From the outset, the vulnerable human organism and psyche
must confront a dualistic world. Wanting love, comfort, and nurturance,
we discover a world that can be pleasurable or painful, loving or unloving,
nurturing or abandoning, and we must learn to adapt and survive under these
dualistic conditions. With limited developmental and cognitive capacities we may learn to survive by adopting patterns of thought and behavior that either maximize our sensation of security or compensate for the security that we don't feel. We learn to separate from feelings or experiences that are too overwhelming, and in the process we also limit our capacity for relating to parts of ourselves and our capacity for relating to others. Our desire for love - and our innate capacity for love - will easily exceed the amount of love we are able to allow or to experience in our lives.

The capacity for love, compassion, and empathic attunement to self and others is a structural and functional capacity of our most evolved brain centers, and reflects the deepest potential of our human experience. Secure and loving attachments in childhood will lay the first foundation for the exercise of these capacities. However, for all human beings the full exercise of these capacities involves a process of conscious choice, as we learn to integrate and transcend our limiting patterns of cognitive-emotional reactivity and our narcissistic patterns of greed, antipathy, or avoidance. This is obviously both a cognitive and a behavioral process on the way to our full human and spiritual maturity.

Much of Buddhist practice, tonglen included, involves a cognitive-behavioral restructuring that helps us to exercise our capacity for love, compassion, and empathic attunement, and to see through the insubstantiality and relativity of our thought forms, especially those that carry our negative imagery. It is not only a re-evaluation of our thinking. It is a re-evaluation of how we use cognition itself. These practices help us to understand, first intellectually (in thought) and then experientially (in practice), that the realm of thought is not the realm in which reality lies; nor is it the realm in which we can ultimately integrate and harmonize our experience. The nature of thought itself is partial, conditional, relativistic, and dualistic - so that one part of our thinking is likely to be in reaction or reactivity to another part of our thinking, to our emotional sensations, and to life in general. Whereas there is another dimension of cognition that can bring non-reactive awareness to our life experience.

The entire realm of cognitive-emotional relativity and reactivity proceeds from the collective activity of the instinctive, limbic, and neocortical regions of the brain that captures our free attention and circumscribes it. Whereas the capacity for free attention itself, or non-reactive awareness, comes from a yet higher and more integrative region of the brain, the pre-frontal cortex. The pre-frontal cortex also mediates our capacity for empathic attunement. It is the shift to being able to consciously relate from the higher cognitive centers that lifts our functioning to a greater level of integration and resolution of conflict. This shift is a learned and practiced choice that strengthens related neural pathways. Hence it is a change in cognition that results from, as well as encourages, substantial behavioral change.

In tonglen specifically, we learn to bring attention to those experiences - of life, of others, or of those parts of ourselves - that our instinctive, emotional, and rational centers might regard as uncomfortable, alien, conflicting, threatening, or overwhelming - and might therefore not allow us to embrace with compassion or intimacy. In tonglen practice we proceed in safe steps that systematically empower us to welcome our experience with a more all-embracing awareness, replacing judgment, separation, and conflict with compassionate intent. This growing capacity to consciously practice awareness and compassion reflects a higher level of brain functioning in support of integration and healing, both within ourselves and between people. Tonglen itself is primarily taught as a practice for increasing our capacity for selfless compassion, which is, of course, a high ideal of Buddhist spirituality.

As we have said, the capacity for pure awareness, or free attention, as well as the capacity to integrate our physical, mental, and emotional activity, is correlated with activity in the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) of the brain. Hence the cognitive restructuring is an activity that reflects, and actually strengthens, the neural structures of the PFC. The PFC also accesses what we now know to be neuronal centers - or intelligence centers - around the heart; and it is also able to consciously work with the harmonization of the breath as an integrating activity. Tonglen utilizes all of this: free attention, accessing the heart, and working with the breath to facilitate a higher level of harmonious functioning.

In our model of therapeutic tonglen, we work with six realms of integration which are mediated by the pre-frontal cortex. Tonglen uses the breath to anchor positive imagery, and uses the imagery to support the brain's pre-frontal capacity to welcome and embrace all experience. This capacity is imaged as resting in the heart, which is seen as the seat of our actual spiritual capacity to receive dualistic or conflictive imagery and process it in the light of a higher contextual wholeness, integration, and love. In tonglen, we proceed counter-intuitively to breathe in that which we would normally push away - breathing it not into our bodies as such, but into a realm of vastness and healing within and beyond the heart - and then breathing out the healed image and positive emotion back from the heart into the world as an act of love, healing, or blessing. This doesn't exist in a realm of fantasy, but actually represents a new behavioral choice, as well as a new level of cognition, correlating with neural growth activity in the pre-frontal cortex. It moves us developmentally beyond the reactive programming of the earlier brain centers.

Tonglen encapsulates this essential therapeutic journey as a simple, direct, user-friendly and, as I teach it, progressively self-integrating practice. That is, whatever obstacles arise in our practice are integrated into the practice itself. In that way it gently leads, unfolds, and supports us along the edge of our healing process - bearing in mind that "healing" comes from the same root as "becoming whole."