Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Slogan: "Drive all blames into one"

"Drive all blames into one" is saying, instead of always blaming the otyher, own the feeling of blame, own the anger, own the loneliness, and make friends with it. Use tonglen practice to see how you can place the anger of the fear or the loneliness in a cradle of loving-kindness; use tonglen to learn how to be gentle with all that stuff. In order to be gentle and create an atmosphere of compassion for yourself, it's necessary to stop talking to yourself about how wrong everything is---or how right everything is, for that matter.

I challenge you to experiment this way: drop the object of your emotion, do tonglen, and see if in fact the intensity of the so-called poison lessens. I have experimented with this, and because my doubt was so strong, for a while it seemed that it didn't work. But as my trust grew, I found that that's what happens---the intensity of the emption lessens, and so does the duration. This happens because the ego begins to be ventilated. We are all primarily addicted to ME. This big solid ME begins to be aerated when we go against the grain and abide with our feelings instead of blaming the other.

The "one" in "Drive all blames into one" is our tendency to protect ourselves: ego-clinging. When we drive all blames into this tendency by staying with our feelings and feeling them fully, the ongoing monolithic ME begins to lighten up, because it is fabricated withour opinions, our moods, and a lot of ephemeral--but at the same time vivid and convincing--stuff.

-Pema Chödrön

No comments: