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

by Pema Chödrön

BY PRACTICING MAITRI, compassion, and rejoicing, we are training in thinking bigger, in opening up as wholeheartedly as we can to ourselves, to our friends, and even to the people we dislike.

Whenever someone asked a certain Zen master how he was, he would always answer, “I’m okay.” Finally one of his students said, “Roshi, how can you always be okay? Don’t you ever have a bad day?” The Zen master answered, “Sure I do. On bad days, I’m okay. On good days, I’m also okay.” This is equanimity.

Training in equanimity is learning to open the door to all, welcoming all beings, inviting life to come visit.

Equanimity is bigger than our usual limited perspective. That we hope to get what we want and fear losing what we have—this describes our habitual predicament. The Buddhist teachings identify eight variations on this tendency to hope and fear: pleasure and pain, praise and blame, gain and loss, fame and disgrace. As long as we’re caught in one of these extremes, the potential for the other is always there.

We can never get life to work out so that we eliminate everything we fear and end up with all the goodies. Therefore the warrior-bodhisattva cultivates equanimity, the vast mind that doesn’t narrow reality into for and against, liking and disliking.

It’s easy to continue, even after years of practice, to harden into a position of anger and indignation. However, if we can contact the vulnerability and rawness of resentment or rage or whatever it is, a bigger perspective can emerge. In the moment that we choose to abide with the energy instead of acting it out or repressing it, we are training in equanimity, in thinking bigger than right and wrong. This is how all the four limitless qualities evolve from limited to limitless: we practice catching our mind hardening into fixed views and do our best to soften. Through softening, the barriers come down.

An on-the-spot equanimity practice is to walk down the street with the intention of staying as awake as possible to whomever we meet.

Noticing where we open up and where we shut down—without praise or blame—is the basis of our practice.

We can take the practice even further by using what comes up as the basis for empathy and understanding. Closed feelings like fear or revulsion thus become an opportunity to remember that others also get caught this way.

As with the other limitless qualities, equanimity can be practiced formally in seven stages.

We can also do equanimity practice before beginning the loving-kindness or compassion practices.

As the Maitri Sutra says, “With a boundless mind one could cherish all living beings, radiating friendliness over the entire world, above, below, and all around without limit.” In practicing equanimity, we train in widening our circle of understanding and compassion to include the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly.

Training in equanimity requires that we leave behind some baggage: the comfort of rejecting whole parts of our experience, for example, and the security of welcoming only what is pleasant. The courage to continue with this unfolding process comes from self-compassion and from giving ourselves plenty of time.

With unfailing kindness, your life always presents what you need to learn. Whether you stay home or work in an office or what ever, the next teacher is going to pop right up. —CHARLOTTE JOKO BECK

THE ESSENCE OF BRAVERY is being without self-deception. However, it’s not so easy to take a straight look at what we do.

A warrior begins to take responsibility for the direction of her life.

There is a traditional teaching that supports us in this process: the near and far enemies of the four limitless qualities. The near enemy is something that’s similar to one of these four qualities. Rather than setting us free, however, it burdens us. The far enemy is the quality’s opposite; it also gets in our way.

The near enemy or misunderstanding of loving-kindness is attachment.

Loving-kindness is different from lhenchak. It is not based on need. It is genuine appreciation and care for the well-being of another person, a respect for an individual’s value. We can love someone for his own sake, not because he is worthy or unworthy, not because he is loving toward us or he isn’t.

The obvious drawback of aversion is that it isolates us from others. It strengthens the illusion that we are separate.

There are three near enemies of compassion: pity, overwhelm, and idiot compassion. Pity or professional warmth is easily mistaken for true compassion.

Overwhelm is a sense of helplessness. We feel that there is so much suffering—whatever we do is to no avail. We’ve become discouraged. There are two ways I’ve found effective in working with overwhelm. One is to train with a less challenging subject, to find a situation we feel that we can handle.

So starting with something workable can be powerful magic. When we find the place where our heart can stay engaged, the compassion begins to spread by itself.

The second way of training with overwhelm is to keep our attention on the other person. This one takes more courage. When someone else’s pain triggers fear in us, we turn inward and start erecting walls. We panic because we feel we can’t handle the pain. Sometimes we should trust this panic as a sign that we aren’t yet ready to open so far.

our current limitations and go forward. The third near enemy of compassion is idiot compassion. This is when we avoid conflict and protect our good image by being kind when we should say a definite “no.” Compassion doesn’t imply only trying to be good.

Booker T. Washington was right when he said, “Let no man pull you so low as to make you hate him.” Cruelty when rationalized or unacknowledged destroys us.

The near enemy of joyfulness is overexcitement. We can churn ourselves into a manic state and mistake riding high above the sorrows of the world for unconditional joy. Again, instead of connecting us with others, this separates us. Authentic joy is not a euphoric state or a feeling of being high. Rather, it is a state of appreciation that allows us to participate fully in our lives. We train in rejoicing in the good fortune of self and others.

The near enemy of equanimity is detachment or indifference. Especially in spiritual practice, it is easy to mistake dangling above the unkemptness of life for genuine equanimity.

Yet feeling emotional upheaval is not a spiritual faux pas; it’s the place where the warrior learns compassion. It’s where we learn to stop struggling with ourselves. It’s only when we can dwell in these places that scare us that equanimity becomes unshakable.

The far enemy of equanimity is prejudice.

We are all children of the Great Spirit, we all belong to Mother Earth. Our planet is in great trouble and if we keep carrying old grudges and do not work together, we will all die. —CHIEF SEATTLE

FORGIVENESS IS an essential ingredient of bodhichitta practice. It allows us to let go of the past and make a fresh start.

The teacher then instructed her in forgiveness, saying that the most important thing to do was to forgive herself. He suggested that she do a variation on tonglen. She should begin by visualizing herself and then intentionally bring up all her life’s regrets. The point was not to dwell in painful memories but to contact the feelings underlying the pain: guilt or shame, confusion or remorse. The feelings didn’t have to be named; she was to contact the stuckness in a nonverbal way. The next step was to breathe these feelings into her heart, opening it as wide as she possibly could, and then to send herself forgiveness.

Forgiveness, it seems, cannot be forced. When we are brave enough to open our hearts to ourselves, however, forgiveness will emerge.

There is a simple practice we can do to cultivate forgiveness. First we acknowledge what we feel—shame, revenge, embarrassment, remorse. Then we forgive ourselves for being human. Then, in the spirit of not wallowing in the pain, we let go and make a fresh start.

FEW OF US ARE SATISFIED with retreating from the world and just working on ourselves. We want our training to manifest and to be of benefit. The bodhisattva-warrior, therefore, makes a vow to wake up not just for himself but for the welfare of all beings.

There are six traditional activities in which the bodhisattva trains, six ways of compassionate living: generosity, discipline, patience, enthusiasm, meditation, and prajna—unconditional wisdom.

The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself. —DILGO KHYENTSE RINPOCHE

He told the audience that whatever they believed had to be let go, that dwelling upon any description of reality was a trap.

The Buddha’s principal message that day was that holding on to anything blocks wisdom. Any conclusions we might draw must be let go.

During this teaching, known as The Heart Sutra, the Buddha actually didn’t say a word. He went into a state of deep meditation and let the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara, do the talking. This

Avalokiteshvara answered with the most famous of Buddhist paradoxes: “Form is emptiness, emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form, form is no other than emptiness.”

“Maybe I have to hang in here a bit and go further with the irritation I’m feeling at not being given any satisfaction.”

The “secret” of life that we are all looking for is just this: to develop through sitting and daily life practice the power and courage to return to that which we have spent a lifetime hiding from, to rest in the bodily experience of the present moment—even if it is a feeling of being humiliated, of failing, of abandonment, of unfairness. —CHARLOTTE JOKO BECK

WHEN WE TALK ABOUT RESTING in prajnaparamita, in unconditional bodhichitta, what are we asking of ourselves? We are being encouraged to remain open to the present groundless moment, to a direct, unarmored participation with our experience. We are certainly not being asked to trust that everything is going to be all right.

The practice is compassionate inquiry into our moods, our emotions, our thoughts. Practicing compassionate inquiry into our reactions and strategies is fundamental to the process of awakening. We are encouraged to be curious about the neurosis that’s bound to kick in when our coping mechanisms start falling apart. This is how we get to the place where we stop believing in our personal myths, the place where we are not always divided against ourselves, always resisting our own energy. This is how we learn to abide in the prajnaparamita.

THE MOST STRAIGHTFORWARD ADVICE ON awakening bodhichitta is this: practice not causing harm to anyone—yourself or others—and every day, do what you can to be helpful.