The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

by Pema Chödrön

Trying to fix ourselves is not helpful. It implies struggle and self-denigration. Denigrating ourselves is probably the major way that we cover over bodhichitta.

Self-improvement can have temporary results, but lasting transformation occurs only when we honor ourselves as the source of wisdom and compassion.

It is only when we begin to relax with ourselves that meditation becomes a transformative process. Only when we relate with ourselves without moralizing, without harshness, without deception, can we let go of harmful patterns.

There are four qualities of maitri that are cultivated when we meditate: steadfastness, clear seeing, experiencing our emotional distress, and attention to the present moment.

We’re encouraged to meditate every day, even for a short time, in order to cultivate this steadfastness with ourselves. We sit under all kinds of circumstances—whether we are feeling healthy or sick, whether we’re in a good mood or depressed, whether we feel our meditation is going well or is completely falling apart. As we continue to sit we see that meditation isn’t about getting it right or attaining some ideal state. It’s about being able to stay present with ourselves.

goes against the grain to stay present. These are the times when only gentleness and a sense of humor can give us the strength to settle down.

Learning to stay with ourselves in meditation is like training a dog. If we train a dog by beating it, we’ll end up with an obedient but very inflexible and rather terrified dog.

Through the process of practicing the technique day in and day out, year after year, we begin to be very honest with ourselves. Clear seeing is another way of saying that we have less self-deception.

Experiencing our emotional distress. Many people, including longtime practitioners, use meditation as a means of escaping difficult emotions. It is possible to misuse the label “thinking” as a way of pushing negativity away. No matter how many times we’ve been instructed to stay open to whatever arises, we still can use meditation as repression. Transformation occurs only when we remember, breath by breath, year after year, to move toward our emotional distress without condemning or justifying our experience.

Emotion can’t proliferate without our internal conversations.

There are certain advanced techniques in which you intentionally churn up emotions by thinking of people or situations that make you angry or lustful or afraid.

People often say, “I fall asleep all the time in meditation. What shall I do?” There are lots of antidotes to drowsiness, but my favorite is, “Experience anger!”

When we struggle against our energy we reject the source of wisdom. Anger without the fixation is none other than clear-seeing wisdom.

In sitting meditation we practice dropping whatever story we are telling ourselves and leaning into the emotions and the fear. Thus we train in opening the fearful heart to the restlessness of our own energy. We learn to abide with the experience of our emotional distress.

Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum and don’t interrupt our patterns even slightly.

To remember a slogan right in the midst of irritation—for example, “Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment”—might cause us to pause before acting out our resentment by saying something mean.

When we are escaping the present moment with a habitual reaction, can we recall a slogan that might bring us back?

question. The slogan “Train in the three difficulties” gives us instruction on how to practice, how to interrupt our habitual reactions. The three difficulties are (1) acknowledging our neurosis as neurosis, (2) doing something different, and (3) aspiring to continue practicing this way.

Without compassionate recognition that we’re stuck, it’s impossible to liberate ourselves from confusion. “Doing something different” is anything that interrupts our ancient habit of tenaciously indulging in our emotions.

In essence the practice is always the same: instead of falling prey to a chain reaction of revenge or self-hatred, we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction and drop the story lines. Then we feel the bodily sensation completely. One way of doing this is to breathe it into our heart. By acknowledging the emotion, dropping whatever story we are telling ourselves about it, and feeling the energy of the moment, we cultivate compassion for ourselves.

When we can recognize our own confusion with compassion, we can extend that compassion to others who are equally confused.

you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained.”

Again, practice means not continuing to strengthen the habitual patterns that keep us trapped, doing anything we can to shake up and ventilate our self-justification and blame. We do our best to stay with the strong energy without acting out or repressing.

When we begin to train we see that we’ve been pretty ignorant about what we’re doing. First, we see that we are rarely able to relax into the present moment. Second, we see that we’ve fabricated all kinds of strategies to avoid staying present, particularly when we’re afraid that whatever’s happening will hurt.

When we are denigrating ourselves, do we know it? Do we understand where the desire to lash out at another is coming from? Do we aspire not to keep going down that same old self-destructive road?

May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness. May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering. May we not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering. May we dwell in the great equanimity free from passion, aggression, and prejudice. —THE FOUR LIMITLESS ONES CHANT

IT’S UP TO US. We can spend our lives cultivating our resentments and cravings or we can explore the path of the warrior—nurturing open-mindedness and courage.

Particularly powerful are the aspiration practices of the four limitless qualities—loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.

Affirmations are like telling yourself that you are compassionate and brave in order to hide the fact that secretly you feel like a loser.

Choosing to cultivate love rather than anger just might be what it takes to save the planet from extinction.

Entrenched in the tunnel vision of our personal concerns, what we ignore is our kinship with others.

For an aspiring bodhisattva, the essential practice is to cultivate maitri. In the Shambhala teachings this is called “placing our fearful mind in the cradle of loving-kindness.”

Sometimes we feel good and strong. Sometimes we feel inadequate and weak. But like mother love, maitri is unconditional. No matter how we feel, we can aspire to be happy.

Without loving-kindness for ourselves, it is difficult, if not impossible, to genuinely feel it for others.

Without dissolving the armor, the loving-kindness of bodhichitta is always held back. We are always obstructing our innate capacity to love without an agenda.

The formal practice of loving-kindness or maitri has seven stages.1 We begin by engendering loving-kindness for ourselves and then expand it at our own pace to include loved ones, friends, “neutral” persons, those who irritate us, all of the above as a group, and finally, all beings throughout time and space.

The fourth step is to cultivate loving-kindness for a neutral person. This would be someone we encounter but don’t really know.

The Buddhist teachings tell us that over the course of many lifetimes all beings have been our mothers. At one time, all these people have sacrificed their own comfort for our well-being, and vice versa.

The fifth step of the maitri practice is to work with a difficult person, someone we find irritating; when we see this person we armor our heart.

If we start with less-difficult relationships first, we can trust that our capacity to stay open to people we dislike will gradually expand by itself.

The sixth stage of the practice is called “completely dissolving the barriers.”

The seventh and final stage is to expand loving-kindness to all beings. We extend our aspiration as far as we can.

In cultivating compassion we draw from the wholeness of our experience—our suffering, our empathy, as well as our cruelty and terror. It has to be this way. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.

In the fifth stage, when we generate compassion for the difficult people in our lives, we get to see our prejudices and aversions even more clearly.

This is a good time to remember that when we harden our heart against anyone, we hurt ourselves. The fear habit, the anger habit, the self-pity habit—all are strengthened and empowered when we continue to buy into them. The most compassionate thing we can do is to interrupt these habits.

HOW DO WE MAKE THE TEACHINGS REAL? In the midst of our overscheduled lives, how do we discover our inherent clarity and compassion? How do we develop trust that openness and maitri are available even in the most frantic moments?

When we encounter any pleasure or tenderness in our life, we cherish that and rejoice. Then we make the wish that others could also experience this delight or this relief. In a nutshell, when life is pleasant, think of others. When life is a burden, think of others.

Although there are many such fleeting ordinary moments in our days, we usually speed right past them. We forget what joy they can bring. So the first step is to stop, notice, and appreciate what is happening.

Discomfort of any kind also becomes the basis for practice. We breathe in knowing that our pain is shared; there are people all over the earth feeling just as we do right now.

A woman wrote me about practicing with her daily misery in traffic.