Friends of the Heart

  • A series of talks on the compassionate and integrative practice of Tonglen offered in the fall-winter of 2020-21

    Tonglen is a meditation practice that is gifted us from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It broadens and deepens the heart's capacity for compassion and love. But more than a meditation practice, it is a learned way of being.

    In this series of eleven talks, we explore tonglen as a complete integrative and therapeutic practice for recognizing and enabling the heart's fullest capacity not only to hold others in compassion, but also to bless and to heal all our experience. And we will see how tonglen teaches us to navigate the structures of reactivity, judgment, overwhelm, and fixation, which otherwise compromise our capacity to rest in empathetic and healing relationship to ourselves, to others, and to reality.

1. Introduction: Creating a Foundation for Tonglen Practice

This talk introduces us to the spirit of tonglen, but focuses on exercises that help us to gather our attention and to create a strong whole body foundation for grounding, centering, and opening.

2. Foundations, continued

This second talk continues and reinforces the work of the first, and introduces imagery that helps us to see the heart not as a potentially burdened organ of reactive emotion, but as an empty and open window and channel for the healing work of "the greater, or universal, heart."

3. Tonglen with the Self

We begin our formal practice by first learning to use the tonglen technique to address our own emotional healing, working with current emotions or challenges that may be uppermost for ourselves in this moment.

4. Tonglen with "The Inner Child"

We know learn to turn to our older and deeper issues, issues of our primal innocence and our primal vulnerability and hurt. We learn ways of being in a healing tonglen relationship to our "inner child."

5. Tonglen, Guilt, and Relationships

We may also carry a burden of guilt and unresolved energy from hurt we believe we have caused others in either the recent or distant past. Here we engage a several part process, using tonglen principles to evolve through 'the holding pattern' of guilt into taking conscious responsibility, to grief, to forgiveness and compassion, and to reconciliation.

6. Shame, Guilt, and Healing Duality

Here, in the first of several lively dialogues with participants, we further explore the issues of guilt and shame, and the most basic issues that separate us from ourselves and from life.

7. The Heartfield

Before progressing to tonglen practice with others, we explore a bit more about the nature of the heart and our energetic 'heart-fields." Here we call on both modern and ancient science to evoke a further attunement to the heart that can support our practice.

8. Tonglen Troubleshooting

Once again we set some time aside to address important issues that were coming up for participants, and that may be coming up for you.

9. Tonglen with Others

We now take a close look at how to practice tonglen on behalf of others – whether it is with our loved ones, with less personal relationships, or even with those with whom we are in conflict. And we will see why attention paid to integrating our own issues will support our readiness to exercise compassion on behalf of others.

10. Tonglen with the World

We are a global community. And the sufferings of the world and its many peoples, near and far, also loom large for us, and burden our hearts. How can we learn to maintain an open, active and healing relationship to the individual sufferings of others, and to the heartfield of the planet?

11. Existential Tonglen: Reknitting our Lives

Finally, we look at how to use our tonglen to address, reconcile, and heal the most primal and challenging existential issues of our duality: our separateness and our mortality, our life and our death, our past and our future, our fears and our failures; and the vast intricate web of all our relations.