I learned a new take on tonglen this week, the Tibetan practice of giving and taking. The way I've been doing it in the last few years, is to imagine myself taking in the suffering of others on an in- breath, and then imagining myself sending out liberation, comfort, just the feeling of release. But in this online Varajana course I'm taking, I've learned that we practice generosity by breathing out our virtues, our skills, our ability to love.
That is practicing generosity in meditation.
Practicing generosity in daily life is quite simple, being more gradually willing to let go of possessions, ideas of the self, resources. Mingyur Rinpoche demonstrates it by shifting a coconut from one hand to the other. It's not being attached to things, but also not to the fruits of our skills.
For me these days, generosity is practicing the letting go of my usual comforts to focus on cleaning, then dedicating any energy, skill, comfort I get from cleaning to anyone who is struggling to find the motivation and energy to take care of themselves. Yesterday and this morning, I gave up the twenty minutes of blissful meditation to pick up stuff.
This is an extension of last week's insight into the difference between anger and hatred. Anger is the emotion that arises. Hatred is anger in practice. To begin to untangle and de-iterate this habit of hatred, one needs to look at how to iterate love. Ther is love the spontaneous feeling, and love the practice. When I look around my chaotic home, I see the I am not practicing love in this domain. I see myself surrounded in learned helplessness. I think of everyone who feels helpless, I clean, and send any motivation I am accumulating through these increased minutes and hours of cleaning.
An interesting thing happened this weekend. I did a cleaning meditation that started with picking up all the paper, chip bags, light squalor from the floor, feeling the resistance, and sending out any good that might come of this. And suddenly, in the middle of his online video game with a friend, my son turned to me and said, "is there anything I can do to help?"
The impact of generosity.
