How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind

by Pema Chödrön

When we sit in our discomfort, we touch in to the fact that everyone experiences hard and uncomfortable feelings. A kind of tenderness and understanding of others can develop, a tenderness that opens our hearts and connects us more deeply with all beings. It is that strength of sitting in the discomfort, and the connection that can come from it, that will carry us in times of great distress.

meditation gives us the opportunity to have an open, compassionate attentiveness to whatever is going on. The meditative space is like the big sky—spacious, vast enough to accommodate anything that arises.

a compassionate openness and the ability to be with oneself and one’s situation through all kinds of experiences. In meditation, you’re open to whatever life presents you with. It’s about touching the earth and coming back to being right here.

you begin to let go of the words, the stories, as best you can, and then you’re just sitting there. Then you realize, even if it seems unpleasant, that you feel compelled to keep reliving the memory, the story of your emotions—or that you want to dissociate. You may find that you often drift into fantasy about something pleasant. And the secret is that, actually, we don’t want to do any of this.

What does it mean to sit and “be present”? It means to be like space itself, allowing everything that arises—breath, thoughts, emotions, sensations, everything.

The root of suffering escalates into full-blown suffering when we go on and on with our habitual emotional reactivity, when we let ourselves get carried off by our thoughts and stories.

The mind is the source of all suffering, and it is also the source of all happiness.

When something comes up in your life that causes you dissatisfaction, or triggers habitual patterns and reactivity, or makes you angry, lonely, and jealous, ask yourself: Are these emotions happening because of outer circumstances? Are they completely dependent on outer circumstances?

we have to work with our mind, and that if we do work with our mind, the outer circumstances become workable.

So whenever you find yourself caught in an emotional attack, you have to ask yourself: “How much of this is really happening on the outside, and how much of this is my mind?”

The guideline is this: if you’re hooked, then you need to work on your side of the situation, no matter how outrageous and unjust the outer circumstances might seem. If you’re hooked, this is a clue that you have some work to do—and you, only you, can call yourself back.

and not running away or turning my back on it. Because that’s what real friendship is. You don’t turn your back on yourself and abandon yourself, just the way you wouldn’t give up on a good friend when their darker sides began to show up.

Life, as you well know, is a continuous succession: it’s great, it’s lousy, it’s agreeable, it’s disagreeable; it’s joyous and blissful, and other times it’s sad. And being with that, being with this continual succession of agreeable and disagreeable with an open spirit, open heart, and open mind, that’s why I sit to meditate.

The ability to drop into the present is sometimes referred to as child-mind, because children, little ones, look at things that openly, from that degree of relaxation, from that degree of nowness.

When you say “everything is a dream,” another way to say that is, “there is just so much room.” We have an enormous amount of room to move around in. Our minds are really vast. We’re not constricted by anything. But the opposite is our habitual experience. Our experience is usually quite claustrophobic, and we carry with us a very strong sense of burden, of things being solid. If we can loosen the grip of our thoughts, regarding them as dreams, we’ve just made the world and our ability to experience this world evermore larger.

the intelligent way of working with emotions is to try to relate with their basic substance. The basic “isness” quality of the emotions, the fundamental nature of the emotions, is just energy. And if one is able to relate with the energy, then the energies have no conflict with you. They become a natural process. —CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation

in your everyday life, notice when you’re hooked. Notice when you’re triggered or activated. That’s the first step: you acknowledge that emotion has arisen.

“When you hold a fixed idea of yourself, you have to leave out all the parts that you find boring, embarrassing, difficult, or sad. You leave out the emotions you don’t want to feel. And then when you do that, when you leave out all those parts, when those parts are not acceptable, then it eats away at you underneath. These unacknowledged parts are like a hum in the background that’s eating away at you, and you have to find an escape to get away from that.

In order for us to be fully present, to experience life fully, we need to acknowledge and accept all our emotions and all parts of ourselves—the embarrassing parts as well as our anger, our rage, our jealousy, our envy, our self-pity, and all these chaotic emotions that sweep us away. Looking for an exit from experiencing the full range of our humanity leads to all kinds of pain and suffering.

Drop a stone in the water and what happens? The ripples go out. If the stone is big enough, it can rock a rowboat on the other side of the lake. It’s the same, generally speaking, when an emotion arises and you acknowledge, “Oh, I’m getting worked up. Oh, my heartbeat is going faster. Oh, I’m feeling fear. Oh, I’m feeling resentment.” Or just, “Oh, I’m activated, triggered.” At that moment, when you acknowledge it, there’s a space. Just by the very act of acknowledging or being present enough, conscious enough, you’ll find that space—and in that space lies your ability to choose how you’re going to react. You can either stay present with whatever it is you’re feeling—with the intensity or heat or edginess or shakiness of the emotion—or you can spin off.

if you don’t reject the emotions, they actually become your friends. They become your support. Your rage becomes your support for stabilizing, for returning the mind to its natural, open state. Emotions become your support for being fully awake and present, for being conscious rather than unconscious, for being present

Emotions don’t have to be so evil and scary; they are just energy. We are the ones who ascribe the labels of “good” and “bad” to our emotions.

When an emotion arises, everybody has the same choice. Everyone knows how to strengthen the old habits of anger, and everyone knows how to feel resentment and self-pity. We’re very good at it.

Fundamentally, the reason why emotions are discomforting, painful, frustrating is because our relationship to the emotions is not quite clear.”

because I was in so much pain and I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t think much at all, because I was in so much pain. Sometimes pain completely knocks thoughts out; you’re sitting in the pain, and it’s like you’re speechless at all levels.