“The practice of Tonglen, a healing practice that puts your heart where your mind is. Breathe in the pain … Breathe out blessing.” Cynthia Bourgeault
The Given Gift
“Air is necessary in order to breathe and to live. Is not the air which surrounds us a perfect analogy for the gratia gratis data—for gratuitously bestowed grace? Because to live in the spirit, vivifying spirit is necessary, which is the air of spiritual respiration. Can one produce artificially intellectual, moral or artistic inspiration? Can the lungs produce the air which they need for respiration?
“Now, the principle of grace underlies earthly life as well as spiritual life. It is wholly—below and above—ruled by the laws of obedience, poverty and chastity. The lungs know that it is necessary to breathe—and they obey. The lungs know that they are in want—and they breathe in. They love purity—and they breathe out. The very process of breathing teaches the laws of obedience, poverty and chastity, i.e. it is a lesson (by analogy) in grace. Conscious breathing in of the reality of grace is Christian Hatha-yoga. Christian Hatha-yoga is the vertical breathing of prayer and benediction—or, in other words, one opens oneself to grace and one receives it.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p134.
One Fresh Breath
“The tendency of the small self is always to relate to yourself through the stories you tell yourself about yourself. And the Buddhists talk about this as well, those rare moments where you can break through this gnarled knot of storytelling and simply breathe one good breath of fresh air of your presence are huge moments in life.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 12:33 21 Saturday Evening Q & A.
The Choice Point
“Bring your attention to your breathing, in, out, in, out. And it’s a really simple trick, but what it does is it immediately liberates your attention from the story. And it also requires a choice point for your being willing to do that. And that is where the real freedom lies. When you’re sitting there watching yourself go into a downward spiral and you remember something, remember to breathe or sense your feet on the ground, will you then elect to do it or not? That freedom is always ultimately yours. And every time you exercise it, it gets slightly stronger and more alert to do it the next time. It has an incremental repetitive effect. Every time you could realize yourself at the lower level, in your howling, in your misery, in your story, in your trauma, in your victimhood, in what, every moment you could do that and elect to follow your breath. You’ve made a choice and that’s a powerful choice.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 43:40 05d – Thurs pm Teaching Evil.
Breathing Gratitude
“What do we breathe out? And it’s kind of tricky because you can immediately go, well, we breathe out the fruits of the spirit, but do we even have any of them in us yet? And can we try and pretend we do? The gateway, I think, to a listening feeling, and feeling is quicksilver. You can’t turn it on and off on demand. That one moment you put on the Hallelujah Chorus and you’re on the floor weeping, and the next morning it fails to move you. But the real gateway into feeling, understanding it not just as the emotional center, but as something deeper, is through sensation. It restrains it. And if we can move from that into feeling, which doesn’t take us out of ourselves ecstatically, but brings it more closely into ourselves, then we’re beginning to awaken something. And I would say that in a semi-conscious human creature, gratitude would be the natural flow on every out-breath. Because it’s the thank you for the in-breath. I’m here. I get to take another breath. I get to participate in this. And it’s in our muscles already if we can find it.
“We breathe out in a simple way into the environment who we are, for better or worse. And that’s a kind of numinous and scary and wonderful thing. It’s wonderful because every one of us in our particularity is beloved. And every one of us, whether we’re evolved, evolving, or devolving, is beloved. And our existence is itself a sacrament of existence itself. An outward invisible symbol of an invisible inner truth. So to simply breathe out your own being into the world, even if you don’t overlay it with some particular quality you’re striving, held in the sense of gratitude, will already, in and of itself, be sacramental, be healing.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 42:36 020-Conscious Circle of Humanity.
Taking In Pain
“I want to work with a practice whose origin is actually in the Buddhist traditions, particularly the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the practice of tonglen, in which what happens is that it’s, in a deep way, a healing practice that puts your heart where your mind is. That you allow yourself to breathe in the pain, or the sickness, or the fear, or the hungry ghost of another. Breathe out blessing. Breathe in that pain body. Breathe out. Breathe out blessing. It’s a wonderful and generous practice, and when you’re doing it proper, in a real guts ball way, it’s not metaphoric. You don’t just, oh, well, think, I’ll breathe in the pain of the world and breathe out. You actually open yourself, open your attention to allow yourself to ingest that which you’re lifting up in concern, and breathe out your blessing.
“I breathe in the darkness of the American shadow side. And breathe out blessing. In other words, take a situation that has a general faith support. I breathe in the suffering of those in dementia facilities. I breathe out blessing. So that’s a more general level of it. At a more specific level, notch two. Allow yourself to be present to a particular situation or a particular person that is in some sort of distress, either physical or emotional. Allow yourself to breathe in that pain, that suffering. Breathe out your blessing. And at this level, as you breathe in that pain, it’s with the commitment to be willing, in this prayer, to stand by that person in their pain. And breathe out your blessing and stand by them in the blessing … That person, that place, that situation, breathe in the pain, breathe out the blessing. But as you breathe out the blessing, and as you breathe in the pain, it’s with a willingness to stand in their place as substituted love.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, disc 6 track 7.
When You Need Gentler Work
“If you don’t feel contained enough and strong enough and solid enough in your being to think about taking in pain, the other thing you can do is just take in goodness. Take in love. Breathe it out. A very good and slightly gentler use of the Tonglen practice is working with icons. Get your favorite icon and your favorite figure from the tradition. Sit yourself down with a picture of Jesus or Mary Magdalene, and take in the energy of their prayer, their realized being. Just drink it in. Let it flood over you. They won’t begrudge it, I guarantee you. They’ve been waiting for this, so help yourself. Sit in the presence of that goodness. Take the saints that attract you. And spend an hour, breathe it in, and then breathe that back out. Breathe it through your body if you want and out into the world. Good to good. A much easier transmission while you’re developing the strength and sureness in your own being to take in a bite of the pain.
“These kinds of practices, if you wish to engage in them, the big risk for most of us is thinking they make a difference. So just accept they do. They do. Some of us are more skillful than others. Some of us are more gifted. Some of us have unusual charisms there. But even the act of showing up and sincerely offering to help is itself a sacred gift. So don’t worry about how good you are. You know, if you want to sit for five minutes a day and just sort of sit in the presence and ingest goodness or, you know, ingest hurt for the sake of the world and breathe it out, powerful practice reverberating in the web.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 34:20 06b – Final Session Evil.
Blessing to Blessing
“Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out with no story, no story. And as you can do that so that you learn how to just do the simple bare act in sensation, the next step is in the ballpark of breathe in blessing. Receive from the air the blessing of God. Breathe out blessing. So you’re dealing in blessing to blessing. And the air, as we learn in a lot of the exercises we work in in the Gurdjieff work, this isn’t just a metaphor. The air is jam-packed with subtle substances for the nutrition and building up of our inner bodies. Breathe in air, breathe out blessing, realizing it’s the breathing and that’s the breath that does the work, not you. So we want to stay away from the story of I am breathing in blessing.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 7:44 Day 3c Evening Session.
Breathing Through the Heart
“Your breath does move in and out through your heart center. So just take a moment now to let attention come to the breath anchored in your heart center. And see if you can taste the subtle qualities that the tradition has associated with this center. And these are qualities like warmth and sweetness and gentleness. Humility. Mercy. And breathe in and out through these qualities that are the qualities of the heart of Jesus. Of the heart itself.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2016 June, 40:00 2016-06-10f Friday Evening Session.
The Subtle Breathing of Presence
“This Presence, this body of another density, needs to have an action on me. I must have a close relation with it. For finer energy to penetrate and be absorbed, a kind of space must appear in which reactions do not arise, a zone of silence that allows this Presence, this second body, to expand with its subtle vibration. I need a circulation of energy that is free, that is stopped nowhere. I do not intervene. The energy is distributed according to an order beyond my understanding. This free circulation takes place through the breathing, which nourishes this Presence by the air, bringing active elements we are not aware of. This breathing is a participation in the forces of the universe. But it is not just any kind of breathing. It is very light and subtle . . . as if this Presence were breathing.” The Reality of Being, p235.
Logion 113
His students asked him,
“On what day will the kingdom arrive? “
“Its coming cannot be perceived from the outside,” he said.
“You cannot say, ‘Look, it’s over there,’
or, ‘No, here it is.’
The Father’s realm is spreading out
across the face of the earth,
and humanity is not able to perceive it. “
Logion 3
Yeshua says…
If your spiritual guides say to you,
“Look, the Divine Realm is in the sky,”
well then the birds will get there ahead of you.
If they say, “It is in the sea,”
then the fish will precede you.
No, divine Reality exists
inside and all around you.
Only when you have come to know your true Self
will you be fully known—realizing at last that you are
a child of the Living One.
If, however, you never come to know who you truly are,
you are a poverty-stricken being,
and it is your “self” which lies impoverished.
Jeanne De Salzmann, The Reality of Being, Shambhala Publications, 2010
Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Jeremy Tarcher, 1985
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
Read the Impression on Meditations on the Tarot.
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