Pema Chodron’s instructions on how to practice Tonglen meditation transformed the way I handled a job rejection the other day.
“We’ll get back to you,” she said in a condescending tone. “All you have to do is wait for our decision.”
I did ask her to clarify when she’d get back to me but didn’t get any straightforward answer. That was at the end of a rather strange job interview over Zoom. And “strange” was putting it very politely. I was constantly interrupted and felt like my expertise was put under question. Going through the interview in my head, I felt like I was intentionally humiliated by the recruiter. So I wasn’t surprised when I hadn’t heard from her at all. She couldn’t bother to tell me that I had failed the interview.
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Join PatreonEven though I meditated and practiced non-attachment, I was hooked on the idea of working in that company. It was a remote position with your own work schedule and a lot of perks on top. Going in, I was confident that I’d meet all of their requirements. Even after the humiliating interview, I kept checking my email (and junk folder) several times a day, hoping for some contact, and I even declined other offers in hopes of getting that one. And I ended up getting nothing.
Then I began to panic. I thought, “What about my bills? What about my rent?”
Suddenly, I stopped and remembered the word “shenpa.”
Pema Chodron teaches that shenpa is “the barometer of ego clinging, a gauge of our self-involvement and self-importance.” In more simple terms, it means that shenpa has a quality associated with grasping or, conversely, pushing away.
This is the feeling of I like, I want, I need and I don’t like, I don’t want, I don’t need, I want it to go away. And that’s what I felt at that moment. I felt that I really wanted that job, and I really hated the recruiter for rejecting and humiliating me.
Now, I’m a firm believer that negativity doesn’t work. So I felt the need to release the accumulated negative energy from my mind and body. And that is when I turned to Pema Chodron‘s tonglen meditation script. In her book Comfortable with Uncertainty, she writes:
In its essence, [tonglen meditation] is: when anything is painful or undesirable, breathe it in. In other words, you don’t resist. You surrender to yourself, you acknowledge who you are, you honor yourself. As unwanted feelings and emotions arise, you actually breathe them in and connect with what all humans feel. We all know what it is to feel pain in its many guises.
Then she adds that we can transform negativity and breathe it out as positivity:
By the same token, if you feel some sense of delight — if you connect with what for you is inspiring, opening, relieving, relaxing — you breathe it out, you give it away, you send it out to everyone else. … [I]t’s very personal. It starts with your feeling of delight, your feeling of connecting with a bigger perspective, your feeling of relief or relaxation. … In this way if we do the practice personally and genuinely, it awakens our sense of kinship with all beings.
Then she explains how to practice tonglen meditation within a 10-minute session. Tonglen meditation has four steps:
Pema Chodron teaches that the first step of tonglen meditation is aimed at calming your mind and body and lasts a minute or so:
Rest your mind … in a state of openness or stillness.
In the second step of tonglen meditation, Pema Chodron instructs us to get accustomed to the general “texture” of our feelings as we breathe them in and out and prepare for the main part of the tonglen meditation:
Work with texture. Breathe in a feeling of hot, dark, and heavy — a sense of claustrophobia — and breathe out a feeling of cool, bright, and light — a sense of freshness. Breathe in through all the pores of your body and radiate out completely through all the pores of your body. Do this until your visualization feels synchronized with your in and out-breaths.
In the third and main step of tonglen meditation, Pema Chodron instructs us to breathe in suffering and breathe out joy:
Now contemplate any painful situation that’s real to you. For example, you can breathe in the hot, dark, constricted feeling of sadness [or anger] that you feel, and breathe out a light, cool sense of joy or space or whatever might provide relief.
In the final step of tonglen meditation, Pema Chodron instructs us to extend our goodwill to all beings:
Widen the circle of compassion by connecting with all those who feel this kind of pain and extending the wish to help everyone.
Here’s a tonglen meditation script audio by Pema Chodron:
How to use this recording:
- Read the steps above.
- Choose a comfortable meditation posture.
- Press “play,” close your eyes, and follow the instructions.
- Don’t worry about prolonged silence. Pema Chodron’s voice will signal the start and end of each meditation step.
- You may have noticed that in the third stage of tonglen meditation, instructions in the book say to concentrate on your own feelings and emotions, while the audio version says to concentrate on the suffering of someone close to you. You can adjust the meditation to your needs: if you need to work on yourself, by all means do that; if you want to concentrate on someone else, you can do that too. If you choose to concentrate on yourself, when in the audio Pema Chodron says “begin to do tonglen for another person,” start doing it for yourself and visualize yourself instead of another person.
About the book’s author: Pema Chödrön is an American Tibetan-Buddhist. She is an ordained nun, former acharya of Shambhala Buddhism and disciple of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Chödrön has written several dozen books on Buddhist practice, including Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change and When Things Fall Apart.
Complement with our articles on how to practice lovingkindness meditation and how to prevent a buildup of negative energy in your body and mind.
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