Breathe

To look deeply into the suffering of those who have caused us to suffer is a miraculous gift. Thanks to our observation, we now know that the person is suffering. He may think that his suffering will be lessened if he can cause us to suffer. Once we are in touch with his suffering, our enmity and bitterness towards him will vanish, and we will long for him to suffer less.

Thich Nhat Hanh

There is a simple Buddhist prayer that I repeat periodically through the day. Not deliberately, not on a schedule. Just when it comes to mind, to heart.

When I breathe in, I breathe in peace.

When I breathe out, I breathe out love.

The prayer was set to music, and it’s Hymn 1009 in the Unitarian Universalist teal hymnal. In its full version, it has beautiful, soothing harmonies. But at its simplest, it can be sung by a single voice, or many voices in unison: "When I breathe in, I breathe in peace. When I breathe out, I breathe out love."

But love and peace aren’t all there is for us to take in. Buddhism teaches us, bids us to keep remembering, that suffering is unavoidably woven into life – and that so much of our unhappiness, our pain, our rage is rooted in our clinging to the idea that it shouldn’t be.

And so sometimes I change that prayer to echo a Tibetan Buddhist practice that came out of the teachings of Atisha Dipankara more than a thousand years ago. He taught monks to sometimes practice tonglen, more or less translated as sending and receiving – take in suffering and pain, and breathe out love and peace.

When I breathe in, I breathe in pain.

When I breathe out, I breathe out love.

It is counterintuitive, of course. To think that taking in pain helps us send out love. And to be sure, sometimes it simply isn’t possible. Sometimes we aren’t in a place to take in that pain, and so we shouldn’t.

Even when we are in that place, we aren’t taking in pain to glorify or fetishize or even pity it. We breathe in pain – our own, a loved one’s, a stranger’s, our enemy’s – so we can see it, and through it see the being who suffers it, and through that being, see the ways we are connected by the experience of pain and loss, but also through the experience of joy and love.

We each have stories of loss, of pain, of fear. And we all have stories of healing. When we share those stories, we share our own moments of vulnerability. To hear them will reveal each other’s pain. Let us breathe that pain in. See it as part of our shared humanness. And as we let that breathe go, let it carry a sense of respect, hope, love and peace.

When I breathe in, I breathe in pain.

When I breathe out, I breathe out love.

May it be so. May we make it so.