Читать книгу Love on Every Breath - Lama Palden Drolma - Страница 11
ОглавлениеAt 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, loving-kindness is defined as the sincere wish for the happiness and well-being of others. The next step beyond loving-kindness is compassion. Compassion means feeling someone else’s pain or suffering and wishing them to be free of suffering. Of course, this naturally leads to wanting them to be happy. In Mahayana§ Buddhism, loving-kindness and compassion are emphasized as essential qualities of who we truly are, qualities we can uncover within ourselves. Buddhism understands that our nature as loving and compassionate people is innate. In a study at the University of British Columbia, researchers found evidence that humans are inherently altruistic. In their study, toddlers under two years of age experienced “greater happiness when giving treats to others rather than receiving treats themselves.”2 Buddha spoke of ignorance as the source of our suffering: ignorance of our true nature as well as ignorance of the true nature of all that is. This ignorance brings about habitual patterns of ignorance and suffering that can obscure our inherent altruism. We split reality into self and other, subject and object. It’s human nature to seek distinctions. But reality is nondual.‖ There is no separation between various polarities, but rather truth includes and transcends polarities. Our misunderstanding leads us to desire or grasp for those things and people we want and to have an aversion to and push away those things and people we don’t want. This creates habitual patterns: The ego, or our sense of self, devises strategies to try to keep us safe and to get our needs met. But because all phenomena are like a rainbow, what we grasp onto never truly satisfies us.
Therefore, over many centuries, various ways of meditating have been developed to help people uncover and actualize qualities of love in themselves. These meditations spark and develop kindness and compassion in the individual, both for ourselves and for others. This is part of a transformational awakening process for the self — revealing and cultivating the wholesome qualities at the core of who we are. Over time, these kinds of meditations establish us firmly in close contact with our innate love and wisdom while we simultaneously contribute to the larger good. This leads to manifesting compassion in our world. Love on Every Breath is one of these meditations.
Realization
While Love on Every Breath specializes in the cultivation of compassion, it has an aspect of wisdom as well. Buddhism is rooted in the fact that liberation is possible for every human being. It is based on the Buddha’s own experience of transformation from an ordinary person to a fully free and enlightened being. The Buddha taught a spiritual path that enables people to realize the truth regarding the nature of mind and reality and to arrive at a happiness that is not dependent on outer circumstances.
The essence of Buddhist wisdom is to experience and understand the liberating nature of unconditioned awareness. This awareness is empty in nature. It is not a “thing.” It is present but is empty, nonsubstantial. If we look for it, there isn’t a thing we can find, but we do find an aware consciousness. Every Tibetan Buddhist meditation begins with letting go of conceptual thought and opening oneself to the truth of what is, right now in our direct experience. This goes beyond the conceptual mind. In other words, we need to let go of thinking and trying to figure everything out. Thinking cannot bring realization. Realization arises out of nonconceptuality. That is why meditation is so important, and why we let go of thinking (again and again for most of us!) during meditation. It is through meditation, a wholesome mind, and wholesome actions that realization occurs. Love on Every Breath is a creative practice (or kyérim meditation in Tibetan) that makes use of images and sounds with their symbolic meaning and conscious embodiment of love and compassion.
Complete openness and unbiased awareness are the basis of realization and prepare the practitioner for doing Love on Every Breath. We have to let go — to empty ourselves of concepts — in order to open ourselves to reality. The motivation to meditate is love, which seeks to liberate all beings from suffering, including ourselves. Compassion and love are the intention and aspiration for the meditation practice.
The Eight Steps of Love on Every Breath
The Love on Every Breath meditation has eight steps, which are described in part 2. The complete meditation is done as a sitting practice and takes about forty-five minutes to an hour from start to finish, but the practice is highly adaptable and can be easily abbreviated. I call these abbreviated versions “On-the-Spot” meditations, and I have included them for each step along with the main meditation description. These On-the-Spot variations can be done on their own, individually, anywhere, anytime, in a flash. However, even if you want to practice just one step at a time, I suggest reading through all the steps so that you have a complete understanding of the process. In addition, each step discusses the psychological issues that can arise for meditators during each meditation.
In the book’s appendices, I provide the entire Love on Every Breath meditation in both versions — traditional and On-the-Spot — and I also provide a “non-Buddhist” variation for people from other traditions. Each step of the meditation is easily adapted for those of different religions, for those who are nonreligious, and for activists; see “Love on Every Breath for Activists and Those of Other Traditions.”
Here is a brief description of each step. In step 1, Resting in Open Awareness, we let go of everything. We let go of the past and the future; we let go of any and all ideas about ourselves or others; we completely let go into our bodies and into relaxing. We become aware of our mind so that we don’t allow it to wander into thinking. Rather, we stay present with what is. Usually, the easiest way to do this is to join our attention and breath. This anchors us in our body, and in our felt sensations, instead of in our thoughts. This is a doorway into calm abiding. We simply rest in awareness and openness; openness is synonymous with emptiness.
In step 2, Seeking Refuge in Awakened Sanctuary, we go for refuge, for sanctuary, to the awakened ones. This helps create a context and the space for our meditation. We also ask the buddhas and other awakened beings to support us during our meditation.
In step 3, Cultivating Awakened Mind, we engender the altruistic intention to fully awaken to be able to help liberate all beings from suffering.
In the fourth step, Stepping into Love, we invite an awakened being, traditionally Chenrezig (see drawing), the Bodhisattva of Compassion, to be present above the crown of our head.
CHENREZIG, EMBODIMENT OF LOVE
Following our heartfelt prayers, Chenrezig dissolves into ourselves, and we meditate that we become inseparable from Chenrezig. The awakened mind is then established in the heart center as a crystal vajra of light (see drawing on facing page), which is a symbol of the indestructible, pure luminous empty reality of who we truly are, our buddha nature. The vajra is what transforms the suffering — not our individual personality or ego. This saves our ego from saying, “I don’t want to take in more suffering! I have enough of my own!”
THE VAJRA THAT APPEARS IN OUR HEART CENTER
In the fifth step, Taking and Sending for Yourself, we imagine our ordinary self in front of us and contemplate our pain and wounds, meeting ourselves with loving awareness. We breathe in our suffering as a dark smoke-like substance, breathing it right into our heart center. As soon as it touches the vajra of light, we visualize a lightning bolt arising from the vajra, transforming all suffering into white light, symbolic of unconditional awakened love and healing energy. When we are breathing out, this white light goes into the heart center of our ordinary self, where it heals, illuminates, and awakens.
In the sixth step, Taking and Sending for Others, we meditate on a loved one, and gradually we include others. As in the previous step, we contemplate their suffering, big and small, see it as dark smoke, and breathe it into the vajra in our heart. When the suffering touches the vajra, it is instantly transformed. Then, on the out-breath, we imagine the white light going into the person or people, filling them with light and healing, and eventually bringing about their awakening.
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, Linda was dying, and there seemed to be no suitable person who could take care of her.
Eventually, the case went to court, and afterward, Linda told me the story, though at this point she could barely speak. An unexpected outcome had occurred. Out of the blue, one of Laura’s former foster parents, who was eminently suitable, had come forward. Laura had bonded well with her and her family, but at the time, she had not been able to stay long-term with them. This family only fostered children temporarily who were in crisis. After considering all the evidence, including this previous foster mom’s testimony, the judge awarded long-term custody to the previous foster family, who were now able and willing to have Laura. This was indeed a surprising outcome! Linda and I were overjoyed. About ten days later, Linda, now at peace, passed away.
Linda and I had no way of knowing if our meditation helped. But Linda felt really good about what she had been able to do from bed. Who knows what really happened? We were totally okay with not knowing.
Benefits of the On-the-Spot Meditations
Doing the On-the-Spot meditation is valuable in many ways. We can do a step of this transformative meditation anytime. For example, if we hear a parent speaking to their child in an angry voice, or see a news story about refugees fleeing violence, or see an accident on the freeway. This is not a substitute for concrete action in the world, but it does create an internal shift. Opening our heart, we intentionally send out kindness and love.
The “pith essence” or “On-the-Spot” method was taught to me in my traditional Tibetan training along with the long form. The On-the-Spot method can be used in any moment when you see suffering, whether it is in the grocery store, in traffic, or at a dance concert. I often practice the step Resting in Open Awareness when waiting in line or when enjoying nature. I also attempt to (practice, practice!) let go of my ego’s preferences if I am being confronted or am in a challenging conversation. This allows me to relax my defenses and open to what the other person is saying. Then I can hear them, and later I reflect on the value of what they said. We can do this anytime throughout the day to enhance mindfulness and clarity and to let go of unwholesome patterns.
You can start by doing an On-the-Spot meditation two or three times a day, such as at a certain time or during a certain activity. Then you might want to practice doing this many times a day, for example, whenever you stop at a red light, are doing the dishes, or are brushing your teeth. Some people set an alarm on their phone to remind them. We need to make good habits. If we find ourselves in a habitual pattern of irritation, we can remember the possibility that we can drop into resting in awareness for a moment or two. Over time this becomes helpful, as our mind learns how to calm down and relax.
Once we become accustomed to this, we can drop everything and come to a calm state of mind whenever we choose. When we are triggered emotionally, it may be hard to remember, it may take extra time, or it may not be possible at all until the habit of calm abiding is firmly established. “Calm abiding” is one of the translations of the Sanskrit term samatha. Another translation is “one-pointed concentration.” All meditation done with alertness and mindfulness develops calm abiding. This is good for lowering stress. In challenging situations, this enables us to step back from the emotional charge and allows our wisdom to emerge with greater clarity. Calm abiding can be simultaneous either with witness consciousness or with resting in awareness itself.
The Uniqueness of Love on Every Breath as a Tonglen Meditation
In the standard Tonglen, the meditator simply breathes in the suffering of others and then breathes out love and compassion to them. But this approach does not always work well for Westerners, who often find it difficult to get past the ego’s roadblocks. Many people, for example, don’t like the idea of taking in someone else’s suffering; they say, “I already have enough suffering. I can’t handle any more!” Therefore, they turn away from Tonglen, and the opportunity is missed.
Twenty years ago, a highly esteemed Western Buddhist nun, Jetsunma⁋ Tenzin Palmo, was visiting me during her world teaching tour. She was due to teach at a local Zen center one weekend and asked me, “What should I teach?”
“How about Tonglen?” I replied.
“Oh no, people don’t like Tonglen. They find it too hard.”
“Oh,” I said. “I have a special Tonglen from our Shangpa lineage. It changes what is difficult for people and makes it user-friendly!”
She asked me to teach it to her. After learning it, she said to me, “Oh, this is wonderful! May I teach it?”
I attended her teachings that weekend and was glad to see people openly receiving the teaching and not complaining about difficulty with their meditation. I have noticed the same with the many hundreds of people I have taught this meditation to over the years.
It has become clear to me in over forty years of practicing Tonglen, and in thirty years teaching it, that meditating on the embodiment of enlightened love, Chenrezig,** and on the vajra of light, not only increases one’s capacity for love but provides a doorway into experiencing one’s pure being.
Source of Love on Every Breath Teaching
Many sutras,*** commentaries, and meditation practices were brought from India to Tibet between the seventh and thirteenth centuries. Some of these focused primarily on developing and uncovering our innate love and compassion. Love on Every Breath comes from the Shangpa lineage, which, like all authentic Buddhist lineages, traces from disciple to guru, heart student to teacher, back to Buddha Shakyamuni in the fifth century BCE. A guru may have one or two, or occasionally more, heart students who have received and put into practice all their teachings. The gurus are usually accomplished yogis and scholars. As yogis, they are extensively trained in many kinds of meditation and physical yogas. As scholars, they are trained in Dharma and the inner science of the mind, philosophy and logic, medicine, creative arts, and language. The relationship of teacher and student is personal and direct and imbued with great love and mutual respect, though the training and interactions can sometimes take the form of “tough love.” In these cases a guru sees what is needed in order for the student to purify themselves and come to full realization.
The Shangpa lineage was started by a Tibetan, Kyungpo Naljor, who reportedly made the trek to India from Tibet seven times to receive teachings and transmissions from the most highly esteemed Buddhist gurus of eleventh- and twelfth-century India. Of these, he said that the kindest and most important to him were two Kashmiri women, Niguma and Sukhasiddhi, each of whom is said to have actualized full and complete awakening. Due to this they are both referred to as “wisdom dakinis.” The term dakini (or daka in the masculine form) covers a wide range.†† It means literally “sky dancer.” What does this mean? Wisdom dakinis have realized shunyata, the open, empty nature of reality, which is sky-like. They play in the sky of shunyata, serving as messengers of awakened compassion and as support for yogis and yoginis (or female yogis). Wisdom dakinis are completely awakened and may teach fortunate disciples. It was not easy for Kyungpo Naljor to become Niguma’s student. She rigorously tested him before accepting him. Her tests challenged his concepts about who she was, what he knew, and who he was.
Most of the meditations I practiced in my own three-year retreat were from these two women. It is a great gift that we have these meditations given by two awakened women. The feminine transmission of Niguma and Sukhasiddhi is very simple and direct. Their teachings focus on what is most essential. I received all the transmissions and empowerments of the Shangpa lineage from my guru, Kalu Rinpoche,‡‡ in 1982. Then the lineage holder, Kalu Rinpoche emphasized the universal nature of compassion meditations, and he was known for teaching many of the great Tibetan masters, as well as being considered a preeminent yogi-scholar and retreat master of the Tibetans in his generation. He also taught many kinds of people all over the globe, including Christian priests and adepts of other religions. He had great confidence in his raggedy band of former hippies, his Western students. I later received these transmissions again from the next primary Shangpa lineage holder, Bokar Rinpoche, in 2001, and again from Tai Situpa in 2009.
In the oral teachings I received from Kalu Rinpoche in his Darjeeling monastery, and in my traditional Tibetan Buddhist three-year retreat of the Shangpa and Kagyu lineages, I was given the extensive teachings that this book offers. Shangpa yogis and yoginis have done this particular meditation for over a thousand years in Tibet. It is a gift to you from the lineage of the eleventh-century enlightened dakinis, Niguma and Sukhasiddhi. It is my wish that through the many people engaging with this meditation, our hearts will open further, and we will bring more love and cooperation into our human world.
Even a Young Child Can Do Love on Every Breath
I have taught an abbreviated version of Love on Every Breath to children. Once I knew a lovely girl named Sarah, then three years old. Sarah was interested in spiritual things and had already learned how to sit quietly for some minutes in meditation. Sarah’s godmother brought her to me because Sarah had told her how much seeing certain things upset her. She felt sad when she saw other children hurt or in conflict on the playground. Sarah told me all about this. She was a loving child and was being cared for in a loving way. Sarah also recounted how she often saw dead animals on the road while in the car. This also made her sad. She wanted to know how to help them.
I told her that there was a meditation that can help in these situations. Then I showed her a crystal vajra and told her to imagine a vajra like this, made of light, in her heart. This vajra, I said, was all the Buddha’s love and power in her own heart. Then I told her to breathe the person or animal’s suffering into the vajra in her heart and imagine that instantly the vajra changed the suffering into healing love and white light. Then she should imagine that this white light was the love and healing energy of the buddhas, and she should send it out into the person or animal. I also taught her that she could do this for herself when she was sad or unhappy. She could breathe her own sadness and unhappiness into the vajra and imagine it instantly changing her feelings into ones of love, peace, and safety.
A few weeks later she came back to see me and happily told me that she really liked doing this practice and it helped her a lot. Sarah, at three years old, was able to do this short meditation practice, giving her something to do in these situations to benefit others and to help herself. This brought her much peace.
The abbreviated form of Love on Every Breath that I taught Sarah is a version of the practice that the Tibetans call the “pith essence,” and it’s the basis for my “On-the-Spot” meditations. These distill the most important elements of the meditation into its concise version, which can be done anytime, anywhere, by anyone, regardless of religion, age, or educational background. Whether you prefer this distilled form, the traditional form, or to modify the practice to fit your own spiritual path, this book will guide you in developing your own Love on Every Breath meditation.
Love on Every Breath offers a path to feel our innate love and wisdom and to bring these forward into our consciousness and interactions in daily life. Like all Buddhist meditations, it also helps us to realize reality as it is, known in Sanskrit as dharmata. This is the basis in Buddhism for the unfolding of wisdom.
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* Vajrayana, from Sanskrit, is the actual term for Tibetan Buddhism. Vajra means “indestructible” or “diamond” and refers to our indestructible diamond-like true nature that is undisturbed by birth and death. Yana means “vehicle,” which means a vehicle or path that takes us to enlightenment. There are three primary yanas in Buddhism: Theravadin, Mahayana (which includes Zen and Chan), and Vajrayana.
† Chenrezig’s name in Sanskrit is Avalokitesvara. I have chosen to use the Tibetan version, since this meditation has been primarily practiced in Tibet.
‡ A bodhisattva is one who dedicates their life to following the path of awakening in order to free all beings from suffering and to help establish all of us in enlightenment.
§ In Sanskrit, Mahayana means “Great Vehicle,” and it is one of the three yanas or “vehicles” of Buddhism. The Mahayana, the bodhisattva vehicle, is called “great” because its purpose is to liberate all beings.
‖ Tibetan Buddhism considers reality nondual because it is beyond dualistic conceptions, like self and other, or one and many.
⁋ Jetsunma is an honorific Tibetan title meaning “venerable” that is bestowed by the head of one’s lineage.
** As I mention, you can use a different awakened or divine being if desired; see “Love on Every Breath for Activists and Those of Other Traditions.”
*** In Sanskrit, sutra means a “spiritual discourse,” one preserved in the literature of that tradition. In Mahayana Buddhism, it refers to the words of the Buddha and other greatly realized teachers.
†† For more on dakinis, see Judith Simmer-Brown’s excellent book, Dakini’s Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism.
‡‡ Rinpoche is an honorific title literally meaning “precious one.” Either it is given to a person who is found to be an incarnation of an important teacher, or it is given due to a lama’s level of activity and realization.
