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of you have done it before and some of you haven’t, but in any case, it’s always like doing it for the first time.
    Tonglen practice has to do with cultivating fearlessness. When you do this practice for some time, you experience your heart as more open. You begin to realize that fear has to do with wanting to protect your heart: you feel that something is going to harm your heart, and therefore you protect it. Again and again, in the Buddhist teachings, in the Shambhala teachings, and in any tradition that teaches us how to live well, we are encouraged to cultivate fearlessness. How do we do that? Certainly the sitting practice of meditation is one way, because through it we come to know ourselves so completely and with such gentleness.
    I had been doing shamatha practice for maybe seven years when I first did tonglen. After doing this practice, I was amazed to see how I had been subtly using my shamatha to try to avoid being hurt, to try to avoid depression or discouragement or badfeelings of any kind. Basically, unknown to myself, I had secretly hoped that if I did the practice I wouldn’t have to feel any pain anymore. When you do tonglen, you invite the pain in. That’s what opens your eyes, even though that’s what shamatha is all about – seeing pain, seeing pleasure, seeing everything with gentleness and accuracy, without judging it, without pushing it away, becoming more open to it. Even though that’s what we’ve been practicing all along, tonglen puts it right on the line; I realized that I hadn’t really been doing that before. Tonglen takes a lot of courage to do. Interestingly enough, it also gives you a lot of courage. You start out maybe with one thimbleful of courage and a tremendous aspiration to want to open to your world and to be of benefit to yourself and others. You know that that means you’re going to find yourself in places where all your buttons will be pushed and things are going to be tough, but nevertheless, you have the aspiration to be able to walk into any situation and be of benefit. You have at the most only a thimbleful of courage, just enough courage to do tonglen, maybe because you don’t know what you’re getting into, but that’s usually life’s situation anyway! Something amazing then occurs. By the willingness to do tonglen, you find, after some time – a few days or a few months or a few years – that you have a teacup full of courage, that somehow, by doing the practice, you awaken your heart and you awaken your courage. When I say ‘awaken your heart,’ I mean that you’rewilling not to cover over the most tender part of yourself. Trungpa Rinpoche often talked about the fact that we all have a soft spot and that negativity and resentment and all those things occur because we’re trying to cover over our soft spot. That’s very positive logic: it’s because you are tender and deeply touched that you do all this shielding. It’s because you’re soft and have some kind of warm heart, an open quality, to begin with that you even start shielding.
    In shamatha particularly, you see your shields so clearly. You see how you imprison your heart. That already lightens things up and gives you some respect for the insight and perhaps sense of humor that you have. Tonglen takes that further because you actually invite in not only all your own unresolved conflicts, confusion, and pain, but also those of other people. And it goes even further. Usually we try to ward off feeling bad, and when we feel good we would like that to last forever. In tonglen, though, not only are we willing to breathe in painful things, we are also willing to breathe out our feelings of well-being, peace, and joy. We are willing to give these away, to share them with others. Tonglen is quite the opposite of the conventional approach. Usually if one is meditating and one really begins to connect with something bigger and feel the sense of inspiration and delight, even walking meditation seems like