new book by rami shapiro

Rami Shapiro, one of my favorite contemporary Jewish writers, wrote a book called The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness:Preparing to Practice. The book is almost a year old, but I only recently came across it. Rami writes in a simple and uneffected style that feels more down-to-earth than some of his fellow writers in the "spirituality" lit world.
The book offers a series of practices one can engage in to increase the likelihood of manifesting lovinkindness when needed in the course of life. One of the practices that was especially compelling to me was that of tonglen meditation. He credits the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron for teaching it to him and recommends her book The Wisdom of No Escape.
I had heard of tonglen before, but it had always sounded like a very unpleasant practice. Here is Rami's story of how he first was introduced to the idea.

A hospice nurse...took me aside one afternoon {while he was visiting someone in the hospice} and said, "It is lovely that you visit so often, but you are still a stranger here. ...you are not at home here, you are resisting the suffering that resides here. ...You have to shatter the armor you wear in this house. You won't die. On the contrary, you might truly learn to live...{she then taught him tonglen} Whenever I encounter suffering I breathe it in. I have discovered I can take in infinite suffering as long as I am willing to breathe out infinite peace. And the suffering does not stay. It is transformed and returned to the world as love... If I seek to avoid suffering by hiding in happiness, my happiness is reduced...it isn't genuine and I am always worried about suffering.

What struck me particularly about this teaching was that it spoke to issues I had been dealing with in my own life. I realized that in all the Mussar I had read on the issue of gratitude, I had always felt it was incomplete, that one could do everything that was prescribed and still have a kind of callow gratitude. Perhaps I have just not read the right traditional Jewish texts and that if I look longer and harder, I will find this teaching in a Jewish idiom, through Jewish stories, as well. But the fact remains that I heard it most clearly in an ancient teaching from Buddhism.

This points to one of my problems with Mussar. On the one hand, it is fabulous that Jews are able to discover right in the heart of traditional Judaism a practice that speaks to their urgent soul needs today. It is really important to stick with something and follow it through. Seeker spirituality can lack depth. On the other hand, profound as the Mussar teachers are and as much as I am thrilled to study them and know they are my forebearers, sometimes I need to hear different angles on the perrenial truths. I appreciate Ira Stone for mining deeply the Jewish tradition for the gold. I also appreciate Rami Shapiro for roaming farther afield and bringing back treasures from other mines.