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The Sagacious Buddhist Blog

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by the Buddhist Anagārika Pasannacitta

(a.k.a. Anagārika Michael Turner)
​


Everyday Life Coach and applied-Buddhism Trainer offering deeply transformative personal coaching, counselling, teaching, and guidance with a focus on cultivating the positive mental habits that develop your capacity to experience increasing resilience, happiness, and joy.




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AUDIO: Tonglen Meditation — Benefits and Techniques to Cultivate Compassion and Awakening [Dharma Talk MP3]

7/7/2022

5 Comments

 
The Taking-and-Giving Meditation: a detailed dharma talk on how to do it and what the techniques, benefits, and results are; and using it to cultivate compassion to overcome your own pain, stress, and suffering.
Tonglen meditation to ease suffering and overcome problems

Using Tonglen meditation to ease suffering, overcome problems, cultivate the brahmavihārās, and attain Buddhist awakening (streamentry)


​In this dharma talk I dive into the details of a somewhat-lesser-known meditation technique that anyone can use to overcome mental suffering, physical pain, and generate deep and transformative states of compassion and gratitude. I also cover the importance of Right Effort, determination, and good teachers, and how these are critical to cultivating resilient states of contentment and to making spiritual progress.

[download mp3 file]
​

Introduction to the Dharma Talk

(a transcription of the introduction)

​After talking with a student briefly about Tonglen, the taking-and giving-meditation, I was asked to go into more detail on the purpose, technique, and benefit of Tonglen as a meditation practice and the following unscripted dharma talk is an excerpt from what was otherwise a longer conversation.

But before we get started, I would like to take a moment to talk about Tonglen.  For the sake of brevity, I will assume that you already know, at least at a high level, what Tonglen is.  Tonglen, the process of breathing in the pain of others and breathing out ease and comfort to send back to those who are the object of our meditation sounds simple at face-value.  But Tonglen is so much more than what is typically covered and talked about by other teachers.  It's even much deeper than what I talk about in this dharma talk, mostly because, what I refer to as Level 2 and Level 3 Tonglen were beyond the scope of this teaching and beyond the reach of this student.  But we all have to start somewhere and we must learn how to walk, before we can learn how to run, as it were.

Tonglen, when approached skilfully and correctly can not only help us cultivate and develop our capacity of selfless and painless compassion for the plight of others, but it can also be one of the most effective techniques we can leverage when we are experiencing extended periods of our own suffering.  It can help us process our pain by putting our dukkha into perspective, whether it be periods of fear and anxiety, doubt and insecurity, anger and ill-will, greed and jealousy, or any of the many other forms that our suffering can take, whether it be our mental pain or physical pain.

Doing the taking-and-giving meditation can very effective at easing our unwanted mental and physical states by transforming our pain into gratitude and appreciation. While that sounds like a far stretch, it's entirely attainable, even with only a little practice.  It forces us to approach our own experience of pain from the perspectives and the feelings of others who are experiencing similarly painful feelings or conditions, many of whom are experiencing conditions and situations far worse than we are.  And that has the power to pull us out of our narrow-minded perspective and free us from the self-cherishing mind and afflictive mind-states that pull us down.  It frees us from the negatively tainted mind that thinks, 'I’m the only one who is suffering like this, no one else feels what I feel, or is treated so unkindly like this.'

Because so often we take our life or situation for granted and focus on a few unwanted or unfortunate circumstances.  This perspective leads to negative thinking, which not only leads us down the path of sorrow, fear, anger, or resentment, but it all too often also leads to wasting the many wonderful opportunities that are available to us, but are otherwise clouded by our afflicted mind-states.  So, it's important to recognise, appreciate, and be grateful for the fortunate circumstances that we have available to us and not waste them, and this is where Tonglen can provide us with so much practical value.
Metta Meditation Beingpeacefully Picture
RELATED: EASY 10-MINUTE AUDIO GUIDE
Mettā Meditation
​How to Do It Effectively

​- with bonus -
Explanation, Instruction, Transcript 

​Tonglen diverts the grasping mind from clutching at our ego, and our ego is generally at the very center of our painful and harmful feelings and emotions.  It does so by helping us cultivate selfless compassion and lovingkindness for others, which is a form of compassion, that when coupled with wisdom, understands that compassion for others is truly compassion for ourselves.

It has the power to do this because it serves to break down the solidity of our ego — which ultimately is often the source of so much of our suffering — it chips away at the strength of our strong sense of self, and opens the doors of our compassion and love by softening the hard exterior of our heart; that is, the hard protective coating that we've slowly developed, layer-by-layer, over a lifetime of painful experiences and hurt.

But Tonglen is more than just a practice that can cultivate and develop the qualities of non-self, but it can also help us develop and mature truly genuine states of the brahmavihārās, otherwise known as the limitless ones.  These are the wholesome qualities deep within each and every one of us that can be cultivated limitlessly, without limit, those of compassion, lovingkindness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity for all sentient beings, even when faced with direct threats to our contentment and general sense of peacefulness and well-being.

And anything that can do that, and do it consistently, reliably, and in time, easily, is a very powerful practice indeed, and therefore, something that's worth taking the time to explore, learn, practice, and cultivate.

But don't get me wrong, we don't have to be in pain for the practice of Tonglen to be powerful and transformative, it does that all on its own when we approach it skilful and properly.  Tonglen is a practice that anyone whether they are Buddhists or not, can learn, develop, and benefit from.

But beyond all that...

Tonglen can additionally be used to settle our mind before we transition into a period of mindfulness of breathing meditation.  Contemplating the dukkha experienced by those less fortunate that we are can fuel our motivation to transform our own moment-to-moment adversity and discontentment into continued progress along the path.  It helps to calm and stabilise our mind and body before we meditate, which will lay a better foundation for us to observe our breath peacefully, mindfully, thereby opening the doors to deeper levels of concentration, which is ultimately the purpose of meditation.

I hope you find the following dharma talk on Tonglen to be of value to you and to your practice, and if you enjoy this teaching, please share it with others, and visit the rest of this website to access more of my teachings or to learn more.

A Brief and Incomplete Outline


The dharma talk is preceded by a 5-minute recorded  introduction: see the transcript of the introduction above. 

Here is a completely incomplete outline of the dharma talk that follows:
  • Breaking down the ego-driven hard shell around out heart
    • opening ourselves up to compassion
    • compassion is critical to our own sense of happiness
    • tearing down the suffering caused by our own aversions, resistance, and resentment to our unwanted feelings and emotions
  • Putting our suffering and our problems into perspective
  • Recognising how gratitude and appreciation are boundless sources of peace and contentment
  • Cultivating the foundations for the brahmavihārās, the limitless ones, of lovingkindness, compassion, altruistic joy, and equanimity
  • Summary of the purpose and benefits of Tonglen
  • Understanding our suffering fuels our motivation to learn, study, and practice the dharma and to meditate
  • Tonglen is only powerful and beneficial if we truly understand why and how, and cultivate the correct understanding, motivations, and intentions to practice is properly and wisely
  • Objects can be human, but also animal and insect
  • Tonglen helps to cultivate deep levels of compassion, ultimate levels, on the levels of ultimate bodhicitta
  • The power of Buddhism to change the levels of happiness an contentment we experience
  • The importance of Right Effort in our practice
  • Briefly Tonglen meditation versus Mettā meditation (lovingkindness)
  • Tonglen is a practice any of us can start benefiting from right away
  • Beyond Level 1 Tonglen, a sneak peak into Level 3 Tonglen
  • Importance of good teachers
  • How cultivating Tonglen cultivates progress toward streamentry and Buddhist awakening (streamentry)

Would you like me to be your teacher?  If you are interested in working together to make veritable progress as a Buddhist, you need a trustworthy teacher.  Please visit my training page or contact me to learn more; I am available as a skilled resource to guide you along your journey.  Opportunities to meet someone who can veritably teach what I teach don't come by often.

If you enjoyed reading this, please consider making a donation to our student community to help make future teachings possible.  Why Donate?  Learn More Here.

If you gained any insight from this article, please consider subscribing. And if you wouldn't mind sharing your thoughts or just saying 'thanks' in the comment field below, it means quite a bit to me to know that I may have been of value to others.

But perhaps most of all, would you mind sharing this with others on your social media platform of choice?

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5 Comments
Kevin Schultz
6/8/2022 14:12:46

I loved this talk on tonglen, especially the visual image of the black smoke, that was so powerful. I also appreciated how you tied it to reducing our own suffering. Well done! High quality audio too.

Reply
Michael Turner link
6/8/2022 15:05:31

Thank you, Kevin. I am grateful that you took the time to listen to my dharma talk and that you additionally took the time to provide me with your feedback.

May your day be a peaceful and your practice resilient.

Reply
Gary Fischer
6/26/2022 00:03:49

This was very inspiring! Your section on wise compassion really hit the mark for me and resonated deeply. This was excellent. Thank you for posting this, it has really touched me deep in my heart. Please post more dharma talks like this.

Reply
Michael Turner link
6/26/2022 10:05:52

Hi Gary,

That is very kind of you, thank you for sharing how my teaching impacted you.

Please subscribe to my blog, I will continue to post more dharma talks as they are available. May your weekend be a pleasant one.

With mettā,
Michael

Reply



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    Anagārika Michael Turner Buddhist Teacher, Dhamma Trainer, Dharma Coach
    Anagārika Pasannacitta

    Hi! My name is Pasannacitta (my layperson name is Michael Turner).

    ​I am a pre-monastic sakadāgāmi, early Buddhist teacher, enlightenment and streamentry (awakening) mentor, resilience and happiness counsellor, everyday life coach, and full-time Buddhist anagārika.

    ​I've spent more than 30 years learning and cultivating what I do, and what I do goes far beyond meditation and dharma.

    I work with Buddhist practitioners of all levels to help them attain measurable spiritual progress toward Nibbāna. This special kind of one-on-one training isn't readily available to lay practitioners and I hope to do my part as I prepare to prepare to become a monk and enter into full-time Buddhist monastic life.

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    It is worth noting that what is on-offer here is very special.  I am a skilled pre-monastic early Buddhist ācariya and I will be a Buddhist monk, scholar, and teacher.  There are few people outside of authentic Buddhist monasteries who can genuinely offer this kind of applied guidance and advanced training to lay practitioners.​

    Please visit my home page and my about me to learn more about my style and what it is that I teach.

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Anagārika Michael Turner Buddhist Teacher Philosopher, Dharma Coach, Meditation Instructor, Business Leader, Sales Trainer, and Mentor
Anagārika Pasannacitta
Pasannacitta is a pre-monastic ariya-puggala and a full-time Buddhist anagārika; and he is also a deeply accomplished streamentry mentor and applied-dharma teacher. He emphasises and teaches the practical application of the Buddha's teachings in our everyday lives to overcome our human problems that stand in the way of making measurable progress toward Buddhist enlightenment and he is particularly adept at explaining them in ways that can be easily understood and practiced by Western Buddhists. He has been meditating and cultivating the views and techniques that generate indestructible resilience, inner-strength, and direct experience for more than 30 years and has helped countless numbers of students enhance and course-correct their practice to make veritable progress along the path toward Nibbāna.


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