The Wisdom of No Escape: How to love yourself and your world

by Pema Chödrön

we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are. That’s not considered to be a problem; the point is to see it. Inquisitiveness or curiosity involves being gentle, precise, and open – actually being able to let go and open. Gentleness is a sense of goodheartedness toward ourselves. Precision is being able to see very clearly, not being afraid to see what’s really there, just as a scientist is not afraid to look into the microscope. Openness is being able to let go and to open.

The path is a sense of wonder, becoming a two- or three-year-old child again, wanting to know all the unknowable things, beginning to question everything. We know we’re never really going to find the answers, because these kinds of questions come from having a hunger and a passion for life – they have nothing to do with resolving anything or tying it all up into a neat little package. This kind of questioning is the journey itself.

The point is that our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to. It’s who we are right now, and that’s what we can make friends with and celebrate.

In meditation and in our daily lives there are three qualities that we can nurture, cultivate, and bring out. We already possess these, but they can be ripened: precision, gentleness, and the ability to let go.

the key to feeling more whole and less shut off and shut down is to be able to see clearly who we are and what we’re doing.

That means getting to know it completely, with some kind of softness, and learning how, once you’ve experienced it fully, to let go.

You don’t repress the thoughts. You acknowledge them as ‘thinking’ very clearly and kindly, but then you let them go. Once you begin to get the hang of this, it’s incredibly powerful that you could be completely obsessed with hope and fear and all kinds of other thoughts and you could realize what you’ve been doing – without criticizing it – and you could let it go. This is probably one of the most amazing tools that you could be given, the ability to just let things go, not to be caught in the grip of your own angry thoughts or passionate thoughts or worried thoughts or depressed thoughts.

just to learn to be extremely honest and also wholehearted about what exists in your mind – thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, the whole thing that adds up to what we call ‘me’ or ‘I.’ Nobody else can really begin to sort out for you what to accept and what to reject in terms

No one else can really sort out for you what to accept – what opens up your world – and what to reject – what seems to keep you going round and round in some kind of repetitive misery. This meditation is called nontheistic, which doesn’t have anything to do with believing in God or not believing in God, but means that nobody but yourself can tell you what to accept and what to reject.

The greatest obstacle to connecting with our joy is resentment.

Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect with our basic joy.

Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’re always in the middle of the universe and the circle is always around you. Everyone who walks up to you has entered that sacred space, and it’s not an accident. Whatever comes into the space is there to teach you.

Now. That’s the key. Now, now, now. Mindfulness trains you to be awake and alive, fully curious, about what? Well, about now, right?

Whatever you’re given can wake you up or put you to sleep. That’s the challenge of now: What are you going to do with what you have already – your body, your speech, your mind?

There isn’t any hell or heaven except for how we relate to our world. Hell is just resistance to life.

‘As soon as you begin to believe in something, then you can no longer see anything else.’ The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Holding on to beliefs limits our experience of life.

‘When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha’ means that when you see that you’re grasping or clinging to anything, whether conventionally it’s called good or bad, make friends with that. Look into it. Get to know it completely and utterly. In that way it will let go of itself.

The first noble truth says simply that it’s part of being human to feel discomfort. We don’t even have to call it suffering anymore, we don’t even have to call it discomfort.

The second noble truth says that this resistance is the fundamental operating mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering.

worrying about things that are going to happen is very unpleasant; it’s an addiction.

We all know what addiction is; we are primarily addicted toME.

The third noble truth says that the cessation of suffering is letting go of holding on to ourselves. By ‘cessation’ we mean the cessation of hell as opposed to just weather, the cessation of this resistance, this resentment, this feeling of being completely trapped and caught, trying to maintain huge ME at any cost.

The essence of the fourth noble truth is the eightfold path. Everything we do – our discipline, effort, meditation, livelihood, and every single thing that we do from the moment we’re born until the moment we die – we can use to help us to realize our unity and our completeness with all things.

Learning to be not too tight and not too loose is an individual journey through which you discover how to find your own balance: how to relax when you find yourself being too rigid; how to become more elegant and precise when you find yourself being too casual.

The first one is ‘resting the mind.’ We’ve already been instructed to ‘be one-pointedly with the breath.’

In the second instruction, ‘continually resting,’ you are encouraged to prolong that sense of being fully with the breath.

The instruction for continuously resting is to train yourself not to be distracted by every little thing, but to stay with the breath. So the first instruction is something you can do, and the second one is something that tends to be an attitude and an experience that evolves: you are not drawn off by every sound, not distracted by every sight, not completely captured by every movement of your mind. You are able to prolong that sense of sitting in the present moment, being fully here, just breathing.

The third one is ‘naively resting,’ sometimes called ‘literally resting.’ This instruction has to do with taking a naive attitude, a childlike attitude toward your practice, keeping it very simple.

So naively resting says, ‘Just simply come back.’

The fourth of the nine ways, is ‘thoroughly resting.’ The instruction here is to let yourself settle down, let your mind calm down. If you then find that things are somewhat simple and straightforward and there are no 3-D movies going on, then try to catch each flicker of thought, the tiniest flickers of thought.

The fifth one is called ‘taming the mind.’ This has to do with the importance of a basic attitude of friendliness.

It is simply a process of seeing what is, noticing that, accepting that, and then going on with life, which, in terms of the technique, is coming back to the simplicity of newness, the simplicity of the out-breath.

So taming teaches that meditation is developing a nonaggressive attitude to whatever occurs in your mind. It teaches that meditation is not considering yourself an obstacle to yourself; in fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Number six, ‘pacifying,’ is further instruction on how to deal with negativity. Taming basically gave the view, which is so crucial, that meditation is cultivating nonaggression and a good relationship with ourselves. Pacifying acknowledges that when we’ve really committed ourselves to practice, when we have some passion for practice and we put our whole self into it, a very curious thing always happens: we get fed up, we lose heart, and we get discouraged.

‘First of all, recognize that a let-down feeling accompanies good practice, that this is the experience of someone who is very committed and has started on a journey, and pacify yourself. When that happens, see that there’s some humor in it, and just talk to yourself, encourage yourself.’

So pacifying is realizing the human condition with a lot of heart and a lot of sympathy, and appreciating the rareness and preciousness of being able to practice and make friends with yourself.

‘Thoroughly pacifying,’ number seven, gives specific instructions about the obstacles and antidotes. It talks about passion, aggression, and ignorance, which we consider to be obstacles to practice. It says that if you are experiencing extreme aggression in your practice, first you can take that sense of fresh start, and then you can emphasize the airy, windy, fresh quality of your breath. You have learned the meditation technique, you have posture and labeling and all kinds of tools, but if aggression has its claws in you and you can’t let go of those resentful, bitter, angry thoughts and plans, then you should emphasize the windy, airy, fresh quality of the breath as it goes out, which helps you connect with freshness and spaciousness. If it’s passion or lust that has taken hold of you – you can’t stop thinking about that person or that thing that you want so much – then the instruction, interestingly enough, is to flash back to your sense of body, emphasize your posture. The antidote to being completely caught by lust and passion, wanting so much that it hurts, is your posture. Just resettle and have this sense of mindfulness of body. Just emphasize feeling your hands on your thighs and feeling your bottom on the cushion. You could even mentally go through your whole body from the top of your head all the way down. Come into your body completely to ground yourself.

The antidote for ignorance or drowsiness is connecting with spaciousness, the opposite of the antidote for passion, which is connecting with sense of body. If ignorance of drowsiness is a problem, then you can sense your breath dissolving into space; you can sense your body sitting in this room with all this space around you, all the space outside the abbey and all the space of the whole of Cape Breton Island: lots of space. You connect with a sense of big space to wake yourself up, brighten things up. Rather than having your eyes somewhat lowered, you can raise your gaze, but without starting to look around.

Number eight, ‘one-pointedness,’ has two parts, with the main emphasis on thi...

Just stop practicing. Give up the whole struggle. Give yourself a break. For a while, don’t practice. Keep your posture, so you don’t become too loose, but on the other hand let your mind relax and just think about things or look out. Relax, and then start fresh. The second part of this particular teaching is realizing that you’re not a victim of anything, and neither are you a patient that some doctor has to cure. You’re actually a sane, healthy, decent, basically good person, and you can find your own balance. This sense of fresh start can be applied not only to formal meditation, but throughout your whole life. This teaching, one-...

The last of the nine ways is called ‘resting evenly.’ It is also sometimes called absorption. However, Rinpoche made it very clear that this is not some kind of absorption state that blocks everything else out. Resting evenly just stresses the basic attitude that meditation is about developing a thoroughly good friendship with oneself, a completely honest, open-hearted relationship with oneself. Traditionally there’s a little verse that goes with this teaching, which says, ‘As swans swim on the lake and vultures roam in the charnel ground, you can let your mind rest in its natural state.’

The group of renunciation is realizing that we already have exactly what we need, that what we have already is good. Every moment of time has enormous energy in it, and we could connect with that.

that’s fundamentally renunciation: learning how to let go of holding on and holding back.

So renunciation is seeing clearly how we hold back, how we pull away, how we shut down, how we close off, and then learning how to open. It’s about saying yes to whatever is put on your plate, whatever knocks on your door, whatever calls you up on your telephone. How we actually do that has to do with coming up against our edge, which is actually the moment when we learn what renunciation means.

The moral of the story is that it really doesn’t make any difference where you meet your edge; just meeting it is the point. Life is a whole journey of meeting your edge again and again. That’s where you’re challenged; that’s where, if you’re a person who wants to live, you start to ask yourself questions like, ‘Now, why am I so scared? What is it that I don’t want to see? Why can’t I go any further than this?’ The people who got to the top were not the heroes of the day. It’s just that they weren’t afraid of heights; they are going to meet their edge somewhere else. The ones who froze at the bottom were not the losers. They simply stopped first and so their lesson came earlier than the others. However, sooner or later everybody meets his or her edge.

The whole journey of renunciation, or starting to say yes to life, is first of all realizing that you’ve come up against your edge, that everything in you is saying no, and then at that point, softening. This is yet another opportunity to develop loving-kindness for yourself, which results in playfulness – learning to play like a raven in the wind.

Tonglen practice has to do with cultivating fearlessness. When you do this practice for some time, you experience your heart as more open. You begin to realize that fear has to do with wanting to protect your heart: you feel that something is going to harm your heart, and therefore you protect it.

When I say ‘awaken your heart,’ I mean that you’re willing not to cover over the most tender part of yourself. Trungpa Rinpoche often talked about the fact that we all have a soft spot and that negativity and resentment and all those things occur because we’re trying to cover over our soft spot. That’s very positive logic: it’s because you are tender and deeply touched that you do all this shielding. It’s because you’re soft and have some kind of warm heart, an open quality, to begin with that you even start shielding.

The tonglen approach is, ‘If you feel it, share it. Don’t hold on to it. Give it away.’