Episode 142 – Trading Places

The Mahayana path, the path of the Bodhisattva warrior of wisdom and compassion, has a great deal to do with how we relate to ourselves and to one another  •  what kind of others do we include in our world?  •  what kind of underlying feelings do we honestly have about the people in our lives and the people we encounter?  •  everybody is worthy of our attention, but usually we engage in a lot of picking and choosing: who is worthy of our attention and who is not  •  the practice I want to briefly introduce is the practice of exchanging oneself for others, which is the basis of tonglen practice — the practice of taking and sending  •  this practice is very simple: it’s putting yourself in the shoes of another  •  you can do this for all sorts of possible scenarios, but a very common one is looking at how we relate to people we consider to be our superiors; how we relate to people we consider to be our inferior to us; and how we relate to those we view more or less as equal  •  when we can see situations from different perspectives, we can cultivate the ability to treat others respectfully and with the same regard, whether they’re more powerful than us, whether they’re less powerful than us, whether they’re intimate friends, or whether they’re strangers.