~Tonglen meditation

Tonglen means "sending and receiving" in Tibetan.
We practice being revolutionaries of peace, welcoming the difficult and letting go of the wonderful.

Pema Chödrön on tonglen in her book Start Where You Are:

. . . this making friends with ourselves—it’s the key to a more sane, compassionate planet. . . . Any gesture of gentleness . . . , of honesty . . . toward yourself . . . will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others you’re doing for yourself.

p. 37
If you’re willing to drop the story line, you feel exactly what all other human beings feel.
This practice cuts through culture, economic status, intelligence, race, religion.
p. 38
Completely reversing the logic of ego, which is to say reversing the logic of suffering, . . . you are essentially breathing in the cause of suffering . . . , which is fixation. . . .

p. 39
You need to work with both . . . the immediate suffering of one person and the universal suffering of all. . . . Not theoretical, not narrow.

p. 40
The idea is to develop sympathy for your own confusion. . . . It’s extremely insulting to ego.

p. 41
The things that really drives us nuts [crazy] have enormous energy in them. That is why we fear them.