Tonglen and Portobellos

The week after my birthday, I found myself feeling lonely at work. I missed Emily in particular, but I was also disliking being the only person in my group at my location. The person who sits next to me was out of town for a week. I made a point of going to the Bike Coalition’s volunteer night, which cheered me up, and then I also remembered about tonglen, which is Tibetan for “sending and taking” and is a remarkably effective way to deal with difficult feelings of all sorts.

To practice tonglen when you have a yucky emotion, you breathe in the feeling directly, feeling its heavy weight or vast cold emptiness or churning heat. You try to really experience it and feel the misery of it, and you also do this on behalf of everyone everywhere in the world. You breathe in the grief of the whole world, or the anger, or the fear, or the wretched feeling of longing, and then you breathe out and feel the tranquility and lightness of the out-breath, and wish that this affliction would be gone for all beings, including yourself: May all beings be free from fear. May all beings be happy and at peace.

I think this is a brilliant practice because it does so many things at once: It’s the opposite of running from the feeling, or of the kind of resistance that tends to prolong the agony. It reminds me that everyone is subject to the same difficulties I am: it’s not MY sorrow, it’s THE sorrow. It lends a purpose to my sufferings, even makes them seem a bit noble, or makes me feel a bit noble for dealing with them. (Though I imagine you can read all of Pema Chodron’s books and never read that doing tonglen is good if you want to feel noble.)

Doing tonglen gives me a chance to practice generosity: I want this good thing for everyone, not just me. Being generous is a mood lifter, and that moment of relief that comes with the out-breath and the good wishes reminds me that I might be going to live and that there still might be moments of pleasure or happiness that lie ahead.

Now the lonely feeling seems to have abated, and I’m kind of enjoying having the whole place—the whole city, really—to myself.

Tom and I have been watching episodes of the TV show Dark Angel on DVD, and for my birthday, he took me to see The Life Before Her Eyes. It was so emotionally intense, I could barely sit through it. It made me nearly queasy, but before I could apologize to Tom for having put him through it, he said he’d really enjoyed it and that he thought it was a good movie.

It’s about a high school shooting and focuses on two best friends, and the life of one of them as an adult, so it’s half flashbacks. The wonderful Evan Rachel Wood is in it. If you haven’t seen Pretty Persuasion yet, do that right away.

I must mention a documentary my parents and I saw: The Devil Came on Horseback, about Brian Steidle, a U.S. Marine who went to Darfur as an official military observer and ended up chronicling the dreadful events taking place there. He played a large role in bringing awareness of those events to America, in the form of a huge number of ghastly photographs. On top of everything else, once a Darfurian woman is raped, she is then often abandoned by her Muslim husband for having dishonored the family. It is a moving and distressing film, and we all learned quite a bit. Now I understand much better what’s going on there and why.

I also lately saw Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, about two brothers who get the remarkably good idea to rob their own parents’ jewelry store. It is sad, about the ways we enrage our family members and let each other down, yet how we never stop loving each other and wanting to be loved.

Lately I’ve been cooking one kind of grain per week—I’m rotating through a long list of them, trying new ones—and one pot of soup or beans. Since I make only one thing, it has to be tasty, so I’m mostly choosing from a list of five or six favorites. I bring a Thermos-brand vacuum bottle full of soup to work each day, along with crudités and apple slices, and for dinner I’ve often been having grains and steamed veggies with sautéed mushrooms and/or pine nuts and/or red peppers and/or water chestnuts or whatever. Because of all the different possible grains and veggies and things to sauté, it’s never quite the same twice, but it is always tasty and satisfying.

This week I had a mushroom extravaganza and had sautéed Portobello strips or shiitake every night I cooked dinner. (Then there was the dinner that consisted of two pints of Double Rainbow Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream, also very satisfying.)

I made the Dal recipe from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant last week, using red lentils, adding chopped tomatoes per one of the offered variations, and it was really good.