Chenrezig, together with the vajra of awakening, greatly enlarges our capacity to welcome the suffering and transform it. Slowly we expand our meditation out to various people and groups of people, until finally all beings are included. We rest in the love and joy of all of us awakened together.
Step 7, Dissolving, involves dissolving our visualization, completely letting go, and resting in open awareness. Then in step 8, Dedicating, we dedicate any and all benefit of our meditation to the awakening of all beings.
Developing Self-Love
Traditionally, in Tibet, Love on Every Breath involves first developing compassion and love for ourselves before we do so for others. In the West, many people do not experience self-love, but rather self-criticism and self-hatred. We tend to be overly self-centered and often feel that something is wrong with us. Therefore, it is important that we start the Love on Every Breath meditation by generating compassion and love for ourselves. One of my students, a serious meditator for over thirty years, found that meditating on Love on Every Breath for himself healed a deep psychological angst that had not been touched by many years of quiet sitting meditation. It powerfully liberated wounds he had been carrying for many years.
Without love and compassion for ourselves, we cannot sustain love and compassion for others. Love and compassion can arise spontaneously in certain circumstances for all of us, but to fully actualize love and compassion, we need to work through our anger and hurt and have compassion and love for ourselves. Then we can authentically have more compassion for others. Otherwise, it is like living in a home where we behave with harshness and cruelty and then expect to go outside and be open and loving. If we do not include ourselves in our love, our love is not whole, not complete. This is essential. As Aristotle wrote (in Ethics, book 9), “All friendly feelings for others are an extension of a man’s feelings for himself.” It should be noted that self-love and compassion are not to be confused with self-centeredness or narcissism.
Developing love and compassion helps us to grow spiritually and emotionally by lessening our ego fixation and self-centeredness and helping our relationships with others. When we generate compassion, we do not excuse or condone our own or others’ negative actions. Likewise, awakened love does not enable our own or others’ negativity or destructiveness. Awakened compassion understands that everyone is trying to be happy. We often try to be happy in all the wrong ways, such as when we think that money, prestige, and power will bring us happiness. Some people think they will be happy by stepping on, cheating, or destroying others, but we can have compassion for them in their ignorance. This does not mean we endorse or in any way condone their behavior. We need to stand up to their destructive agendas. Our compassion means that we wish for them to be authentically happy and free of suffering — in other words, awakened.
Four Benefits of the Meditation
I see four major benefits of the Love on Every Breath meditation. First, it can crack open the hard shell of our ego-clinging. Ego-clinging is our grasping onto the self that we think we are, but which isn’t actually there. Our sense of self is simply a collection of our perceptions, feelings, thoughts, memories, and consciousness; in part, it arises from the fact that we have a body. Clinging to this separates us from others, puts us first, and blocks our capacity to realize our true nature of wisdom and love. In cracking open our hard shell of self-importance and self-protection, Love on Every Breath allows our natural love and compassion to both be uncovered and grow. It allows our inherent wisdom to shine through. Letting go of ego-clinging is a process that needs to happen again and again. Then we can learn to take loving care of ourselves from a place of increased freedom.
All authentic gurus and teachers give guidance in order for their students to access their own innate wisdom. This is for the sole purpose of helping students awaken. It is not about the teacher. They are not in the business of being an autocrat. Teachers who have the style of a dictator are usually getting their ego’s needs met in an unhealthy way by having students idealize them and follow their every command.
Second, Love on Every Breath gives us a process to engage in when we are aware of suffering. It empowers us to transform our experience of the world, of others, and of ourselves. It empowers us to move from feeling overwhelmed or afflicted by suffering to a place of agency. It gives us something to do even when, on an external level, there may be no action to take. In highly developed meditators, and sometimes spontaneously with any of us, the Love on Every Breath meditation can have a significant effect on those people we are sending love to, in terms of alleviating their suffering and shifting their experience to one of being loved. In any case, when we let go of our fixed ideas of other people, the space that is freed up allows for new possibilities to emerge. Our relationships often improve and outcomes are better.
Third, instead of clinging to a fixated ego perspective, we can learn to love ourselves and others more deeply, to have compassion for ourselves and one another. A fresh, open space is created in our mind for the people we know. This shifts our relationships. We stop projecting the past onto others. Then enhanced skillfulness and effectiveness emerge in our words and actions.
Fourth, in shifting away from ego contraction, opening more deeply to love and compassion, and letting go of clinging to our negativity and fear, we can connect with our innate awakened mind, our innate buddha nature (for more, see the next section, “Awakening, Buddha Nature, and Our Subtle Body”). This gives us a deeper sense of our fundamental or basic goodness. This is incredibly healing. We begin to realize that we are not our insecurities, we are not our unwholesome habit patterns, and we are not our neuroses. As we come to more clearly know our natural goodness, we can face and take responsibility for our shadow side, our unconscious material that sometimes acts out or erupts, since we know that is not who we are at our core. Then we can work more consciously and skillfully with our shadow material.
Examples of Compassion: Mark and Linda
An example of this happened in the life of one of my students, Mark, who engaged daily with Love on Every Breath for over a year. Mark was a professor whose department chair, Frank, continually made his life difficult by opposing his ideas and limiting funding opportunities. Mark did not care for Frank at all. However, after practicing Tonglen for many months, Mark decided to focus on this colleague in his meditation. Contemplating Frank’s suffering, Mark came to understand and have compassion for Frank’s insecurities and competitiveness. Mark’s feelings toward Frank became more neutral; in his mind, there now was a bigger, fresh space for Frank to show up in. The next time they met, Mark engaged Frank with this new attitude. Mark spoke to him without any negative charge, and Frank responded by showing up differently in the relationship. He became much less tense and stopped exhibiting his usual derogatory behavior. Over time, as Mark continued with the meditation, their relationship mellowed and became nonproblematic. Sometimes, when we let go of our end of the rope, the other person does, too.
Another example was Linda, a client who was dying of ALS disease. Once a week, I drove to Linda’s home, where she was ensconced in a hospital bed in the living room. Linda was concerned about her six-year-old granddaughter, Laura. Linda’s son, Laura’s father, was a drug addict, and Laura’s mother also had issues that prevented her from being a fit mother. Linda wanted to do something before she died to help her granddaughter.
We decided to work with the Love on Every Breath Tonglen meditation and to focus on an upcoming court hearing that would determine who would take care of Laura. We started the meditation focusing on the child. Over some weeks we expanded our meditation to include the parents, social workers, attorneys, foster parents, and all the other people who were in the child’s life and involved in the court case. As the time got closer to the hearing, we imagined the courtroom with all the participants present. We did the meditation for each person involved, including the judge. In Love on Every Breath, you eventually see everyone as healed, illuminated, and awakened. As we did the practice, we saw this happening for everyone. We prayed for the best possible outcome for the child. It was a really tough situation because Laura had no other grandparents,