At the core of hope is a leap of faith — not that it will all come out right, but a faith that holds that what we do matters. How it will come to matter, who it will come to inspire, what positive effect it will have — is not ours to know.
— RABBI DAVID COOPER
Love on Every Breath is an ancient Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana* meditation from the Shangpa lineage that combines breath, awareness, imagination, and an energetic transformation process. The meditation brings all these components together in a powerful way in order to open our hearts, to reveal and cultivate our kindness, love, compassion, and wisdom. In Tibetan, this is called the Extraordinary Tonglen, since it uses special techniques of Vajrayana to transform suffering. The Tibetan word tonglen is composed of two words — tong means “giving or sending,” and len means “receiving or taking.” First, we open ourselves to receive and feel the suffering of ourselves and others, breathing it into our heart center. This is the “taking.” The suffering is then instantaneously and effortlessly liberated in the heart and transformed by a special method into unconditional love. At this point, on the out-breath, love and healing energy are sent back out to whomever you are doing the meditation for at the moment, whether yourself or another. This is the “sending.”
The primary purpose of the Love on Every Breath meditation is to cultivate our love and compassion, to transform and liberate our heart. When we come from a place of love, everything shifts for us. This book gives you the tools to transform and empower yourself and come to a place of creative engaged freedom.
The Love on Every Breath meditation is not an exotic Himalayan practice, but it is something that emerges out of us spontaneously and naturally. It is inherent in us to want to remove suffering — others’ or our own. The problem for many children (and adults) is that we absorb the suffering of others, and then it stagnates inside of us. Love on Every Breath gives a way for the suffering to be liberated in the body and the psyche and emerge as compassion. There is a felt sense as this happens.
A Story of a Healing
Ever since I was young, I’ve felt that there has to be something beneath the surface of daily life, something more real, more true than what I see and experience around me. I wanted to connect with this deeper truth. My first memory of church was when I was three. I had on my good winter coat, and I was delighted with a new fur muff that was keeping my hands warm and cozy. As I walked up to the church with my family in the brisk air of a gray winter day, I remember thinking, Maybe this is the place where people are more real. I was raised as an Episcopalian, and I loved the church. I felt the blessing of the Holy Trinity during Holy Communion, and this sense of blessing only increased as the years went by. The primary teaching I received in church was that Jesus’s message is love: Everyone is loved by God, and all are God’s children. In hindsight, this pointed to the basic goodness and equality of everyone.
As a child I had an experience of Jesus’s love that changed my life. I tell you this story for two reasons. The first is to illustrate the universal nature of the Love on Every Breath meditation and show how a similar spiritual practice, but in a Christian context, spontaneously arose in me as a child. The second is to illustrate the purifying and healing power of this kind of practice. One day when I was seven, I was at my best friend’s house, and we were visiting her fifteen-year-old brother in his room. At one point he asked us to pull down our pants, and he briefly put his hand on my vulva. As soon as that happened, I felt uncomfortable. I immediately pulled up my pants and stepped back from him. He didn’t pursue it. I fled their house and went home.
From that point on, I felt that something dirty had happened to me. I felt tainted where he had touched me. I felt damaged. Up until then, I had felt a wholesome good feeling inside myself. All of a sudden it wasn’t there. I had no idea about sex then, but it just felt bad. And the feeling would not go away. So I decided that I must do something about it. In church I had been taught that God was omnipotent wisdom, love, and compassion, and that Jesus, as the son of God, was God’s love for us made manifest. In church I had learned to pray to Jesus both in formal prayers and in my own way. So I decided to call on Jesus to help me.
Every night before I went to sleep, I’d call upon Jesus and imagine that he came to be with me. I would see him up above me, standing next to my bed. He would put his hand, filled with love and compassion, on top of my head. Then a stream of white light would come from his hand into me. The white light filled my body completely and cleaned the bad feeling away. I was being filled with love and healing from Jesus. I did this every night, and it slowly released my feelings of dirtiness and shame.
After about a year, I thought, I feel completely purified, completely okay, filled with light. I don’t need to do this anymore. I did the meditation one last time, and then with much gratitude, I thanked Jesus for helping me. I never told anyone what had happened.
Many children and adults instinctively want to heal and take away the suffering from themselves and others. I now believe that my intuitive and spontaneous idea to call on Jesus, and to picture his healing light pouring into me, was a natural, self-generated meditation similar to the Love on Every Breath meditation that I offer to you in this book. The feeling of Jesus’s healing white light coming into my body from the top of my head is similar to the visualization of Chenrezig,† the Bodhisattva‡ of Compassion, who sits on a lotus above our head in Love on Every Breath. My experience of feeling sullied, which at the time felt unfortunate, and being cleansed by devotion became a cornerstone of my adult life because it gave me a deep inner knowing. Spiritual practice can work to transform and liberate us.
Love and Compassion
The Dalai Lama has often said, “My religion is kindness.” This is not just a simplification for Westerners; in fact, compassion and wisdom form the basis of all Tibetan Buddhism and the essence of all the world’s religions. In my opinion, the Dalai Lama is saying that the most important thing for us to have is the actual felt response of a compassionate heart. Loving-kindness and compassion are of utmost importance at this time for humanity. Love and compassion for one another, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, and gender, need to take precedence over ideology and our superficial differences. We must come together and cooperate with one another in order to survive the global challenges facing us.
From time immemorial there has been, and continues to be, devastating conflict in our world, like wars fought over ethnic, cultural, and religious differences. Power-hungry leaders all over the world use these differences toward divisive ends to inflame hatred and get people to go to war, causing an unfathomable amount of suffering. Buddhism teaches that it is necessary for loving-kindness and compassion for all beings to be in our hearts in order for humanity to move forward in a sustainable way that benefits everyone, leaving no group of people out. Love on Every Breath gives a way to act on this: It frees up our skillful action, so that our efforts in the world are more effective.
The principles of love and compassion form the basis of all religions. In his book Essential Spirituality, which describes the seven spiritual practices core to every major religion, Roger Walsh writes, “One emotion has been long praised as supreme by the great religions: love.”1 He goes on to quote The Encyclopedia of Religions:
The idea of love has left a wider and more indelible imprint upon the development of human culture in all its aspects than any other single notion. Indeed, many notable figures ...have argued that love is the single most potent force in the universe, a cosmic impulse that creates, maintains, directs, informs, and brings to its proper end every living thing.
From a Buddhist point of view,