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Here, you will find simple and gentle practices, prompts and rituals inspired by Clara Barton, that will help you connect with her energy and embody her qualities.

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2. Move your awareness to your heart area and breathe in deeply, imagining yourself inhaling those dark, heavy, uncomfortable, cloudy feelings, directly into your heart. As you breathe out from the heart area, imagine that your heart is a source of bright, warm, compassionate light, and you are breathing that light into the person who is suffering. Imagine that the dark feelings are disappearing without a trace into the light of your heart; the dark clouds transforming into a bright, warm light at the center of your heart, alleviating his or her suffering.

3. Next, try extending your compassion out to a stranger that may be experiencing dark, heavy feelings at this moment. As you did for your loved one, imagine inhaling these cloudy, dark feelings away from those people into your own heart. As the dark feelings settle into your heart, imagine that they are disappearing without a trace into the light of your compassionate heart. You can imagine this person or people being enveloped by the calm and comforting light that you are breathing out from your heart.

4. Continue the above process of sending and receiving, but this time extend your compassion out to someone you find difficult to associate with. Tonglen can extend infinitely, and the more you practice, the more your compassion will expand naturally. You might be surprised to find that you are more tolerant and able to be there for people even in situations where it used to seem impossible.

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Tonglen on the spot

Tonglen can also be practiced informally and on the spot as one bears witness to suffering in everyday life. At any point during the day when you experience personal suffering or observe someone else who is suffering or struggling, you can do Tonglen for one to three breaths.

For example, if you see a mother struggling with an unruly child, you might wish to breathe in the stress and anxiety of the mother and breathe out a sense of calm and ease. You could also practice Tonglen for the child in this situation, breathing in the child’s discomfort and breathing out love and relief. If you see two people yelling at each other, you can breathe in the argument and breathe out understanding. Likewise, you can practice Tonglen for yourself if someone has upset you or something bad has happened.

This can be practiced as quickly as one cycle of breath or you could do it for longer. There’s no need to completely stop whatever you’re doing, just simply put enough energy into staying present with the suffering, without over analyzing or judging it.

Practicing Tonglen on the spot even just three times a day builds the compassion “muscle” in a truly transformative way.

Source: Positive Psychology

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As we do this practice, mindfulness of loving touch expands to include awareness not just of how we touch things but awareness also of how we are touched. This includes not just how we are touched by human hands but also how we are touched by our clothing, the wind, the food and drink in our mouth, the floor under our feet, and many other things. We know how to use loving hands and touch. We touch babies, faithful dogs, crying children, and lovers with tenderness and care. Why don’t we use loving touch all the time? This is the essential question of mindfulness. Why can’t I live like this all the time? Once we discover how much richer our life is when we are more present, why do we fall back into our old habits and space out?

DEEPER LESSONS

We are being touched all the time, but we are largely unaware of it. Touch usually enters our awareness only when it is uncomfortable (a rock in my sandal) or associated with intense desire (when she or he kisses me for the first time). When we begin to open our awareness to all the touch sensations, both inside and outside our bodies, we might feel overwhelmed. Ordinarily we are more aware of using loving touch with people than with objects. However, when we are in a hurry or upset with someone, we can forget to treat them with love and care. We rush out of the house without saying good-bye to someone we love, we ignore a coworker’s greeting because of a disagreement the day before. This is how other people become objectified, and how disconnection occurs.

In Japan objects are often personified. Many things are honored and treated with loving care, things we would consider inanimate and therefore not deserving of respect, let alone love. Money is handed to cashiers with two hands, tea whisks are given personal names, broken sewing needles are given a funeral and laid to rest in a soft block of tofu, the honorific “o-” is attached to mundane things such as money (o-kane), water (o-mizu), tea (o-cha), and even chopsticks (o-hashi). This may come from the Shinto tradition of honoring the kami or spirits that reside in waterfalls, large trees, and mountains. If water, wood, and stone are seen as holy, then all things that arise from them are also holy.

Zen Master Maezumi Roshi teaches how to handle all things as if they were alive. He opened envelopes, even junk mail, using a letter opener in order to make a clean cut, and removed the contents with careful attention. He became upset when people used their feet to drag meditation cushions around the floor or banged their plates down on the table. “I can feel it in my body,” he said. While most modern priests use clothes hangers, Zen Master Harada Roshi takes time to fold his monk’s robes each night and to “press” them under his mattress or suitcase. His everyday robe is always crisp. There are robes hundreds of years old in his care. He treats each robe as the robe of the Buddha. Can we imagine the touch-awareness of enlightened beings? How sensitive and how wide might their field of awareness be? Can we treat everyone and everything, even inanimate objects, with such loving care? How might this practice invite us into different states of being and relating?

“When you handle rice, water, or anything else, have the affectionate and caring concern of a parent raising a child.”—Zen Master Dogen

Practice by Jan Chozen Bays, from Mindfulness on the Go

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