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The Must-Try Meditation Technique That Radically Shifts Your Relationship To Fear
Tonglen meditation trains your brain to handle those pesky, tricky, highly painful things from which you might otherwise flee.
Madness and Mayhem in the Year of COVID
If you’ve ever watched the hilarious Ryan Reynolds’ Match dot com ad featuring a fabulously horned Satan figure hooking up with a young hottie whose name happens to be Twenty-twenty, then you know why it went viral. The Man From Hell and Ms. 2020, parading around New York City together, stealing toilet paper, starting dumpster fires, and sewing mayhem. It was a brilliantly over-the-top piece of work. Almost as over-the-top, maybe, as the way people’s real lives imploded last year.
Yes, the virus wreaked havoc, no question.
But so did the isolation. My Dad, for example, was parked in a senior care center in Southern California when the world shut down. Crippled by loneliness like others in his situation across the country, he reached for the one coping strategy which had always *worked* for him: alcohol. With his brain marinating in Vodka, he started blacking out, falling, ending up in the ER. On one occasion, as he was being rolled up to the hospital’s main entrance, the wheels on his wheelchair hit an uneven seam in the pavement, and he tipped over, careening out of his chair and smacking the back of his head for good measure.
The Coronavirus didn’t get my father. But the unremitting desperation sure did. The fallout from the pandemic was itself a weird kind of pandemic. Like COVID, it kept continually re-colonizing us, infecting us through viral fear and panic. This was always the dark truth hiding in the chaos.
The Antidote
So, as a longtime meditation practitioner, I turned to the wisdom traditions for help with pandemic-level overwhelm. More specifically, I turned to an elegantly simple Buddhist practice which unfolded long ago as a tool for helping people manage states of fear and aversion as a prelude to developing natural compassion and love. It’s called tonglen, and it’s all about leaning in close, to get very familiar and intimate with precisely…
