Tonglen & The BFT (Bad Friend Theater)
We’ve all been there. Your best friend, your sister’s husband, your old college roommate’s in/wrote/directed/what-have-you a show and they can’t wait for you to see it. So you buy your ticket and take your seat in a dingy black box more fire hazard than theater. You want the performance to be good, to be great. You can’t wait for the show to send you home, brain abuzz with the taste of new worlds. But, alas and alack, it’s not meant to be—the show’s awful. Dreck. For forty-five minutes, for ninety, for two hours, you sit in the shadows, watching the page die on the stage, watching the actors sweat and struggle and do the best they can just to survive until curtain. It’s unavoidable; it’s eternal—Aristophanes’ best pal did it for him and you do it for yours—it’s the BFT (Bad Friend Theater).
Crammed, cramped, hemmed in by elbows on both sides, and closeted by the darkness, the BFT is an unhappy—albeit familiar—state of being. First comes Anger (“I can’t believe I’m sitting through this”), then Bargaining (“I read her blog—I have to see her show too?”), followed by Superiority (“I would never make that mistake”), Avoidance (“Should I switch to Gmail?”), and finally, Denial (“The set was great!”).
Just recently, I was in the theater, experiencing that selfsame cycle, when a small scrap of the Dharma fluttered past my mind’s eye—a concept the Buddhists call bodhichitta. Meaning “noble heart,” bodhichitta expresses the relational nature of all living beings in the cosmos—in other words, we’re all connected. Hardly a profound realization, I know, but rather than just saying it (like most of us do), the Buddhists actually have a practice to make you live it, a practice called tonglen. Broadly speaking, tonglen is about opening your heart to the suffering of others, acknowledging that suffering and breathing in a stranger’s pain and breathing out well-wishing, ease, comfort and hope for that person.
In her book, When Things Fall Apart, author and teacher Pema Chodron describes tonglen much more eloquently than I, calling it “…[the] practice of creating space, ventilating the atmosphere of our lives so that people can breathe freely and relax.” There’s a beautiful sense of spaciousness in Chodron’s words, a Big Sky Country-kind-of-freedom that, when you’re trapped by the BFT inside a too-hot black box, sitting in a broken chair on a rickety riser in the middle of the aisle, praying to whomever will listen to hurry the curtain, it’s the kind of feeling that can transform your whole experience. Practicing tonglen to beat back the BFT makes the moment less about you and your discomfort and all about the performers, sweating under the hot lights and doing their best to perform for the audience. Moreover, by practicing tonglen, you’re doing what you can to ease the anxiety, the fear and embarrassment of the actors, which (ideally) will let them perform better, and thus, make a stronger show that helps out not just you, but all your fellow travelers in the night—the audience.
But how do you practice tonglen meditation? William Faulkner, strangely enough, put it best in his 1944 screenplay for Bogey & Bacall’s To Have and Have Not:
“You don’t have to say anything and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together—and blow.”
And that’s pretty much it. Just breathe. It’s helpful to focus on texture. If you’re in the middle of the BFT, breathe in a feeling of dark, heavy and hot—a sense of claustrophobia—and breathe out the cool, the light, the fresh, the new-again. It’s both the simplest thing to do and the most difficult, but the next time you’re confronted with the BFT, don’t shut down and tune out; instead, crack apart your heart and let the performers know you’re there—after all, you might just be a Buddha in disguise.
~cpd
