Note, this is the third of three posts (see here and here) wherein I aim to help us move into the heart of being as well as gain the kind of perspective needed to survive the collective trauma still ahead. All three were first posted on exopermaculture.com in March 2011. I have altered, and condensed or excerpted, each of them somewhat, but the original posts remain there .
Introduction
The evening of September 11, 2001, my awareness having been altered profoundly, I went to bed and found myself staring into the dark. I could feel my own being resonating with that of the entire, traumatized, human species. The question arose: What can I do, how can I help? This question was very real; in fact, it obsessed me.
Then, subtly, as if the universe magically bent in the direction of my strong intent, without conscious choice my breathing altered. I found myself, rather than cowering in fear, doing the opposite: I began to consciously breathe in all the suffering, all the Fear, the PTSD infecting the whole human world, circulating it through my heart, and then breathing it out transformed, as Love. Over and over again, for hours.
It felt like my work.
Soon after I discovered that this is a Buddhist practice, and has a name, “tonglen.”
Nearly ten years later, the Fukushima earthquake and radiation release nudged me to alter my tonglen practice . . .
How Fukushima has Altered My Tonglen Practice
What can we do to help moderate both the personal and the collective response to this extraordinary event? Well, for one thing, it helps to breathe. Fear constricts, to the point where we actually stop breathing. Conscious breathing opens the heart. Love pours in. Love or Fear. These are the choices. It’s really quite stark.
I’ve noted in several posts since the Japan quake that, just as after 9/11, I have found myself practicing the Buddhist breathing technique called tonglen. Breathe the world’s suffering into the heart; transmute; breathe out love and compassion.
Meanwhile, as I continue to skim the various, and somewhat contradictory, channeled reports as to whether or not the earthquake was manmade or natural, I’m struck by the unanimity in them as to one factor: that Mother Earth is going through a cleansing process, and that this involves release of negative energies through giant storms, volcanic eruptions, and unusually large earthquakes.
“Release of negative energies”: I’m reminded of a conversation with my late husband Jeff Joel, about how the earth has been trampled for centuries with the blood and gore of armies, the bedraggled footsteps of starving migrants, and, in the past 300 years, the industrial and chemical and nuclear waste that we so cavalierly “throw away.” As if there is an “away” on a finite planet.
Let’s add to this understanding, that of an apparent balance being created between the enormous release of negativity and what appears to be an intensification of the frequencies of light bathing the planet. This intensification is palpable to anyone who has cleared or is in the process of clearing his or her old reactive patterns. Clearing our patterns opens the spiritual pores, so to speak, and lets in that light.
With this balancing action in mind, I have shifted my tonglen practice, to simultaneously incorporate both the light and the dark. It is a practice that comes quite naturally to anyone who works with chi kung and/or tai chi, where we are continuously absorbing, integrating and releasing currents of chi from all directions. Here is the practice:
Standing or sitting: Vertical on the inhale: absorb the intensifying light down into the crown chakra of the head and the compacted darkness buried in the earth up through the feet. Absorb these energies, the light and the dark, from above and below, simultaneously on the in-breath into the heart. Circulate to transmute. Then, horizontal on the exhale: breathe out Love throughout all of the kingdoms of nature, including humanity.
Lying down: Vertical on the inhale: simultaneously absorb the intensifying light into the front of the body from above and the compacted darkness into the back of the body from below. Concentrate in the heart, circulate and transmute. Horizontal on the exhale: breath out Love . . .
I find this practice even more satisfying than the original. In absorbing the darkness, I absorb the currents of past and present nuclear suffering of people in Japan as it descends into the earth, crosses the ocean floor, up through the land mass of western U.S. into my body in Bloomington, Indiana.
If I didn’t realize our interconnectedness, or, in the beautiful metaphor of chaos theory, the global effects of a butterfly’s fluttering wing, I’d think this practice foolish.
But I do realize our interconnectedness, and I’m so very grateful.
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And yet, it is well to remember the last line of this next quote from the author of The Game of Thrones . . .
In 2022, I find myself doing tonglen breathing with every step I take during my three to four mile morning walks with puppy Shadow. And when I actually meet another human being, when they can take their eyes off their screens long enough to check out Shadow, then their eyes rise to meet mine, and we meet in the heart, right there — on the sidewalk, or in the store aisle, or on the forest path. We meet and greet soul to soul, in Love, smiling, or with a big hello . . .
With each mutual greeting, my heart lifts. Swells. In gratitude.