In the Tibetan tradition, we prepare the ground for Bodhicitta with equanimity. In this talk, you are introduced to the main methods to discover an openess and kinship with all living beings.

Sometimes it is difficult for us to connect with a genuinely felt sense of warmth and kindness towards ourselves. In this meditation, you learn a method to strengthen this natural quality within you.

How do we prepare ourselves so that we genuinely can open to others? It is important to first heal your own wounds and insecurities. Genuine Bodhicitta can only grow if you come from a stable self-acceptance. Stephan Pende shares traditional approaches to self-healing.

Stephan Pende gives examples on how to practice tonglen in your daily life. Every difficult experience and every wonderful experience gives us the opportunity to open, to soften, to share and to grow. Tonglen is one method to do so.

As spaciousness opens within you, you can experience a profound silence in your very being. You may feel nervous at first, and at the same time, you’ve longed for this. This is the vast silence that surrounds life. Trust it and rest in the stillness. Feel your heart open and become more fully alive. Everything that arises from this silence is only a cloud in the vast sky, a wave on the ocean. Rest in the depths of silence. - Jack Kornfield

The deep, peaceful clarity of our essential mind is in the nature of love, and in this calm atmosphere the disturbances of hatred and anger have no place. While absorbed in this deep state of awareness, there is no chance for a harmful thought to agitate us. It is not a question of consciously deciding to refrain from anger and behave virtuously; this loving, benevolent feeling arises spontaneously and effortlessly, from the depths of our being. - Lama Yeshe

The tonglen practice is a method for connecting with suffering — ours and that which is all around us — everywhere we go. It is a method for overcoming the fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our heart. Primarily it is a method for awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us.

We begin the practice by taking on the suffering of a person we know to be hurting and whom we wish to help. For instance, if you know of a child who is being hurt, you breathe in the wish to take away all the pain and fear of that child. Then, as you breathe out, you send the child happiness, joy, or whatever would relieve their pain. This is the core of the practice: breathing in other’s pain so they can be well and have more space to relax and open, and breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever you feel would bring them relief and happiness. However, we often cannot do this practice because we come face to face with our own fear, our own resistance, anger, or whatever our personal pain or our personal stuckness happens to be at that moment.

Tonglen can be translated as "taking in and sending out." It is a Buddhist practice that can assist us in countering the human tendency to resist emotional discomfort. Instead of engaging in the habitual response of pushing away pain, the practice of tonglen invites us to bring the discomfort close. It is totally counter-intuitive, yet it is a profound way to cultivate inner peace and compassion.

Tonglen practice, also known as “taking and sending,” reverses our usual logic of avoiding suffering and seeking pleasure. In tonglen practice, we visualize taking in the pain of others with every in-breath and sending out whatever will benefit them on the out-breath. In the process, we become liberated from age- old patterns of selfishness. We begin to feel love for both ourselves and others; we begin to take care of ourselves and others. - Pema Chodron