it had more structure than anything else I had been trying, and I was feeling that structure was my missing link. I intend to continue with this practice for a good while, and may do a little more research and reading on the subject.
As always, good luck in all your endeavors in meditation,
Jake
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January 17, 2008 at 2:34 am
Wilber is how he spells it. He’s in a very interesting role for his area. But yes, sort of rigidly unintegrated with much else for how integrative his approach is. I have seen how he can categorize everything into quadrants, or into prerational or transrational, but it does seem quite rigid and repetitive — I may have read the wrong things but all I found were these same ideas over and over. His memoirs were better but still found him circling these classifications of people into fantasy-chasers and the much better rational, transcendent thinkers.
Masculine and feminine are types which sort of have to be freed from the gender. Which may be more than Wilber permits but we can always understand the split and consider them just poles to balance. I mean there’s no reason why a certain practice, once “feminine” is defined, couldn’t be classified as that. I think compassion vs. aggression is more like a social extension of the more fundamental poles — emptiness/fullness, reception/penetration. But I think you could categorize compassion as stemming from the feminine — emanations from a goddess. If the universe is a sex act, you can pick the parts that are female and maybe you can feel compassion as one of those. It’s just a mental division for temporary use, balanced with its counterpart. I wouldn’t imagine that compassion would immediately feel like a feminine thing. It should feel like an others-as-self thing. You’d really have to be quite separate from it to bother classifying it as feminine, except later for, again, practical thought purposes. I personally do see “grace” as a feminine aspect as I feel it’s my best counterpart to the active speaker-thinker-discerner father-god I grew up recognizing. Grace is capricious and automatic and always in the moment — mother nature basically. Father-god with his pants off?
January 17, 2008 at 5:06 am
Bagworm,
After reading your comment I can see how, if one takes out the emotional and social connotation out of the terms, masculine and feminine are really tools used to describe polarity in something (maybe using a less western term like yin and yang could remove some of those ties?). I really appreciate you pointing out that one would not immediately describe an experience such as strong compassion or grace as feminine feeling. The more I think on it, the more that makes sense. I am trying to come up with some kind of analogy that would make others have that same duh moment I had after I read that. Maybe like after praying for someone saying “Well that felt very religious to me” It just doesn’t jive.