October 2021
I very much like the Tibetan meditation of tonglen, which is literally, "giving and taking" or "sending and receiving". It beautifully sums up a gift where the act of giving is the same as the act of receiving, and the act of receiving is the same as the act of giving. There is no difference. Nothing is left out.
There is nothing worse than those who see the giving of gifts as something obligatory, or those who can’t receive a love-filled gift. I’ve certainly known people like these. I have memories of standing around at Christmas parties where gifts were presented and immediately set aside by certain people. And also those who complain about having to buy gifts for others, seeing the whole process as something somewhat tiresome. In contrast, there are those who take absolute delight in making gifts and giving something chosen because they are delighted by it, as well as delighting in the very process of giving. In the case of the latter, the very act of giving is felt as continuous with receiving so that giving and receiving are the same process, the same transaction of love.
It got me thinking about how not having a freely given gift received with an open heart feels on an ongoing basis and the idea of suffering moral injury came to mind. A bit extreme, maybe. I note here that moral injury refers to an injury to a person’s moral conscience and values resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression, which produces a profound sense of emotional guilt and shame and sometimes also a sense of betrayal and anger. Not receiving a gift freely given and not giving a gift in a spirit of love somehow gets felt like betrayal. Perhaps I’m conflating too much here, but maybe I’m not. I suspect that this all relates to attachment theory. Attachment theory is a theory about the evolutionary, ethological (where our behaviour is part of our biology) and psychological relationships between people. Such a theory holds that without a good relationship with caregivers, the infant has difficulty growing up as a social being. Give and receiving is integral to the healthy development of a human being. If there is just giving grudgingly and taking, without much interest in the other person, the process of reception is broken and there is little compassionate connection between people. For a little child, this feels like abandonment.
A child can be given hundreds of presents (presented with stuff, but not given with love), but with little interest in what that child actually wants. The child is treated like a stranger, some generic creature disconnected to anybody. How desperately sad this is. His self worth isn’t recognized by those important others and, quite likely, will come to not be recognized by himself in time. There are grave consequences to this. A person can go through life feeling like he cannot achieve much; like all he can hope for is to function, but not enjoy very much of life.
I am reminded of a client I had several years ago. She was a fully trained healer, but didn’t feel she was good enough to work in her field, even though her teachers said her work was very good. In other words, there was a discrepancy between how she perceived herself and how others perceived her. My aim was to allow her to experience herself in the act of giving through her work as the same as how others experienced her work on themselves. Giving is receiving and receiving is giving in that time of connection and this integral to good healing practices.
I taught her the principles of tonglen, where her inbreath was breathing in the light of compassion (a visualization exercise), and her outbreath was breathing this compassion to self and others, so that the breath itself gathered herself and others into a single act of giving and receiving. In time, such a practice becomes second nature where self worth is experienced as compassion to self and others. My client, by the way, went on to open her practice and worked successfully in her chosen profession.
