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    • Four Benefits of the Love on Every Breath Meditation

      An excerpt from Love on Every Breath by Lama Palden Drolma

      At this time, when our human family is facing many challenges, it is more important than ever that we find peace and sustenance in our hearts. In the new book Love on Every Breath: Tonglen Meditation for Transforming Pain into Joy, author Lama Palden Drolma introduces a profound, ancient meditation that has been practiced in isolated mountain retreats in the Himalayas for centuries, which is now available to the modern world.

      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. That is why Lama Palden prefers to teach the more user-friendly “Love on Every Breath” variation to Westerners, which comes from the Shangpa lineage of two enlightened women.

      We hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt from the book.

      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.

      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.

      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. 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.

      Lama Palden Drolma is the author of Love on Every Breath. A licensed psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and coach, she has studied Buddhism in the Himalayas with some of the most preeminent Tibetan masters of the twentieth century. Following a traditional three-year retreat under his guidance, Kalu Rinpoche authorized her to become one of the first Western lamas. She subsequently founded the Sukhasiddhi Foundation, a Tibetan Buddhist teaching center in Fairfax, California. Visit her online at www.lamapalden.org.

      Excerpted from the book Love on Every Breath. Copyright ©2019 by Lama Palden Drolma. Printed with permission from New World Library.

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    • Double Vision: Dream of Cousin's House

      I had a dream last night of my cousin’s house. I was able to see the hallway to her living room and a part of a couch. I also saw the stairs to her bedroom, and that the bedroom had a sliding glass door. It was also clear that her bedroom was long but not wide. I was able to see this through the sliding glass door from the outside. The weird thing is that I have never been to my cousin’s house, yet when I described her house as I had seen it in my dream, she was as amazed and confused as I was, because my description was totally accurate. Can you explain this to me? (My birth date: 9/14/70) – Marissa

      Dreamchaser:

      Marissa, thanks for asking this question. I know that many people experience this kind of dream, but never say anything because it just sounds so far-fetched. What happened in your dream was your soul left your body and went to your cousin’s house. This is called astral travel. Astral travel is defined as an out of body experience where there is a conscious separation of the soul from the body. Most people who come back from an astral travel experience will talk of being very high up in the sky looking down. I am more like you, Marissa: I go to actual physical places; I do not just fly around in the sky.

      The most interesting part of this to me is that you remember it. We leave our bodies all the time and go away. Have you ever awakened with a start and felt completely disoriented? You might have looked around but you couldn’t quite figure out where you were, even though you were in your own bedroom? You were waiting for your soul to catch back up with your mind/body. Sometimes the opposite happens as well. Our souls will try to wake us up from a scary dream or place, and our mind/body will not cooperate. That is when you can remember trying to wake yourself up.

      I know I repeat myself in this column, and here I go again. Oftentimes when we sleep, our souls leave our bodies and go where they most need to be to heal from today and prepare for tomorrow. From time to time, our conscious minds just cannot deal with situations happening around us. We go to sleep and let our souls do the work. I know when I get stressed or sad, I try to take a nap. At times it is just the fix I need. We do not always remember these “trips.” When we astral travel, however, we do remember, and are aware of the trip as it is happening and after we wake up. Apparently, we can train ourselves to astral travel at will. If you are interested in that, do a search on the Internet for “astral travel.” I suggest you search anyway, Marissa, so that you can learn more than we can tell you here.

      The bottom line here is not to be afraid of this experience, or those you have had before or will have in the future. This is a very normal and natural thing to happen. Your cousin confirming your visit was just that: Confirmation. You needed to know that it is real. When we question the validity of something, spirit will find a way to show us the truth. I think you cannot doubt that you had this experience. Rock on, spirit!

      I wish you exciting travels.

      *****

      Astrea:

      You and your cousin have a telepathic connection. Your subconscious is trying to bring you closer together with this dream. There must be some reason that you need to be in contact with one another on a more regular basis.

      You dreamed of her house at probably the same time she was dreaming of her home. You shared this dream much the same way that people who are in love at a distance share their dreams without ever knowing that is happening. I have known people who have had similar experiences with parents, siblings and exes.

      The advantage you have is that you know now that you can at least receive messages from her. Start practicing. The two of you should set up a practice schedule. Every day is probably too much for people with busy lives, but you can agree on an hour or so three or four times a week. Try to practice at many different times, but keep as many as you can early in the day.

      Buy your cousin a deck of ESP cards and get a deck for yourself. These are the cards that have symbols on them such as triangles, circles, squares and wavy lines. Take turns on alternate days sending 10 cards mentally to one another. Keep a little notebook of the cards you send and the cards you receive. Send on one day, and receive during the next practice session.

      Don’t compare notes for at least 90 days, then send each other your lists and compare what you got right and what you didn’t. See if there is a better time of day. I believe that you will find your accuracy gets stunningly better! By the last 30 days, you should be ripping through those symbols with at least 85 percent accuracy. Remember, 50 percent is normal, even for people who are not connected, so you two should start with a higher rate of accuracy.

      When you find that this is not only possible, but getting easier all the time, depart from your ESP cards and start sending mental photos to each other. Stay with the every other day routine. In about a year, you should easily be able not only to get the correct images, but to be able to “call” each other at any time. You’ll also find windows into past lives and other experiences you and your cousin have shared before this lifetime.

      Sometimes cousins are much closer than siblings telepathically and emotionally. The universe is opening up something rare and beautiful between you. Take the time to practice with each other, and enjoy the benefits of having a soul sister in this crazy world!

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