Return to Tonglen

Note: Part IV, the Tonglen Transmission by Edward Podvoll, includes quotations from “Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness,” by Chogyam Trungpa, in C. R. Gimian (Ed.), The Collected Work of Chogyam Trungpa, Volume II (pp. 137–143) © 2003. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boulder, CO, www.shambhala.com and with the kind permission of Lady Diana Mukpo.

I. Opening the Conference: Introducing Edward Podvoll, now known as Lama Mingyur | Jeffrey Fortuna

II. Keynote Address: Re-Entry from Long Retreat | Edward Podvoll

III. Practice | Jeffrey Fortuna

IV. Tonglen Transmission | Edward Podvoll

I. Opening the Conference:

Introducing Edward Podvoll, now known as Lama Mingyur

Jeffrey Fortuna

April 4, 2003

This is quite a joy and an honor to introduce an old friend, whom I at one time didn’t think I would see again. Mingyur has been in retreat for the last twelve years, working on things. And has learned new things. I’ve always known Mingyur to be an avid learner and he cares a great deal about other people—which I think extends things.

Mingyur is the primary founder of the Windhorse Project, which happened in the late summer of 1981. The Windhorse Project itself has gone through many phases, akin to cycles of birth and death. And our relationship with Mingyur has gone through similar cycles of birth and death. Now we find ourselves in a cycle of rebirth, a renaissance.

Mingyur has been here in the States since mid-December, continuing to work on things. This is one of the first times since then that a larger group has gathered together to create a further environment of caring for people—which is really the only reason we’re here.

Mingyur, we are all very curious what you will have to say. I’d like to introduce: Mingyur. He has a few things to share with us.

Keynote Address: Re-Entry from Long Retreat

Edward Podvoll

The issue to talk about is what’s known as windhorse. And it’s also this thing: this thing that we work with and we live with and we can recognize and cultivate and arouse in ourselves . . . or not. We call this thing windhorse because windhorse is primitive energy in ourselves, in every being, which can be roused. And that arousing is huge, healing energy. So that’s the basis, we could say, of the internal work that happens in what is now known as the Windhorse Project, or Windhorse healing in general. Coming back to Boulder, it is very clear that this is what I came back to and what I came back for.

I just wanted to tell you a little story about that—my return to Boulder.

Entering Windhorse Care: from Director to Patient

There was a time when I left the retreat that I didn’t know where I would go. I had a map of the United States in front of me and I was looking at it, thinking, Oh, San Francisco isn’t a bad place, Vermont is an old home for me, and so on. And then somebody wrote to me and said, “Stop looking at maps. It’s just obvious where you should go. It’s crazy for you to start fresh in a new place when all your friendships and all your meaningful connections are concentrated right here.” And that finished the whole thing for me. It was obvious that I would come back to Boulder.

And when I had made that decision, and notified the Windhorse directors here, everything began to move and Windhorse was in action. And surgeons were found and interviewed, and medical doctors were found, the hospital was selected, the oncologist who I would work with was recognized. Before I had even left the plane from Paris, the whole medical situation was organized. I arrived on December 17th, and met my doctors on December 18th. On the 20th, I had surgery. I had nothing to do with it. It was an example of what I was walking into: Windhorse care and organization. And it seemed like the organization followed directly from the caring; caring was the energy to put it together. And a house was arranged for me to stay at. It was immediately a Windhorse household and had a Windhorse housemate going on—already, before I got there. A team leader volunteered immediately to be both housemate, for the first ten days, and team leader at the same time. It was whirlwind activity, so to speak, but there was no speed involved at all, and everything was done easily. It was quite amazing. What kind of work people have to do ordinarily to arrange such a situation by themselves. I am grateful for that.

Then came a time, after the hospital and the surgery, where I had to settle in with a housemate, and I didn’t know quite what to do, how to be. And that haunted me, followed me: how to be now in a different country, so to speak. In a different situation. Having gone from being a director at Windhorse to being a patient in Windhorse. And I’m still a patient at Windhorse, so I want to speak from that point of view.

What Is My Practice?

On New Year’s Day, I decided to look at Boulder and I went for a long walk. I walked from around 30th and Pearl to 9th and Pearl. And it seemed, at the moment I was going through it, like some kind of Odyssey. My question was, What am I doing here? What will I do with this new life? How do I live here? How do I survive here?

It wasn’t easy to walk, as I was still in a little bit of pain from the surgery and easily out of breath. I looked in every store window.

My big question was: What is my practice?

For the last twelve years, I have lived in a practice center. So the idea of practice is the center of my life. Practices and transmissions have been poured into me—many, many, many practices, over a period of twelve years. Many, many disciplines. Many, many transmissions and commentaries and lungs and wangs and teachings and initiations of the entire Kagyu lineage.

Even before I left the retreat center in France, I met with several high-level teachers known as Khenpos in the Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. They provided me very pointed and useful advice on what I should practice after retreat—mostly illusory or empty body, which means to generally rest mind in that space—free and clear. And that worked for a while.

But I’m walking the streets of Boulder, and I don’t know what practice to do. I somehow knew that was not enough, it was not sufficient, for me. I needed some deeper level. And it was hard to imagine a deeper level than the teachings I had already received. But the deeper level came to me in something like the phrase living at your roots.

I still can’t explain it. The image I have in mind is the roots being how a mushroom is formed from the mycelium under the earth and the fertile soil. They come together and the roots cross over and they interlock and, at a certain point of concentration, they give rise to a manifestation: the mushroom itself. And it’s at that level, the level of the mycelium, that I needed to go to.

In some sense, it is very simple. I have basic mind practice, so I know what to do. But somehow, everything was irrelevant. I couldn’t find a practice. Then, as I was walking west down Pearl Street, I saw the gold roof of the Shambhala Meditation Center. I’d almost completely forgotten about it. I walked over there. And of course, being New Year’s Day, it was closed. So I looked through the window and I saw a poster, an advertisement, for Level III of Shambhala training. There was a quote on it from a teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, though I still didn’t even know the source of it, and it said . . . I have to read this, so to make no mistake:

What the warrior renounces is anything in his experience that is a barrier between himself and others.[1]

Instantly, I knew that was the roots for me, that was the practice—whatever it is.

I felt completely overwhelmed with relief, with joy, that I had discovered something—whatever it is. I had only to figure out what this meant and to live it. There was no question about this; it was as if what I was looking for had somehow struck this deep chord, a cello, in my being. And so I went back to my new home.

That evening I told my team leader about it and she said, “We have to go back there.”

I was putting it off, but the next day she insisted that we go back to find the quotation. I couldn’t remember it, even. I couldn’t quote it at the time; I could only tell her that I’d seen what I needed to see.

So, the next day we went back and we got the receptionist at the desk to make a photocopy of this quotation:

“What the warrior renounces is anything in his experience that is a barrier between himself and others.”

So, what does this mean? In the course of the next three months, I gradually put together some understanding of it, and I will say a few words about that now.

The Practice: Rousing Windhorse Energy

Warrior is the Shambhala term for someone who has the courage to practice meditation and to develop a fearless quality of relating to their own mind.

Renounces means, abandons, gives up, lets go, and so on. But, in a sense, renounces is to totally give into another way of being by totally giving up an older way of being. Renounces being a child. Renounces being afraid of everything that one was afraid of before. It’s not that one can do it on the spot, but a strong determination, wish, to do it has to pervade one’s life. Renounces anything that is going to the extreme and anything that is an obstacle to go further into oneself and into accepting another, other beings, into oneself.

And anything is much more than you thought it would be. Anything in one’s experience is whatever happens in one’s body, speech, and mind—at every level, at any time, and all the time; this is a twenty-four-hour practice.

Barrier is the important point, because barrier senses the path quality of what this practice would have to be. Barrier is privacy. Barrier is personal security. Barrier is a safe place to rest. Barrier is my time off. Barrier is my practice. My space. My peace. My quiet. My calm abiding. My precious shamatha. My room. My house. My home. My body. All of that is a barrier to others. And from the point of view of having worked with myself a bit and with other people a bit, there is also another dimension to this. The dimension is: what lies behind this my—my this, my that, my safety. Behind my, one experiences a massive intrusion into mind’s interior, into its precious space, its precious privacy. There is a kind of penetration of a level of personal ignorance which exists as a protective coat. This massive intrusion penetrates that coat. It occurred to me on Pearl Street: this is the rape of my ignorance by wisdom.

And another aspect of it is that there’s a central autistic mindset—I’m using a technical word now for the extreme example of an attitude of self-protection, self-sufficiency, pride, and arrogance—so that they cannot be penetrated. Some very miserable children give us this diagnostic and clinical phenomena. But it exists everywhere. It exists in every being. This place of safety: untouched, untouchable. These are the mycelium roots that we protect. So, in terms of this practice of what the warrior renounces, what the barriers are has to do with this sense of no hiding place and no escape from the reality and intimate confrontation with other people. Not any place to back out to; cutting off any evasion possibilities.

This is what I felt I was going to take on. And certainly, in some ways, it’s impossible. But I made up my mind to go in this direction, to go toward this, and to experience what might be possible for me. And since I was living a Windhorse life, in a Windhorse culture, among Windhorse people who were practicing Windhorse, I realized that was the formal practice I had to do. Both living in the culture and experiencing how to rouse Windhorse. This is the only answer.

There are many ways to rouse this energy of Windhorse. In fact, it seems like the more one knows about it, the more limitless the possibilities are. But certainly, in the traditional teachings of Buddhism and Shambhala and many other spiritual disciplines, there are many formal practices that allow that to happen—to work with this energy in one’s body and in one’s inner body. They are all taught in Shambhala training, for the most part. There are other more traditional ways to do that, and one major one has always been in the Vajrayana tradition of devotion. And gratefulness toward their teachings and the one who made those teachings available to oneself. And that kind of respect and love develops gradually, over long periods of time. Today happens to be parinirvana, the day of the death and realization of my teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, so I must mention this possibility of how this energy can be aroused: by merely touching, just barely touching, that kind of gratefulness and love. I know it can also happen in many other situations of love, but they are, as we all must know by now, more conflicted and even harmful.

There are other ideas of rousing Windhorse, other than the formal practices, that sometimes work with the breath, sometimes work with action—movements of different kinds—sometimes work with practice calligraphies of different kinds, and so on. The other major aspect of rousing Windhorse, or lungta, is that rousing the basic wind that runs through the center of one’s body and being, and to strengthen that, is inseparable from a sense of openness and joy. The other way to rouse Windhorse is to commit oneself on the spot—give oneself, lend one’s body, lend one’s mind and breath—to the care of others. Instead of oneself. This is traditional; this is built into some formal practices and this is built into the long-life practice that is transmitted in both the Kagyu and Ningma traditions. That the very act of caring for others beyond oneself is a lungta practice. The very commitment to do that and to turn one’s being in that direction, is, in fact, a prolongation of one’s life. That’s why it is included in what’s called long-life practice, or long-life initiations. Rinpoche used to use this mudra [sacred gesture] a lot; turning out to others is considered lungta. Turning out to others arouses this energy which brings the possibility of prolonging one’s life through any sickness whatsoever.

So, this is the practice and this is the possibility. This is hardly a complete thing I’m trying to present: this is a work inprogress of living at the roots. This is a few bits and pieces I’ve learned so far in order to put together a practice for myself and hopefully, if it works, share it with other people.

The very act of praying for the benefit of other people is an act of lungta. In this way, it can be incorporated into anybody’s life, into anybody’s spiritual discipline. It belongs to the human realm. It is, as they say, a jewel, an ornament, to human existence. It has nothing whatsoever to do with religion. Another way of putting this is that the barrier is one’s personal pride. I don’t mean one’s personal safety, personal security, but rather one’s pride—that one is good and safe and living at a level of privacy and safety and calmness and equanimity. All of that is a barrier. All of that, at some point, has to be renounced. And only then can the stream of other beings enter you.

Later, I will give some instruction and we will all do some practice in what is known as sending and taking, because this is one of the formal practices that open up and ventilate a system; that allows us to go out and allows us to take in other beings; that allows us to give and allows us to take. Very early this morning, the phrase occurred to me, “This is the only way in, and this is the only way out.” So, I would like to practice it together and see what comes of that and hopefully share our practice and strengthen our practice in doing this root practice. It is the very basis of Windhorse activity, as a healing art. In terms of basic attendance, which is the essential relatedness with others for healing, nothing happens without this practice of sending and taking.

So, we can share that and strengthen it in ourselves and other people and hopefully make it a part of our lifestyle, so to speak. But it is not a style, it is a place where we live—whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not. This is the ground-base of our being. It is happening all the time, and it is up to us to take the reigns and really do it. That’s why we are going to use this opportunity to go further with the development of our own Windhorse activity in this healing situation we are involved in called the “Windhorse project.” After twenty-some odd years of doing it, coming back to it, and seeing the great maturity that has developed here from just the Guerilla Theatre therapy that we had started, it is now not the Windhorse Project, it is the Windhorse Movement. And it is my great joy to help move that forward.

That’s what I learned on Pearl Street.

Thank you for being here and hearing about the movement. It would be good to have a discussion of anything about this or anything else that you would like to talk about.

Q & A

Student: Thank you very much, Dr. Podvoll. I wonder if you could say something further about Windhorse and inviting in chaos.

Ed: Well, we don’t go out looking for trouble, right? It is not chaos in that sense. As strong as the barrier is—that’s the strength of the chaos. There is really not so much chaos, in the sense of a situation we don’t like that we could easily turn away from—it’s more the protection that we have set up for all these years to be secure, to develop a sense of identity, which is an island in itself, fortified and impregnable. But now, without our knowing it, without our wanting it, we are already pregnant with other people. They are entering us all the time, and we are ignoring it. So it’s the barrier of ignorance that we are trying to take down. That feels like chaos because we are unfamiliar with this way of being. It’s threatening; we don’t like it; it takes time; we may lose a lot of sleep. So what? It only becomes chaos because we are so unfamiliar with it and resistant to being ordered around by the world. Like letting children climb all over us all the time, interrupting us.

S: So maybe I shouldn’t have said “inviting in,” but just opening to a chaotic situation. Does that raise Windhorse?

Ed: Yes, eventually. At first the very intention to do such a thing is already Windhorse. Your commitment to go in this direction, whatever the cost, sometimes it even feels at the cost of one’s life. The very commitment to it is already Windhorse. It is a circular thing. It strengthens one’s Windhorse capacities, one’s commitment to do this. First it has to be a wish to do it; we aren’t doing anything without wishes first. We are making these wishes all the time: I want this, I want that, I wish this were different, I wish she were different. I wish, I wish. All the time we’re doing this—literally twenty-four hours a day we are making wishes. So now we have to turn the corner on that, and we have to make the right wishes. All these years, we’ve been making the wrong wishes: ego wishes. Ourselves this, ourselves that. Now a switch has to take place, which is called shifting allegiance in Windhorse lingo. We have to change our allegiance from our self-security to the care of beings. As idealistic and ridiculous as that might sound, it is the only way out.

Student: Hi Mingyur. It’s great to see you. I didn’t think I’d get to see you again either. Last time I saw you, you were really pissed off at my class when we were graduating and you called us all “sheep.” And one of those sheep is now kind of running the Windhorse, leading the charge!

Ed: Now you see why I had to leave town.

S: Yeah! You pissed everybody off. But you’re back. And we grew up. You really redeemed yourself for me when you were talking about just inviting everything in. No safe place, you know, and really working with those barriers: my space, my practice, my this, my that. And then you suggested that it really could be impossible, but to have the intention that that’s where you would like to go. I think that helped me relax around my path, which is, I really do get very tired at the end of my days and there is a sense of struggling for restorative time—you know, sleep and good food and a lot of the Windhorse principles that we work with. And I’m trying to sort out if that’s just an enlightened activity that helps you continue to move forward and dissolve and allow in so that you can continue to do that vs. I really want to go home right now and turn that phone off and I don’t want to talk to anybody and I want to take the weekend off cause I’m tired.

Ed: What can I do?

S: I don’t know! I don’t know what I’m asking. I think it’s just what you were saying: that this is my intention. It’s a practice. And it’s something that I have an inspiration towards, and I need to be alert to how I create these types of barriers to allowing other people in.

Ed: Well, I just want to encourage you to take a second look. A second thought about this thing: I just want time off. Look at that again. And look again at how much sleep you really do need. And just raise the question about it. The development of compassion seems first to be built on the foundation of what we call maitri, taking care of oneself, and we want to do that well. And the practice of meditation is as well as we can get. And of course, food is number one. And there’s shelter and there’s clothing and there’s companionship. So we want to look at all of those things. And look at them carefully and precisely and do them, do them exquisitely, and then: let them go. No sense in making an art form out of feeling good.

S: Yeah, cause I know that that is so much of what we are working with, with our clients.

Ed: With ourselves!

S: As ourselves. Yes, they’re reflecting.

Ed: So, we want to teach ourselves and other people how to take good care of themselves but not get stuck there.

S: Yeah. Okay. Thanks.

Student: Thank you, Mingyur. About maitri. When this model was originating, I think you were quite close with Trungpa Rinpoche in the process of thinking this through and naming the model. The organization you started was Maitri Psychological Services. If you wouldn’t mind, could you say something about why you chose maitri for that?

Ed: It’s political. That’s the banner of Maitri Psychological Services over there and Trungpa Rinpoche, upon my request, created this logo, this icon, for us to relate to as the embodiment display of the Windhorse Project. The code name was Windhorse and the outer, industrial, corporate name was Maitri Psychological Services, incorporated. We had to have a non-profit incorporation. And we did that because Windhorse seemed a little too bold. Nobody could relate to it. Nobody related that much better to maitri, but at least we had something that we could talk about.

Then, when we began collaboration with the county mental health center in establishing a halfway house for people who no longer needed a hospital but still needed help and support in going about their life, they would not accept maitri, even after considerable explanation. The Sanskrit just wouldn’t make it with the state funding agencies, so we translated it just directly into friendship, and they liked that. We created Friendship House. So there are a lot of little political moments on the way—which is just a translation situation.

So, when we sometimes get stuck in, or are unable to move out of, our Buddhist heritage and are not communicating well with people because of that, we have to translate into experiential, human terms, like friendship. It’s still a very complicated issue, friendship, but at least everybody has some basis in it and some yearning in that direction. And some need for such intimacy is in-built, ongoing, and never ending in us. So we respect that; ultimately it’s what we mean by providing care for people, that we do it from that dimension of our shared yearning for human intimacy.

Each translation, in a sense, has a political overtone to it, but what we really mean is windhorse. How to arouse that in ourselves—how that radiates and energizes and inspires and brings some lightness into the being of other people. How we do that in the situation of our own body, how we do that with relationships, how we do that in the situation, however we imagine the environment. Sometimes just moving a picture on the wall in a certain way or taking a ridiculous picture off the wall is a movement in a direction of allowing the windhorse energy to move. We have become specialists in this direction: how to arrange healing environments. That’s our gift. All the other stuff is just names.

S: Thank you.

Student: I believe you used the phrase “no longer being a child.” Could you say something more about that, or about growing up?

Ed: Well, the child needs some protection all the time, right? Some protection. So, that’s what this logo, icon, thing is about. The structure, as I have come to understand it, is a broad outer circle—that’s the protection of the environment, from a safety situation. We don’t let children touch electrical sockets. There is a definite boundary to that. We don’t let anybody come into the house unannounced if there are a lot of children around. So there is this broad protection, a strong band of being careful about the boundaries.

Then there is a very thin line around that, on the inside, which stands for the protection of mind. And that’s more subtle and more delicate. It takes great patience to develop that protection of the mind from limitless distraction, the protection of the mind from being overrun by emotions, and so on.

Inside of the whole thing is this flower which, in the Tibetan medical tradition, is considered a healing flower, a peony. At least, that’s the closest western equivalent that can be found for this flower. Because from this flower and extractions from it, many different Tibetan medicines are formed. A whole variety. So, it stands for that, but it also stands for the flower in us. The delicate blossom of our compassionate nature and how carefully that has to be protected. The outer band protection and inner band protection. You could say that any Windhorse household is that. I live in one of those. And I go through all the same things, it turns out, that many of our clients go through. A few days ago I was talking to a former Windhorse client—I still can’t get used to this word client, but I am forcing myself not to call them patients—and I was sharing with her what it is like to be a Windhorse patient. And I said, “Well, you know, I’m at a point where, you know, during shifts I don’t know anymore if I am entertaining them or they are entertaining me.”

And she said, “Oh, you’re at that phase!”

We have this camaraderie and the burden of being a Windhorse patient. There is a lot of patience, in the emotional sense, that takes place during the constantly shifting, Do I need this, do I need that, what are they here for? Who are they? Do they really like me? So, to contain all of this, it takes that outer protection, and inner protection, and then Windhorse can flourish and flower within that possibility. That’s probably completely unrelated to your question!

S: Well, I don’t know. I work with children, so I’m talking more in terms of mind, where there’s that freshness and that openness, and then somehow that changes, at some point. So what does it mean to be an adult and grow up and still retain something very similar to being a child of illusion. To live in the world without the protection or the sense of barrier, which I think is very much like how a child lives.

Ed: Yes. Well, the quotation that I gave had to do with the practice of warrior, not the practice of children. It takes a long time for a warrior to evolve out of being a child. There’s a lot about this that we know of. First, we have to teach them how to shoot. And a child has to be beyond, slightly beyond, being a child just to do that. Just to begin the training. So, that’s all I meant. There’s a certain toughness you’ve got to develop.

S: Thank you.

Ed: Next question?

Student: I have a question about the relationship between Windhorse and islands of clarity. You know, I’m thinking about people I’ve worked with and I attend to and I occasionally see this recovery unfolding. And I sometimes think, That looks like rising Windhorse, in this person. And sometimes, or in myself in relation to them, it has the quality of confidence. There’s this term authentic presence, a general sense of somebody—myself or this other person—coming into oneself fully as a radiance and a look, as a health-appearance. And what I am missing, I think, in my own conception of Windhorse is where’s the intelligence of it, where is the spontaneous clarity of it, where’s the . . . wisdom seems a little presumptive . . . but where is the knowing quality? So, islands of clarity is kind of fishing here, but it’s one of my favorite topics.

Ed: I think that refers more to the mind dimension of Windhorse. The body dimension is certainly health—a certain robustness that takes place in the speech or emotional qualities of joy and invigoration and, the word you used before, “renaissance.” Youthfulness arises. And the mind dimension is clarity—islands of clarity. Suddenly free from fixed mind. That happens in an instant, on the spot. It comes and goes. We can’t own it or hang on to it. You just have to be inspired by it—that you’re going in the right direction.

S: So, would that mind aspect inform how to be skillful? How to know what to do?

Ed: Do not interrupt it and promote all opportunities for it to spontaneously flash. In the Buddhist dimension of the whole thing, to be fancy about it, we are talking about the spontaneous appearance of clear light. At the level of our ordinary experience and meditation experience, we are talking about the third foundation, mindfulness, which is called mindfulness effort and this is called spontaneous effort, where there is a sudden, abrupt, instantaneous opening of mind and everything that came before it is finished, in an instant, and everything that comes after it is unthinkable. It doesn’t last so long. But it brings one back. This is meditation. This is the infrastructure upon which all meditation technique depends. If islands of clarity did not flash, if we did not have the spontaneous appearance of coming back, of a sudden abrupt awareness that we are out too far on the limb of associations and distractions, it brings us back. If this didn’t happen, there could be no meditation. The original source of this is inherent, enlightened mind. That’s where it’s coming from. It’s pushing forward. It’s making a demand on us. And the more you recognize this and turn allegiance toward this, the more demand it makes. Because what does this clarity do? It not only brings you back to the situation, but it forces a recognition of ego activities in oneself of one’s own preserve, of one’s reservation, of one’s territory. It forces us to recognize that we are functioning at that level all the time and wasting a horrendous amount of time and energy defending this privacy.

So, what the flash of clarity reveals, like a lightening stroke, is what our life is about. And we see clearly, consciously or unconsciously, and it makes a demand on us. We either move away from that or we ignore that—and ignoring it has consequences: illness and regret and remorse. The cycle that we are living incorrectly. Not according to our own ideal, even if we have never named what those ideals are. But something is off and something is wrong and something is noisy about it, so we move to do something . . . or we don’t. But once you start recognizing islands of clarity, once you start practicing meditation, you’re in real trouble. There’s consequences to this. There are things to do. There are things that you begin to see that you had no intention of seeing. Ignoring that brings difficulties.

S: Thank you.

Thank you very, very much. I’d like to thank the Windhorse directors and in particular my team leader and all the members of the team who have given up their time and energy to work in my particular situation. I thank you all, especially. Let’s bow out.

[1] From “Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness,” by Chogyam Trungpa. C. R. Gimian (Ed.) Shambhala Publications, reissued 2007. Page 65.

Practice

Jeffrey Fortuna

April 5, 2003

The Term and Concept of Practice

When the Asian, eastern meditation traditions came to the West, there were immediate challenges around translation because the meditation traditions had developed over the millennia without reference to the English language, or the Western mind, for that matter. And so we have this word practice, which was adopted by the meditation traditions—whether that be Japanese or Tibetan meditation traditions, or traditions from India, Thailand, or Vietnam. These traditions came and somehow this word practice became of paramount relevance. It was a word that was already in wide usage. I haven’t done a formal study of this, but one just needs to think about it for a few minutes to realize that, for instance, people have been singing in choirs and playing instruments in the west for a long time—people practice that. You practice singing, or you practice whatever you need to practice. It has this quality of repeating. Doing something over and over, as you strive to increase your proficiency. It has that quality of repetition, or returning to whatever it is—the formal activity. Has a kind of a formal activity. Most often, a person is given some instruction in whatever one is trying to accomplish and in terms of how to practice. So, you might have a singing teacher, or any kind of a teacher, who shows one how to practice and how to work on one’s own. Now sometimes these teaching instructions, student-teacher situations, evolve into traditions of various kinds, which could be a craft tradition, such as, I suppose psychotherapy is a kind of a craft tradition. It has a body of teaching, and people practice various things, and in fact we have this term clinical practice, in general, or you’ll have a term, someone will say, well, “What do you do?” “Well, I’m in private practice.” It has this reference to a livelihood discipline.

Sometimes people read things in books which describes a way of doing something, and they try to do it, right out of the book, right out of the cookbook. Which can have repercussions; sometimes it is possible to change the recipe by accident if one doesn’t have guidance. Sometimes we come upon things that work for us, and we repeat those things. We all have various ways of putting ourselves to sleep, probably. We all have ways of waking ourselves up in the morning. We have ways of getting dressed, which we tend to repeat, and we develop these homespun ways of repetitively doing things that work for us. One of the great contributions to western psychology, which we probably could perhaps singularly credit Mingyur with, is an exploration and a presentation of what are known as practices of mindlessness. Which are homespun disciplines to achieve certain ends or certain wishes. Which is interesting and it has something to do with what Mingyur mentioned in his keynote address about turning away from islands of clarity, or turning away from clarity. One could develop practices to accomplish that in an efficient way, which can bring about all manner of disorders, illness, or worse.

I think it is important to approach the question and practice as a question and as a kind of . . . for me it is always kind of a challenge or riddle: what do I mean when I use that word? What are we meaning when we use that word? I am hoping that by the end of this session we have a deeper feeling about the use of this term and making it our own, in an important and significant way that works for us.

The Origins of the Windhorse Practice

It is important, in the evolution of an evolving tradition, if not a movement, such as Windhorse, where we remember the origin stories, stories of the origin. And all tribes and clans have this, you know, Native American tribes of all kinds have stories of the origin, as it were, the origin of the tribe. I thought it would be useful to review some aspects of the story, of the origin, which will elucidate how we came to understand practice, and practice practice, and what the practices are, because that is our legacy, and it is the ground from which we then evolve.

In 1978 or 1979, a small group of us formed a training supervision group with Mingyur, who at that time was Dr. Ed Podvoll, psychiatrist, who had moved here from the east coast and clearly had something to offer and was interesting. Kathy Emery and I and a few others were involved in a supervision group. It was a special kind of supervision group. We were all involved with what was called Naropa Institute at the time. We were all involved with this graduate program in Buddhist and Western psychology—which later became known as contemplative psychotherapy. We were studying Buddhist and Western psychology at Naropa and this was our ground together. We were also, for the most part, students of Chogyam Trungpa, who at that time was the president of Naropa. This supervision group was being conducted in a certain way. There were eight or nine of us, we met every week, and we would make presentations. And we were working from a format of what we called at that time a Body, Speech, and Mind Presentation. Which is a highly descriptive presentation discipline to bypass professional jargon, bypass diagnostic traps, and bypass therapeutic arrogance. To find our way to the raw experience of being with someone, being with someone who was in trouble. This was a practice. So, we would take turns and we would present our work with the person, in detail. We would do it over and over and over. It seemed like we had the feeling that we could do this forever.

There was a social element to this group. As we worked together, we became a working group. We began to understand how to take risks giving each other feedback. How to take risks opening ourselves up to feedback, so that there was a dialogue practice that was going on, which we kept doing, over and over. The practice being: how to communicate truthfully from a point of view of non-aggression.

It was an exciting time. In our personal lives, we were all working in various therapeutic settings or clinical settings around town, around Boulder, and we were practicing mindfulness meditation, just as we were doing then. It was a long time ago—twenty-five years ago. And we’re still doing it. We were doing that in our personal lives and we were pursuing other kinds of practices, either in the Buddhist tradition or, at that time they were separate traditions, in the Shambhala Warrior tradition. There was a lot of vigor in this group and a lot of vitality and a lot of bonding among us.

The Antidote of Maitri

In 1979, we hosted (by “we” I mean, many of us in this group, in our connection with Naropa) a symposium, one in a series. At that time we were avidly pursuing what we called psychology symposiums. Sometimes we could call them psychosis symposiums. And these were wonderful gatherings. This is a bit reminiscent of that, although this is a little bit more close in. At that time, we were inviting guests from all parts of the United States.

Chogyam Trungpa gave a keynote address in the summer of 1979, which was two years before the founding of the Windhorse Project. He gave a presentation, which later was titled “Creating an Environment of Sanity.” At the same time, we were also founding a psychology journal, at that time called “The Naropa Institute Journal of Psychology.” In the second edition of this journal, we reprinted this lecture. That was five years later, in 1983. However, we were all present for this presentation in 1979 in the summer, and it had a great impact on us. It’s great—I’ve seen a lot of people carrying around these psychology journals which are being given away freely, which is actually quite unusual. However you’ll notice that you’re missing, I believe it is the first three issues. At some point in the near future we will be creating an archive at a website where you will be able to retrieve these first three issues. These are missing right now. Issue two has this paper I am talking about.

This presentation by Trungpa Rinpoche presented many themes that characterize Windhorse to this very day. He presented a very simple exploration of the relationship of insanity to aggression. He presented a working definition of aggression, which was the refusal to be touched and to attack anyone who tried to touch oneself. He presented the antidote, which was the development of maitri. We heard something about maitri earlier, which is developing lovingkindness, an attitude of lovingkindness, to oneself. There were certain guidelines about how to work with people in a professional way. Such as not trying to talk anybody into or out of insanity. About avoiding the pitfall of the arrogance of having the answer. About avoiding the pitfall of feeling the one was healthy and sane and on the side of good, so to speak, and that one was going to bring the disturbed person over to one’s side. The importance of telling the truth in the middle, and the beginning, and the end. The importance of never going along with anyone’s insanity—especially one’s own. There is also a description of how beneficial it could be to share mindfulness meditation with a person trying to recover from a psychiatric-psychological disorder of some kind, which of course raised a firestorm of debate over the next ten, twenty, years about the relationship of psychotherapy and meditation. Is meditation a therapy? When is that a pitfall? Is meditation another pill to ease tension?

What I am trying to describe in this story are the causes and conditions which are the mycelium fibers growing underground that gave, provided, the conditions for the sudden emergence of the Windhorse Project in the summer of 1981.

Meeting Karen

There we were—a small group of young warriors—and we met someone. Her name is Karen, as presented in Mingyur’s book. Karen is a pseudonym. We met Karen. Karen met us. There was a calling. That is really the only reason the Windhorse Project ever really emerged. There was a need. So, this group suddenly formed itself based on all of those causes and conditions and those experiences into a working team, a mature working team. It was quite amazing. From my way of thinking, it was because of the diligence by which we were practicing and applying ourselves. We were practicing mindfulness meditation, we were practicing our supervision discipline, over, and over, and over. And suddenly, we were ready. The time was right.

We then began to explore the possibilities of expanding our concept and understanding of practice to our work with other people. And we began to realize that everything was being permeated by the aroma of the practice, of the discipline. Our work with other people, our undying, unremitting commitment to trying to find out: what’s true here? And how are we going to give voice to that?

Practice as the Origin and Ground of Windhorse

You could say we practiced mindfulness meditation in order to discover what is true. We have this capacity of our own innate intelligence to understand and see, be thirsty for and hungry for, what is true. The world of psychosis is cataclysmic, is confusing, but most of all, frightening—to others, primarily. I don’t really want to speak for those who have been through the experience in terms of the presence of fear, or fright, but we do know that people in psychosis frighten other people. We could say we practice mindfulness meditation in order to understand the common ground of our experience. We all have the potential for psychosis. Or, we could say, the potential to lose one’s mind, the potential to be encased in a dream, an ego-projection, our own version. So we practice meditation to try to wake up from our tendency to dream to our common ground. This tonglen experience that we’re about to engage in is a further movement in that area.

There is one thing that bears repeating. The maitri space awareness practice was also involved in the mycelium situation of that early group. And the Windhorse Project is a holder of this tradition of using the maitri space awareness practice in a clinical situation, very little of which has been done. And it is only by our abiding wish to do so that we can eventually make some headway in this area. That’s pending, but it’s certainly not to be forgotten. And it’s certainly part of the original mycelial story of causes and conditions. There may come a time when nobody can remember the story from the beginning, and hopefully that won’t happen, but it could happen. I’d rather it didn’t. Because the story of the origin contains so much of our legacy and what we can rely on. What we can stand on. But what you get from the story is the urge to practice. To continue to apply oneself with some vigor, until one’s last breath. Which will be an out-breath. We could be with that. We could be with that last breath.

So that is trying to create a kind of background so we can understand the evolution of practice in the Windhorse work, where our origins might be. But now tonglen is the practice to really sink our breath into.

Tonglen Transmission

Edward Podvoll

It would be good to do sitting practice a little more, another little session of it. Why we do it is because we need to do it. And we need to do it because our minds are wild, and the penetration of the dream and distraction is the universal ordeal within human species. We have to not go along with that. We have to tame ourselves, a little bit. We have to grow up. The meditation practice is a unique and pure way of doing that, of coming back from wild-mind. So that’s why we do it, because we want to be full human beings. The reason why we can do it is because, just as we have in us a seed of wildness and self-explosion, we also have another seed, and that seed is brilliant and clear and we need to make a special effort to get to it. Practice is possible only because we have this ability to come back, to shift away from distraction and overwhelming emotion, because we have that capacity also built into us.

Those are the two conditions: because our minds are basically wild and because our minds also contain the brilliance of taming that wildness. That’s why we practice.

There are many practices, but this is the simplest one and it is called just being. It is a method to relax from not being. Ultimately, it is how to be stable, stay on one point, and relax at the same time. The famous principle of this possibility is: not too tight, not too lose. We are not practicing in order to rivet our attention on anything, and we are not practicing in order to just let it be blown around by the wind. Somewhere in the middle of that we can find a relaxation point. And just be with that. And then things happen, which is not very much. And then we learn to live with a certain degree of aloneness and, when we are able to do a certain degree of that, we become strong people who are capable of helping other people who cannot live with their aloneness. So, that’s another reason why we practice: because there is nothing else to do.

So, to just quickly review. Take a good seat. Feel a sense of body and the weight of it. Body on the seat. This is always a point to come back to. When everything else fails, in the middle of the night when your mind is wild and you cannot sleep, for hours or days at a time, your body is still there to use as a reference point. To have a sense-feeling of your body. Beyond that is the breath, which is much more subtle, but never failing. Always there. You can always count on it, as a reference point, to come back to from the mind. And the mind itself is the most subtle reference point of all. We just see thoughts come and go . . . again, don’t make a move to go after them or to prevent them. That is called just being. So, let’s do it, a little bit.

[Quiet practice session.]

On this part of the morning with practice and another discussion, or at least, sending and taking practice . . . I really didn’t have time or notice to prepare something about this and it’s not necessary anyway—it has been said very concisely, very much to the point, already.

It is a practice that arose at the beginning of Buddhism itself and has evolved in different forms. It was first taught over two thousand years ago as lovingkindness practice. And maybe because of the power of the sitting meditation, it naturally expanded. It is impossible to just keep it for one’s own sake; there is a natural impulsion to expand its qualities of relaxation and clarity to other people. And first, at least, to do it in imagination and then activity would follow from that, as it always does. So, it evolved. Then sometime around the 7th century, it became more organized, codified, with the large explanation by a teacher by the name of Shantideva. Then by the 11th and 12th century, it was further organized into what is now known as training the mind practice. The sending and taking was more refined, codified, and easily passed on. Since then, it has been the mainstay of Buddhist practice.

It is an extremely strong practice and a living, interpersonal, practice that allows us to train ourselves in ordinary, every situations. Every aspect of life becomes a possibility of practice. Again, practice in the sense of living fully and completely in each moment. We have to practice that. But in this case, it is translated so that your whole life could be wall-to-wall attention. And now we are using our attention to others as the breath and the body and the life of the practice.

Instead of trying to make this up anymore, I am going to read you basic instruction in how to do this which comes from Trungpa Rinpoche’s commentary on the ancient text. Every generation has new commentaries on this to bring it up-to-date for our world, because it’s moving—you cannot actually say developing, not in a time of war. Keep that in mind: this is a time of war in the world. The suffering is enormous and is only the tip of the iceberg. It will follow for generations to come. We could turn our attention somewhat environmentally that way. This is a practice for a time of war.

The first, the main, practice, which is the preliminary practice which we were doing this morning, is just bare presence. Naked being. That is the preliminary practice. And now beyond that, there’s this possibility of expansion. So, the first mention of that in this mind training is called sending and taking. I am going to read this (Trungpa, Chogyam, 2003). It is longer than I thought. Maybe I’ll try to edit it as I go along. But, there is no better way to say this.

Sending and taking should be practiced alternately. These two should ride on the breath.

That is the original text that comes from the past fifteen-hundred years to us and now we have what the commentary says about that.

Sending and taking is a very important practice.

. . . of those who dedicate their lives to helping others. Which, in Buddhist terms, is called bodhisattva path.

It is called tonglen in Tibetan: tong means sending out or letting go, and len means receiving or accepting. Tonglen is a very important term; you should remember it. It is the main practice in the development of relative bodhichitta.

. . . bodhichitta means: how to work in the world.

The slogan says: “These two should ride the breath.” We have been using the breath as a technique all along because it is constant and because it is something very natural to us. Therefore, we also use it here, in exactly the same way, as we have been doing in . . .

. . . the mindfulness practice of meditation.

The practice of tonglen is quite straightforward; it is an actual sitting meditation practice. You give away your happiness, your pleasure, anything that feels good. All of that goes out with the out-breath.

This is ultimately practice on the breath. It should go out with the out-breath.

As you breathe in, you breathe in any resentments and problems, anything that feels bad. The whole point is to remove territoriality altogether.

Some of us were talking about this last night as warrior practice. It is a complete switch, n'est-ce pas? Everything we do is to control our territory, to keep it safe, to pay the mortgage. This is the opposite of that; it is reversing a basic habit that goes against the grain of everything that creates problems for us.

The practice of tonglen is very simple. We do not first have to sort out doctrinal definitions of goodness and evil. We simply breathe out any old good and breathe in any old bad. At first we may seem to be relating primarily to our ideas of good and bad, but as we go on, it becomes more real. On the one hand, you can’t expect a friendly letter from your grandmother with whom you have been engaged in warfare for the past five years. She probably will not write you a kind letter after three days of tonglen. On the other hand, sending and taking will definitely have a good effect, quite naturally. I think it is a question of your general decorum and attitude.
Sometimes we feel terrible that we were breathing in poison which might kill us and at the same time breathing out whatever little goodness we have. It seems to be completely impractical. But once we begin to break through, we realize that we have even more goodness and we also have more things to breathe in. So the whole process becomes somewhat balanced. That always happens, but it takes long training. Sending and taking are interdependent. The more negativity we take in with a sense of openness and compassion, the more goodness there is to breathe out on the other side. So there is nothing to lose, it is all one process.
In tonglen we are aspiring to take on the suffering of other sentient beings. We mean that literally: we are actually willing to take that on. As such, it can have real effects, on both the practitioner himself and on others. There is a story about a great Gadampa teacher. . .

Gadampa is an early movement in the Buddhist meditation practice.

. . . who was practicing tonglen and who actually did take another’s pain on himself: when somebody stoned a dog outside of his house, the teacher himself was bruised. And the same kind of thing could happen to us.

But not so easily.

But tonglen should not be used as any kind of antidote. You do not do it and then wait for the effect—you just do it and drop it. It doesn’t matter whether it works or not: if it works, you breathe that out; if it does not work, you breathe that in. So you do not possess anything. That is the point.
Usually you would like to hold on to your goodness. You would like to make a fence around yourself and put everything bad outside it: foreigners, your neighbors, or what have you. You don’t want them to come in. You don’t even want your neighbors to walk their dogs on your property because they might make a mess in your lawn. So in ordinary . . .

. . . worldly, samsaric, busy, distracted, entertainment-oriented . . .

. . . life you don’t send and receive at all. You try as much as possible to guard those pleasant little situations you have created for yourself. You try to put them in a vacuum, like fruit in a tin, completely purified and clean. You try to hold on to as much as you can, and anything outside of your territory is regarded as altogether problematic. You don’t want to catch the local influenza or the local diarrhea attack that is going around. You are constantly trying to ward off as much as you can. You may not have enough money to build a castle or a wall around you, but your front door is very reliable. You are always putting double locks on it. Even when you check into a hotel, the management always tells you to double-lock your door and not to let anybody come in unless you check them out first. You can read that in the Innkeepers Act posted on the back of hotel doors. That will probably tell you the whole thing. Aren’t we crazy.
Basically speaking, the mahayana path. . .

. . . which is the Buddhist path of working with everybody . . .

. . . is trying to show us that we don’t have to secure ourselves. We can afford to extend out a little bit—quite a bit. The basic idea of practicing sending and taking is almost a rehearsal . . .

As Jeff was trying to explain this morning: a practice, practice rehearsal, a dress rehearsal.

. . . a discipline of passionless-ness, a way of overcoming territory. Overcoming territory consists of going out with the out-breath, giving away and sending out, and bringing in with your in-the breath as much as you can of other people’s pain and misery. You would like to become the object of that pain and misery. You want to experience it fully and thoroughly.
You practice putting others first by means of the very literal discipline called tonglen. How are you going to do that in the ordinary sense? Should you just run up to somebody in the street and say, “Hey, take my candy and give me the Kleenex in your pocket?” Of course, you could do that if you like, and if you were versatile enough, you could probably do it without offending anybody. But that is experimenting with others on a very crude level. What we are doing is different. We have a way of practicing putting others first—by placing letting go and receiving on the medium of the breath. The first stage of tonglen consists of the practice of sending and taking mentally, psychologically, slowly and slowly. Then at the end one might actually do such a thing. It has been said in the scriptures that one can even practice tonglen by taking a piece of fruit in one hand and giving it to the other hand.

My master of retreat in the past years said the whole thing is very simple. He said, “If somebody says to me, ‘Your teacup is in my space.’” He says, “I move it away.”

There are obviously a lot of obstacles to practice tonglen, particularly since we are involved in modern industrial society. But you can do it step by step, which actually makes you grow up and become the ultimate adult. The main point is to develop the psychological attitude of exchanging oneself for others . . . You might have a lot of pride and reservations, but nevertheless you can begin to do that. Obviously, to begin with, tonglen is more of a psychological state than anything else. If everybody began to give things away to each other, there would be tremendous conflict. But if you develop the attitude of being willing to part with your precious things, to give away your precious things to others, that can help begin to create a good reality.
How do we actually practice tonglen? First we think about our parents, our friends, or anybody who has sacrificed his or her life for our benefit.

So, that is the beginning, that is the touchstone. That we are here, that we are still alive, that we have to practice this, that we are able to talk, that we are able to live our lives because there has been great sacrifice that has taken place which we do not know about, which we will never know about, because we did not have the awareness to realize what was happening. We may touch in again on this when we become, if we become, parents, and we see how people have given up their lives, their occupations, their time, their health, to ensure our survival, and we don’t see that. We don’t know about it. But we know it happens, and that is why we can continue our life.

First we think about our parents, or our friends, or anybody who has sacrificed his or her life for our benefit. In many cases, we have never even said thank you to them. It is very important to think about that, not in order to develop guilt, but just to realize how mean we have been . . . . I’m sure you have a lot of stories about how badly you treated your parents and friends, who helped you so much. They dedicated their entire being for your sake, and you never even bothered to say thank you or write them a letter. You should think of the people who cared for you so much that they didn’t even look for confirmation. There are many people like that.
Sometimes somebody comes along out of the blue and tries to help you completely. Such people do everything for you—they serve you, they sacrifice themselves, and then they go away without even leaving an address or a number to call. All along there have been people who have done things for you. You should think of these situations and work them into your tonglen practice. As your breath goes out, you give them the best of what is yours in order to repay their kindness. In order to promote goodness in the world, you give out everything good, the best that you have, and you breathe in other people’s problems, their misery, their torment. You take in their pain on their behalf.
That is the basic idea of relative bodhicitta practice. It is a very action-oriented practice. We give as much as we can give, we expand as much as we can expand. We have a lot to expand because we have basic goodness, which is an inexhaustible treasure. Therefore we have nothing at all to lose and we can receive more, also. We can be shock absorbers of other people’s pain all the time. It is a very moving practice—not that I’m saying we’re all on a train, particularly. The more we give our best, the more we are able to receive other people’s worst. Isn’t that great?
Tonglen seems to be one of the best measures we can take to solve our problems of ecology and pollution. Since everything is included, tonglen is the fundamental way to solve the pollution problem—is the only way. Quite possibly it will have the physical effect of cleaning up pollution in big cities, maybe even in the entire world. That possibility is quite powerful.
Sending and taking is not regarded as proof of our personal bravery. It is not that we are the best people because we do tonglen. Sending and taking is regarded as a natural course of exchange; it just takes place. We might have difficulty taking in pollution, taking in what is bad, but we should take it in wholeheartedly—completely in. We should begin to feel that our lungs are altogether filled with bad air, that we have actually cleaned out the world out there and taken it into ourselves. Then some switch takes place, and as we breathe out, we find that we still have an enormous treasure of good breath which goes out all the time.
We start by thinking of our own mother or parents, of somebody we really love so much, care for so much, like our mother, who nursed us, took care of us, paid attention to us, and brought us up into this level of grown-upness. Such affection and kindness was radiated to us by that person that we think of her first. The analogy of our mother is not necessarily the only way. The idea is that of a motherly person who was kind and gentle and patient with us. We must have somebody who is gentle, somebody who has been kind to us in our life and who shared his or her goodness with us. If we do not have that, then we are somewhat in trouble, we begin to hate the world—but there is also a measure for that, which is to breathe in our hatred and resentment of the world. If we do not have good parents, a good mother, or a good person who reflected such a kind attitude toward us to think about, then we can think of ourselves.
When you begin to do tonglen practice, you begin to think of the goodness that you can give out, what you can give to others. You have lots of good things to give, to breathe out to others. You have lots of goodness, lots of sanity, lots of healthiness. All of that comes straight from the basic awakened and enlightened attitude, which is alive and strong and powerful. So what you give out is no longer just imagination or something that you have to crank up. You actually have something good to give out to somebody. In turn, you can breathe in something that is painful and negative. The suffering that other people are experiencing can be brought in because, in contrast to that, you have basic healthiness and wakefulness, which can certainly absorb anything that comes to it. You can absorb more suffering because you have a lot more to give.
The idea of warmth is a basic principle of tonglen practice. What we are doing is also called maitri practice, or in Sanskrit, maitri bhavana. Maitri means “friendliness,” “warmth,” or “sympathy,” and bhavana means “meditation” or “practice.” In tonglen, or maitri bhavana, we breathe out anything gentle and kind, feeling good about anything at all—even feeling good about eating a chocolate cake or drinking cool water or warming ourselves by the fire. Whatever goodness exists in us, whatever we feel good about, we breathe out to others. We must feel good sometimes—whether it lasts a minute or a second or whatever. And then we breathe in the opposite direction, whatever is bad and terrible, gross and obnoxious. We try to breathe that into ourselves.
I would like to say quite bluntly that it is very important for you to take tonglen practice quite seriously. I doubt that you will freak out. The main point is actually to do it properly and thoroughly. Beyond that, it is important to take delight that you are in a position to do something which most other humans never do at all. The problem with most people is that they are always trying to give out the bad and take in the good. That has been the problem of society in general and the world altogether. But now we are on the mahayana path and the logic is reversed. That is fantastic, extraordinary! We are actually getting the inner “scoop,” so to speak, on Buddha’s mind, directly and at its best. Please think of that. This practice will be extremely helpful to you, so please take it seriously.
Tonglen practice is not purely mind training. What you are doing might be real! When you practice, you have to be very literal: when you breathe out, you really breathe out good; when you breathe in, you really breathe in bad. We can’t be faking.
Start with what is immediate. Just this. This. You should feel that the whole thing is loose. Nothing is really attached to you or anchored to you; everything is detachable. When you let go, it is all gone. When things come back to you, they too are unanchored, from an outsider’s point of view. They come to you, and you go out to them. It is a very exciting experience, actually. You feel a tremendous sense of space.
When you let go, it is like cutting a kite from its cord. But even without its cord, the kite still comes back, like a parachute landing on you. You feel a sense of fluidity and things begin to circulate so wonderfully. Nothing is being dealt with in any form of innuendo or in undercurrents. There is no sense of someone working the politics behind the scenes. Everything is completely free-flowing. It is wonderful—and you can do it. That is precisely what we mean when we talk about genuineness. You can be so absolutely blatantly good at giving and so good at taking. It is interesting.
In tonglen practice, we replace the mindfulness of the breath that doesn’t have any contents with the mindfulness of the breath that does. The contents are the emotional, discursive [rambling] thoughts which are being given the reference point of people’s pain and pleasure. So you are supposed to actually be working hard for the sake of other people. You are supposed to be helping people. If somebody is bleeding in front of you, you can’t just stand there holding the bandages—you are supposed to run over and put bandages on him, for goodness’ sake! Just do it. And then you come back and sit down and watch to see who might need bandages. It is as simple as that. It is the first-aid approach.
People need help. So we have to wake up a little bit more. We have to be careful that we don’t just regard this as just another day dream or concept. We have to make it very literal and very ordinary. Just breathe out and in.
It is straightforward.

It goes on, but I think that is everything that you need to know. You can consider that direct transmission of this practice by people who live this way, live this way a lot. So we could at least try it. At least try it.

Again, it is a quick flash on the goodness that exists in us, meaning the goodness that exists in those people who helped us survive the agonies of infancy.

From that, radiate that out, generate that out, everywhere, to all beings in the world. In particular, this moment-of-war beings. I do not mean only to those who are suffering from warlords, but I mean to the warlords themselves.

So, breathe that out, as if on our breath, which expands in limitless directions which touch them. They can feel it, somehow. And then, on the in-breath, we breathe in their terror, the terror of the people who are suffering from the warlords, and the terror, fear, and arrogance of the warlords themselves. We do not make distinctions between who is good and who is bad. We do not want to get that complicated. Suffering is suffering.

So, breathe that in and take it, bravely, and then return naturally, alternately, to the out-breath. And then breathe out, so to speak, waves of care, maybe some sense of gentleness, tenderness, toward these people. They could be in the Middle East, or they could be at home here in Boulder, or they could be sitting next to you. In fact, they are sitting next to you. So, you could try to do that, or at least just rouse the intention to do that. It’s not a bad thing to do. It certainly can’t be a bad thing to do.

[Silent sitting period]

Okay. So, would you like to discuss that a little bit? Just whatever you feel about that, any questions about it, or any difficulties.

Q & A

What was really noticeable to me, sort of at the end of this practice session that we were doing, was a phenomena that I had forgotten about for a long time: without knowing it, I’d switched the practice in my mind and I was starting to breathe in all the good things and I got lost in that for any number of breaths before I woke up to the fact that I had changed the practice. The tendency of habit to do such things is so strong. So strong. We are going so much against the grain—that movement. We want everything for ourselves—ourselves this, ourselves that—that in an instant, a flash, a blink of an eye, we could change the practice to our good old practice. It was interesting to watch the shock, after all that big talk.

Student: I was taught this practice a few years ago by a teacher at Naropa. What was really helpful at the time was doing it step by step, as with certain instruction, as to how to enter tonglen practice from the shamatha practice. Almost like returning to shamatha, from shamatha.

Ed: Shamatha is what we were doing before—the mindfulness practice.

S: Feeling or visualizing the textures of what we associate with maybe hot, maybe sticky, maybe dark, maybe poisonous, and breathing out light, humor, coolness. And then the fourth stage, as being taking in and reflecting on a particular scenario that we’ve been in, or are in, that has a tendency toward competition, or a situation at home, or an argument we were in, or maybe a physical pain. Breathing that in. Then breathing out a more positive texture. Doing that for a while. And then the last stage is expanded into the greater world.

Not having these stages this time, I found myself sort of drifting in and out of different scenarios again and again. I had some difficulty with focus. I would go from a personal situation to a greater situation to falling asleep, to a specific pain, and then . . .

Ed: That’s great. Just do it like that. Don’t try to control mind. This is not a practice to make us tense. This is a practice to open us up. So let go. Let go of that. Don’t try to control it. Fine. Drift in and out. You will see the drifting. That itself will bring you back. Good. Thank you.

Student: I do want to share my resistance to this practice because what I noticed since I began practicing this years ago, it seemed, like with the shamatha and mindfulness practice, I was able to notice that my mind would drift, and I would breathe, and then come back, and there was just more of a heightened awareness of that. But with tonglen, when I started practicing it, I would wake up deep in a dream. I was totally into discursive mind. I mean: not present. Gone. I was in dreams and fantasies. So what I’d like to offer is that I think inherent in this practice is a resistance to doing it. There is a saying: “Ego does not want to do this practice.” So if you find it difficult to do it, that is an authentic response to it.

I was on retreat once where I was doing quite a bit of tonglen during the day and putting a lot more effort into the practice. That night I went to sleep, and I was dreaming. I had a dream about being in a huge city and I was walking down the street and around the corner there was some accident that had happened. Someone was injured. And there was a group that was gathering. And I remember thinking, “Well, someone else will take care of it.” So in my dream state I was trying to give myself a break. It was a comment on my intense effort, or something, in my waking state. So I just wanted to offer that to the group: that it is a very challenging practice, I find. There is nothing wrong with that. How you do it is how you do it. As Mingyur said, it is a matter of opening up rather than becoming more tense.

Student: I had an experience similar to what you had. I just wanted to ask a question to clarify the process of coming in and going out. When I am breathing in that negative energy and the alchemy within me transforms that energy, I then breath out positive energy that feels more personal and ego-related than the energy coming in. Like George Bush [former U.S. president] coming in and then transferring my specific thought and relationship to that image going out. Or is it more like a separate stream coming in as a general suffering and then a general love going out as two streams, unrelated to me, that come in and out?

Ed: Whatever. Let it all happen. George Bush needs your help more than you need his.

S: Okay.

Student: What is the relationship between this practice while one is just sitting there, somewhere, and actually being that in reality on a day-to-day basis, or whenever that occurs. Is there one? Does one do this to manifest that behavior in the world, or not?

Ed: Absolutely. That is what was talked about in the text as being a literal practice. But first it has to begin in your imagination. First it has to be done, and it has to begin with the wish to do so. You have to take that leap, if it’s the right thing to do. We have the wish to do so. Then we do this very simple, breath-related thing. The visuals go along with it, the breath, the coolness, the goodness, or whatever you like. Whatever you like goes out. So, yes, it is literal. Yes.

S: What if one spends a lot of one’s life doing that?

Ed: Doing what?

S: Recognizing somebody else’s struggle, or pain, or something or other, and reacting to help someone. And that’s done, what, indefinitely?

Ed: What are you afraid of?

S: That’s a good question. Actually, I don’t know.

Ed: Well, generally people are afraid of being overwhelmed. That this time spent going in and out will burden them to some intolerable extent. And it is too much to handle and they might even feel abused by the practice. Burnout, it’s called. It used to be called burnout, in the old days. But this is the only antidote to burnout. Everybody is burning out because they think they’re giving so much of themselves. In fact, all they’re thinking of is their break time and what they’re going to do after work. They are burned out from that. This is the only way to handle the work with people in extreme states of mind who are undergoing a lot of suffering, a lot of pain. This is the way to stay in that situation, and this is what we call authentic presence. This is how to really do it. In a practice like that, you know, what’s the big deal? Fifteen minutes a day. What’s the big deal?

So we do that. We touch in on this possibility. “Gradually,” as the text says. Slowly, slowly, it becomes part of our being. It becomes its own habit. It is a good habit that replaces a bad habit. This is almost the earliest Buddhist teachings on how to work with difficulty in that way. If you are addicted to bad, cheap food, substitute it with good food. The contrast is so great, so obvious, about what’s right and what’s meaningful. We have to replace this bad habit of wanting everything to be good, peaceful, and nice. We have to replace it, go against that stream. We could do it all the time. This fifteen minutes, this practice—touching in—takes some method. We have to put out something. We have to sacrifice some moments of our day. Then we realize that it could go on all the time, anytime. And that, in fact, it is happening all the time. It is an opportunity to see pain. That is our practice. It takes some courage to do that. It takes some strength to do that. That is what the mindfulness practice is all about: preparing us to do this, to jump into this way of life, unprepared. That is why these two practices go hand in hand.

Jeffrey Fortuna: So I wanted to tell a story which I think expresses a quality of this tradition out of which, or within which, the practice abides.

In 1986, my partner and I had just completed supervising the construction of the maitri space awareness practice rooms at Naropa. And Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche came down for a tour. And this was a year before he died and he wasn’t speaking much. So we toured the rooms and we wanted to verify that things were correct—the color, the postures, the lighting, the whole set-up. And we wanted his feedback on that. Which was good. We had a good meeting. So we got to the end, and we were standing there in this kind of awkward, long pause, and I finally had a chance to ask my burning question, which was: what’s the therapeutic effect of the maitri practice? I asked him something like, “What is the after effect of doing this practice?” And he looked at me for a long moment and frowned, which was a wilting frown, for me—a wilting experience. Something in me collapsed, for a moment, and I said, “Oh, there is not literal carryover, it’s more like a natural carryover!”

And he smiled.

So, you know, it has this quality—and I think this was mentioned also in the reading—you put a lot of effort into it, and then there is a kind of a casual abandonment of the outcome, or the effect, that one might look for. Which I think also applies to therapeutic work. Therapeutic carryover. We have this tendency to look for the effect of our virtuous action. We look for it; we peek. And so there is this kind of casual quality, at certain points, which for me came to be known as “natural carryover.” And I am not quite sure where that phrase came from, but it came from a frown, I suppose.

Ed: It is said in the commentaries to this practice that, as one trains in this way, then there is this natural carryover into everyday life. It can go so deeply that in your dreams, your dreams are expressing this care for people, that you are giving up something of yourself. That is the result of this practice. That is also natural carryover, possibly, possibly, but it’s a sign that the practice has entered you fully. When you start dreaming in the same way as you’re living, it is a good sign.

I think we could then end here with a period of straight mindfulness practice, which we were doing at first. This is the usual way of doing tonglen, in any case. It’s a sandwich. We begin with doing mindfulness practice, with following the breath, then relaxing the mind, opening the mind, and then we do tonglen practice. Then the other end of the sandwich is, again, mindfulness practice.

Buddhist Psychology, Chogyam Trungpa, Compassion/Tonglen, Contemplative Practice, Contemplative Psych, Edward Podvoll, Exchange, Legacy Archive, Meditation Practice, Mindfulness-Awareness, Windhorse Approach, Windhorse Legacy ArchiveEdward PodvollApril 4, 2003

Return to Tonglen

Contents

I. Opening the Conference:

Introducing Edward Podvoll, now known as Lama Mingyur

Jeffrey Fortuna

Keynote Address: Re-Entry from Long Retreat

Edward Podvoll

Entering Windhorse Care: from Director to Patient

What Is My Practice?

The Practice: Rousing Windhorse Energy

Q & A

Practice

Jeffrey Fortuna

The Term and Concept of Practice

The Origins of the Windhorse Practice

The Antidote of Maitri

Meeting Karen

Practice as the Origin and Ground of Windhorse

Tonglen Transmission

Edward Podvoll

Q & A

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