How Tonglen Practice Healed My Pain After Trauma

“Tonglen reverses the usual logic of lamister suffering and seeking pleasure. In this process…we uncork to finger love for both ourselves and others; we uncork to take superintendency of ourselves and others. Tonglen awakens our compassion and introduces us to a far worthier view of reality.” ~Pema Chodron

It was challenging to focus during the summer months, with my six-year-old son at home increasingly than usual. I had tons of ideas to write about, but my creative energies were worn-out from hours of playing. When the school year started, I finally sat lanugo to write. The words took their own path and directed me into a memory that had surfaced a few days earlier.

It was a memory of the first days of my son’s life. It came as nostalgic remembrance of his life so far, as he reached the milestone of first grade. I wanted to write well-nigh how Pema Chodron’s Tonglen practice saved me during these challenging days. I had no idea that there was much increasingly in this story for me.

***

Even though I was forty-three when I was well-nigh to requite lineage for the first time in my life, I insisted on having a natural lineage at a birthing center, despite my parents’ protests. I wanted to show them, and the world, that women can requite lineage naturally at my age. I envisioned the typesetting I would write, and the courses I would teach to requite women like me increasingly confidence.

Many of my dreams come true, but not this one.

I went into labor on the morning of the full moon in March. Without twenty hours of rapid contractions and vomiting at the birthing part-way with no progress, I was moved to the nearby hospital.

This was not the time for idealism. I surrendered under well-constructed exhaustion. I gave in and took an epidural, willing to do anything to have my victual in my arms.

During my pregnancy, I envisioned that once my son would be born, he would stay cuddled with me at the repletion of the birthing part-way and that we would return home shortly after. I wanted him to finger nourished, loved, and welcomed right away.

Again, reality hit me in my face. My son had severe jaundice and was forced to spend most of his first few days in the nurses’ room under therapeutic lights.

One of the reasons I wanted to stave birthing at a hospital was that as soon as I walk through the big swing doors, I finger my thoroughbred is washed yonder from me and I turn into a ghost. How many times I walked the white, sterile, unprepossessed corridors, feeling that I was turning white, sterile, and unprepossessed myself. It did not matter if I came to greet a friend’s newborn or to visit my dying mother. The reaction was unchangingly the same.

And there I was, living in a hospital during the first days of motherhood, barely delivering my body, depleted by lack of sleep and nonstop breast-pumping. I kept asking why? Why? Why?

Why did it have to start like this? Why can’t my child be with me? Why do I have to pass by the nurses’ room and see him crying while no one pays attention? Why did they have to poke his finger for thoroughbred every few hours?

My husband and I were thrown into our worst nightmare, fearing our son’s smart-ass would be damaged. We knew that plane if he would sooner be healthy and well, the trauma of these first days would be forever imprinted on him. What hurt the most was that we could not plane embrace him with our loving support.

During one of the short nursing breaks we got, my son was lying on top of me, resting in my arms. I felt his heartbeat and his little breaths. I patted him and cried, “Please be healthy, please be healthy, please be healthy.” The pain was breaking me into a thousand little pieces.

Then I remembered Tonglen. I had read well-nigh it in Pema Chodron’s typesetting When Things Fall Apart. I had practiced Tonglen throughout three challenging years of fertility treatments and three miscarriages. It was weird that I hadn’t thought of it earlier, but then again, I was in the midst of a whirlpool of suffering; I could barely plane remember my own name.

I started the practice with zoetic in my son’s pain and zoetic out healing for him. As I was doing that, I felt a new sense of power. I was no longer helplessly lying there. There was something I could do for my son; I could take yonder his pain and heal him.

After a few minutes, I moved on to zoetic in my own suffering, and zoetic out healing to all the struggling parents whose babies were sick or hospitalized. Suddenly, I was not alone. I was a part of a group of parents. I was a parent for the first time in my life, and I felt all the emotions that came with it: the joy, the gratitude, the pain, and the fear, of a magnitude that I’d never experienced before.

Not only was I a part of a polity of struggling parents, but I was moreover helping to ease their pain and healing their children. This exercise unfluctuating me to my power, and my wisdom. I was no longer a wrenched body, but an empowered soul.

My perspective shifted. I stopped taking it personally. I understood that what happened to my son, to me, and to my husband, happens to others too. It was all a part of the journey of life, which contains suffering as well as joy. I was unfluctuating to something worthier than me. I was supported by it and supporting it.

A good friend told me, “You cannot tenancy your child’s path, you can only support it.” I could not transpiration his journey. I could only make it easier on him and help him grow through his challenges.

Once we were finally released from the hospital, life did not get easy right away. My son was crying a lot and had difficulties nursing. I kept practicing Tonglen all that time. It took us well-nigh a month to settle in and shift from hardship to joy. Since then, I haven’t noticed any traces of trauma in my son so far.

But what well-nigh my trauma?

Through writing well-nigh this memory, I unclose that these were the hardest days of my life. I moreover realize that I have never really processed this hardship. I have worked on my thwarting from the vacuum extraction wordage at the hospital. But I have never talked well-nigh the days that followed with anyone, not plane my husband or my therapist.

At first, I thought that the trauma was so deep that I had to repress it. But on second thought, it did not finger like an unshut wound. I believe that thanks to practicing Tonglen, the healing occurred in real time. I did not repress the pain when it was present; I unliable it to manifest in me. I processed the pain so well that it went yonder and left us wipe and well-spoken to start our new lives as a family.