The Power of Compassionate Breathing

“With my last breath, I’ll exhale my love for you. I hope it’s a cold day, so you can see what you meant to me.
” ~ Jarod Kintz

Are you feeling anxious?

If so, notice how you are breathing.

Chances are that your breaths are quick and shallow.

Now take a few deep breaths. You’ll likely start to feel better and regain some emotional control.

If you meditate regularly, or even occasionally, you may regularly use deep breathing as a tool to help you cope when the going gets tough.

Meditation and controlled breathing have helped me manage stress in my life. Someone along the way, I picked up the technique of visualizing myself breathing in the thing I want and breathing out what I don’t want.

For instance, as I breathe deeply, I may say “I breathe in calm. I breathe out stress.”

Makes perfect sense right? You breathe in what is life-giving and breathe out what is toxic.

But I recently discovered the practice of tonglen in the Buddhist tradition that turns this logic on it’s head. In her book The Places That Scare You, renowned Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön describes tonglen:

“We breathe in what is painful and unwanted with the sincere wish that we and others could be free of suffering…Exhaling, we send out relief from the pain with the intention that we and others be happy.”

This passage immediately illuminated one of my spiritual blindspots. I realized how self-centered my approach to breathing was. I don’t wish anyone pain when I breathe out my anxiety into the world, but I don’t intentionally wish others well either. All I think about is releasing my own pain.

Then I remembered learning about the carbon cycle in school. I was fascinated by the fact that plants breathe the carbon dioxide that we humans produce and produces for us life-giving oxygen.

The practice of Tonglen or compassionate breathing allows me to become a plant for others. What if I could breathe in the spiritual toxins of anxiety, resentment, or hatred and breathe out love, compassion and understanding?

You may be wondering “What’s in this for me?” Or “How can I ever survive breathing the poison of another person?”

Chödrön writes:

“Doing tonglen for another person ventilates our very limited personal reference point, the closed-mindedness that is the source of so much pain….We do the practice whenever there is suffering-either ours or others’. After a while it becomes impossible to know whether we are practicing for our own benefit or for the benefit of others.”

Chödrön confirms the universal spiritual law that what we do for others, we do for ourselves. If we want to live in a world of love and compassion, we must be willing to go to the dark places. Paradoxically, when we do tonglen for another, we are facing the darkness within our own hearts.

Some practical ways to do tonglen

As I thought of practical ways to apply tonglen in my life, these questions came to me:

• Am I willing to be present to those who need my time and attention?
• Am I willing to truly listen to others without being distracted by my own concerns and preoccupations?
• Am I willing to hear and hold space for views contrary to my own?
• Am I willing to look into the eyes of the person begging on the street corner without turning away or throwing loose change at them?
• Am I willing to acknowledge prejudice in our world?
• Am I willing to face my own uncomfortable emotions when engaging difficult subjects?
• Am I willing to drop the stories I tell myself about why I am not good enough or worthy of love, affection, and acceptance?

Breathe the world you want into existence

What if the anxiety you feel is an invitation to participate in something bigger than yourself?

The next time you need to breathe, try the practice of tonglen.

The next time you feel powerless, know that you can breathe in whatever you wish to remove from this world and breathe out whatever you wish the world to be.