How To Read the News
Responding to suffering with connection and compassion.
The Hard Prune delivers practical tools for dystopian times to your inbox most Fridays.
This morning I read an article about Narciso Barranco, a gardener who was abducted by ICE ‘officials’ last weekend while weed-whacking (that’s strimming, for my British friends) outside an IHOP in California. I watched the video of four large, masked men wrestling a slight man to the ground, handcuffing him, punching him, and using a metal baton to force him into a vehicle.
Narciso Barranco has lived in the US for 31 years. He has no known criminal record. One of his sons is a veteran who served in Afghanistan, and the other two are active-duty Marines. Barranco is in a detention facility. He has blood on his shirt. He has not received medical attention for his shoulder, which was hurt during his abduction. He has not had a chance to wash the pepper spray from his eyes.
I know this kind of thing is happening every day. This one just happened to take place out in the open, caught on video. The man recording it yells, “Ey, por qué le pegas!?” Why are you taking him!? It is so obviously brutal, illegal, violent, and I know it is all too common. And it is just one example of just one kind of injustice, when the world is rich in injustices, practically overflowing. I watched with such awareness of that — my viewing of a drop in the bucket. But this was the particular drop on the screen in front of me in that moment.
What did I do next? This is always the question. What now? Do I just go on with my day, hang the laundry, get on with the emails? Do I continue my review of doom we call ‘reading the news’ and look for another horror? Do I donate to Barranco’s Go Fund Me? Do I call my representatives, again? Do I find a petition to sign? Do I distract myself with work? Do I go for a walk and shake it off? How do I assimilate what I have witnessed? What now?
I paused. I asked myself what I was feeling. There was anger, the anger any right-minded person who’d watched this video would feel. I breathed it in. There was fear, the fear you can just about make out in Barranco’s eyes, the fear his eldest son described in an interview he gave to MSNBC, the fear that black and brown Americans live with daily, whether illegal immigrant, legal immigrant, or citizen. I breathed it in. There was the sense of betrayal this military family must be feeling, and helplessness, and sadness. I breathed them in.
I breathed in these emotions with them, for them, for me, for everyone who feels this way for any reason anywhere in the world, for all of us. And then I breathed out ease.
This is the Tibetan Buddhist practice of tonglen: breathe in the difficult, breathe out ease, or love, or compassion (they are all really the same thing).
I used to avoid tonglen. I first learned about it years ago in Pema Chödrön’s books, and I thought, why would I want to invite negative emotions in?! I want to get rid of them, not embrace them! And what real good can my breath do, anyhow?
But we swim in a sea thick with suffering, and avoiding it entirely is an impossibility. Better to have a way of integrating it than to drown in it. And I’ve learned that what is wonderful about tonglen is that it connects you with others. Because when you breathe in what you are feeling, you do it in solidarity, not in isolation. You say, and this may sound grandiose to those of you unfamiliar with Buddhist practice, but really is meant to be humble and generous: I am doing this on behalf of all beings. These emotions belong to all of us. I am not the only one feeling this way right now. Which, in and of itself, is reassuring.
It’s so easy to consume our news in isolation, scrolling on our devices, so that collective pain is experienced on an individual level. We don’t get to process with others in the moment; our communities, such as they are, are not instantly available when we are faced with the challenge of assimilating reports that defy our beliefs about how things should be. Just pausing to breathe on behalf of everyone who feels as we do connects us, makes us feel less alone.
It could be that this solidarity aspect of tonglen sounds good, but there is the still the question, how can I possibly breathe out compassion and love? I am too caught up in it all, too outraged, worried, tired, sick with dread!
Trust the breath. It will do most of the work for you.
There is a letting-go that happens with every exhale, as we literally let go of an intake of breath. Try it now. Breathe in, just a regular breath. Hold it for the tiniest moment. Let it go. See if you can notice a moment of ease. I notice it most at the very end of the outbreath. Try it again. There is a small window of stillness in the pause before the next inhalation that feels a lot like peace. Name it — peace — and the window opens.
This is tonglen. Intentionally breathing in suffering. Intentionally breathing out peace. It need not be a formal practice. It can be approximate, idiosyncratic, and utterly ad hoc.
Tonglen is not a kind of alchemy that turns bad into good. It’s a tool. It’s a means of connecting. To say to yourself, I am not alone in this, and those who are suffering are not alone either. I want to feel their pain alongside mine. And I want balance that pain with ease, because I would rather put love out into the world than more fear and hate.
I would rather feel everything than nothing. I would rather feel connected than alone. I would rather shift from outrage to connection, from despair to ease. I would rather lean deep into our shared humanity and open my heart.
And then I move on with my day.
Postcard from my garden
