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

by Pema Chödrön

whatever is happening with you, if you feel at home in your world, it’s contagious; it could give other people a break.

you are cultivating a fearless heart, a heart that doesn’t close down in any circumstance; it is always totally open, so that you could be touched by anything.

That’s the aspiration of the bodhisattva. When we formally take the bodhisattva vow, we are given the tonglen practice to do. That means that we really wish to be fearless enough to help others; we are aware that we ourselves have a lot of fear, but we aspire to have our hearts wake up completely.

I’ve always thought that the phrase ‘to take refuge’ is very curious because it sounds theistic, dualistic, and dependent ‘to take refuge’ in something. I remember very clearly, at a time of enormous stress in my life, reading Alice in Wonderland. Alice became a heroine for me because she fell into this hole and she just free-fell. She didn’t grab for the edges, she wasn’t terrified, trying to stop her fall; she just fell and she looked at things as she went down. Then, when she landed, she was in a new place. She didn’t take refuge in anything. I used to aspire to be like that because I saw myself getting near the hole and just screaming, holding back, not wanting to go anywhere where there was no hand to hold.

The only obstacle is ignorance, this refusal to look at our unfinished business.

We are the buddha. It’s not just a way of speaking. We are the awakened one, meaning one who continually leaps, one who continually opens, one who continually goes forward. It isn’t easy and it’s accompanied by a lot of fear, a lot of resentment, and a lot of doubt. That’s what it means to be human, that’s what it means to be a warrior.

Taking refuge in the buddha means that you are willing to spend your life acknowledging or reconnecting with your awakeness, learning that every time you meet the dragon you take off more armor, particularly the armor that covers your heart.

Let go and open to your world. Realize that trying to protect your territory, trying to keep your territory enclosed and safe, is fraught with misery and suffering. It keeps you in a very small, dank, smelly, introverted world that gets more and more claustrophobic and more and more misery-producing as you get older. As you get older, it is harder and harder to find the doorways out.

So that’s what it means to take refuge in the dharma. It has to do with finding open space, not being covered in armor.

Taking refuge in the sangha means taking refuge in the brotherhood and sisterhood of people who are committed to taking off their armor.

the sangha are people committed to helping one another to take off their armor, by not encouraging their weakness or their tendency to keep their armor on.

A complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and to all people, experiencing everything totally without reservations or blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself.’

Trungpa Rinpoche once said that the dharma has to be experienced because when the real quality of our lives, including the obstacles and problems and experiences that cause us to start questioning, becomes intense, any mere philosophical belief isn’t going to hold a candle to the reality of what we are experiencing.

The Zen master Dogen said, ‘To know yourself or study yourself is to forget yourself, and if you forget yourself then you become enlightened by all things.’ Knowing yourself or studying yourself just means that it’s your experience of joy, it’s your experience of pain, your experience of relief and ventilation, and your experience of sorrow.

He always wanted to know what his experience of generosity or of discipline was, and so on. That was what Jamgon Kongtrul nurtured and cultivated in him.

Rinpoche say that shopping is actually always trying to find security, always trying to feel good about yourself.

You’ve left home, you’ve become homeless, you long to go back, but there’s no way to go back. That’s called the bardo, in-between.

Wholeheartedness is a precious gift, but no one can actually give it to you. You have to find the path that has heart and then walk it impeccably. In doing that, you again and again encounter your own uptightness, your own headaches, your own falling flat on your face. But in wholeheartedly practicing and wholeheartedly following that path, this inconvenience is not an obstacle. It’s simply a certain texture of life, a certain energy of life.

The traditional four reminders are basic reminders of why one might make a continual effort to return to the present moment. The first one reminds us of our precious human birth; the second, of the truth of impermanence; the third, of the law of karma; and the fourth, of the futility of continuing to wander in samsara.

discursiveness?

The basic thing is to realize that we have everything going for us. We don’t have extreme pain that’s inescapable. We don’t have total pleasure that lulls us into ignorance. When we start feeling depressed, it’s helpful to reflect on that.

‘Anything you can learn about working with your sense of discouragement or your sense of fear or your sense of bewilderment or your sense of feeling inferior or your sense of resentment – anything you can do to work with those things – do it, please, because it will be such an inspiration to other people.’

I’m just talking about seeing how you always do the same habitual things when bad feelings – uneasiness, depression, fear – start coming up. You always do the same thing; you shut down in some habitual, very old way. According to the law of karma, every action has a result. If you stay in bed all day with the covers over your head, if you overeat for the millionth time in your life, if you get drunk, if you get stoned, you know that’s going to depress you and make you more discouraged, if it’s just this habitual thing that you think is going to make you feel better. The older you get, the more you know how it just makes you feel more wretched. The law of karma says, ‘Well, how do you want to feel tomorrow, next week, next year, five years from now, ten years from now?’ It’s up to you how to use your life.

Even though we may feel very heavy-hearted, instead of eating poison, we can go out and buy the best filet mignon or whatever it might be

If you keep lying there, you’ll drown, but you don’t even have the privilege of dying. You just live with the sense of drowning all the time.

‘After a while, you find that the waves seem to be getting smaller.’ That’s really what happens. That’s how karma works.

to be getting smaller.’ That’s really what happens. That’s how karma

The essence of samsara is this tendency that we have to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek security and avoid groundlessness, to seek comfort and avoid discomfort. The basic teaching is that that is how we keep ourselves miserable, unhappy, and stuck in a very small, limited view of reality. That is how we keep ourselves enclosed in a cocoon.

When you find yourself with these old, familiar feelings of anxiety because your world is falling apart and you’re not measuring up to your image of yourself and everybody is irritating you beyond words because no one is doing what you want and everyone is wrecking everything and you feel terrible about yourself and you don’t like anybody else and your whole life is fraught with emotional misery and confusion and conflict, at that point just remember that you’re going through all this emotional upheaval because your coziness has just been, in some small or large way, addressed.