Often guided meditations have you breathe in positivity: love, joy, kindness, and then breathe out negativity. Tonglen meditation, a Tibetan Buddhist practice, does the opposite. You breathe in pain, your own or the pain of others. You breathe in anger. You breathe in sadness. You breathe out relief, love, happiness. This helps you develop kinship with others. It opens your bodhichitta: your awakened heart.
Ironically, this is the kind of meditation that always makes me feel better. You’d think breathing in the negativity would make you feel worse but there’s something heartening about it. It feels like you’re taking that pain and turning it into love, and being able to do that feels empowering. It feels like what you're giving out, you're getting back.
In Pema Chodron’s Start Where You Are, she says “when the resistance is gone, so are the demons.” She says this is the underlying logic of tonglen. She tells a story about Milarepa, a revered Tibetan yogi. Here it is, abridged:
“Milarepa is one of the heroes, one of the brave ones, a very crazy, unusual fellow. He was a loner who lived in caves by himself and meditated wholeheartedly for years….One evening Milarepa returned to his cave after gathering firewood, only to find it filled with demons…Even though he had the sense that they were just a projection of his own mind—all the unwanted parts of himself—he didn’t know how to get rid of them.
So first he taught them the dharma. He…said things to them about how we are all one. He talked about compassion and shunyata and how poison is medicine. Nothing happened. The demons were still there. Then he lost his patience and got angry and ran at them. They just laughed at him. Finally, he gave up and just sat down on the floor, saying ‘I’m not going away and it looks like you’re not either, so let’s just live here together.’
At that point, all of them left except one…Milarepa didn’t know what to do, so he surrendered himself even further. He walked over and put himself right in the mouth of the demon and said, ‘Just eat me up if you want to.’ Then that demon left, too.
When the resistance is gone, so are the demons.