Expansion = love

If you practice, and then pay attention, you can feel your heart expanding.


Yup. Just like the Grinch.

It’s a neat trick, and I highly recommend it. It starts by actively practicing love, and actively practicing joy, which I will admit can be tough sometimes. Feel free to start with the easy moments and work your way up to the tough ones.

Aside from having to remember to practice (more on this tomorrow), this is far easier than it sounds, though. Active love and active joy involve taking time to step back and find those things in ordinary circumstances. It also means taking time to step back and release—or simply fail to attach to—those moments that don’t promote love and joy.

Instead, attach to expansiveness. Not in the sense that it becomes an addiction, because therein lies a danger of attaching instead to repelling those things that fall the other way, but rather in the sense that you automatically seek the expansiveness, inclusive of love, joy, and compassion, in every moment.

Love is expansive. Remember your tonglen practice—we breathe in that which is tight, painful, anguished; we breathe out the space of love, which feels like space, feels expansive and glowing. In the hardest of circumstances, in the most mundane of tensions, in the most ordinary exhaustion, we can still take a single breath that begins to turn things around. But…the practice isn’t in order to turn things around. The practice is to bring all of those experiences into our practice of experiencing life as love. In other words, we don’t do this for an external goal (if I practice breathing love and expansiveness into everything, my life will become problem-free), we do it because the goal (in this case) is the practice of love—and trust me, your life won’t suddenly become problem-free! I’ve found, though, that when problems arise, they’re a lot less stressful, which is an excellent bonus.