I have discovered many people in the Province for whom Centering Prayer is, as it is for me, very important. Especially in this time of tragic divisions in our world, it is, I think, a particularly helpful way not only of focusing on our oneness with God, but also of being taken into the common center of humanity.

There is another kind of breath prayer offered us by Buddhism—a practice called “Tonglen”—which can be very useful, particularly when we are feeling overwhelmed by the world’s crises and by our inability to respond to them in meaningful ways. It helps us to use the very obstacles we experience in our efforts to be for others the kind of people we would like to be.

The practice of Tonglen begins with the desire to be compassionate toward others. The thesis is that the best way to help others is to develop sympathy and friendship for yourself. If you can relate to and accept your own grief, confusion and anger, your own neediness and jealousy, says Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist monk, you can extend that out to relate directly and gently with the sadness, confusion and anger, the neediness and jealousy of people everywhere.

In this suffering world right now, there are so many people whose lives are filled with rage and grief, it would seem a useful way to use some of our own dark struggles. According to Pema, they are grist both for our own freedom and for the freedom of others. “These things that really haunt us and drive us crazy,” she says, “actually have enormous energy in them.”

And so, when we feel those dark passions, instead of trying to overcome them or to explain them away or moving too quickly beyond them, we breathe them in. We breathe in dark, heavy, hot through all the pores of our bodies, focusing not on the occasion of our reaction (the absence or illness of a loved one; the pile of papers on my desk, all of which must be attended to when there’s no time to attend to them properly; the politician on the TV who is presenting a case for protecting U.S. interests at the expense of another country) we don’t focus on the person or the thing--they become catalysts--but on the feeling: the anger, the grief, the confusion, and breathe it in. But we deliberately breathe out spaciousness; openness that is very light, fresh, clear and cool. We stay focused on the feeling and try to balance the darkness and light, the mugginess and freshness; the hot and the cool. It sounds odd, but I think what it does is recognize that the person or thing in question really isn’t the cause of our reaction, our fixation on ourselves is. And so we handle it not by squelching the feeling but by putting it in balance.

The next step is the realization that there are billions of people all over the world who are experiencing the same emotion at this moment. In order to make the focus on others real, we need to start with something of which we have been a part; something that opens our hearts to compassion. One memory that always works for me is something that happened a good ten years ago when I was the on call overnight chaplain during my CPE residency. I had been summoned to the pediatric unit for something else, but as I was leaving I passed a room in which a little boy of about six was sitting up in bed calling gently and tearfully for his mother. I don’t know how sick he was or what has become of him since, but he has become for me all the children in the world who are lonely and bereft of the person they most need to love them. That memory never fails to awaken my compassionate heart.

Having moved, then, from a focus on our own grief, anger, whatever, to that of a beloved person (even if, as in my example, it isn’t someone we know well) we move to those billions in the world who are experiencing the same emotion. We breathe in the grief or the rage from all of them so they no longer have to have it.

And we understand better, from our own experience, how those emotions have created the kind of retaliation and war and domination we see in the world around us. Breathing it in doesn’t make our rage or grief any greater, instead it softens us as we hope that all of us could be free of this kind of pain. “Your pain is like kindling, or a stepping stone for understanding the pain of others.”

So, I start with myself, I move out, but still close to home, and then extend the practice and breathe in the suffering of all the people who are suffering the anguish of my dark feeling. In this way I can let my own experience be a stepping stone for spreading compassion throughout the whole world.