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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Pema Chödrön
We have to do our best and at the same time give up all hope of fruition.
One piece of advice that Don Juan gave to Carlos Casteneda was to do everything as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered, while all the time knowing that it doesn’t matter at all.
Cultivating a mind that does not grasp at right and wrong, you will find a fresh state of being. The ultimate cessation of suffering comes from that.
There is a perplexing tension between our aspirations and the reality of feeling tired, hungry, stressed-out, afraid, bored, angry, or whatever we experience in any given moment of our life.
we understand meditation and the teachings, but at some point we have to face it. None of what we’ve learned seems very relevant when our lover leaves us, when our child has a tantrum in the supermarket, when we’re insulted by our colleague.
What about when we sit down and spend the entire time thinking about how we crave someone or something we saw on the way to the meditation hall?
Instead of calm, wakeful, and ego-less, we find ourselves getting more edgy, irritable, and solid. This is an interesting place to find oneself. For the practitioner, this is an exceedingly important place.
he knew all about nonattachment and not judging, but when his teacher asked him to do something he disapproved of, he refused.
It’s a place where we look for alternatives to just being there. It’s an uncomfortable, embarrassing place, and it’s often the place where people like ourselves give up. We liked meditation and the teachings when we felt inspired and in touch with ourselves and on the right path. But what about when it begins to feel like a burden, like we made the wrong choice and it’s not living up to our expectations at all? The people we are meeting are not all that sane. In fact, they seem pretty confused. The way the place is run is not up to par. Even the teacher is questionable.
This place of the squeeze is the very point in our meditation and in our lives where we can really learn something.
When we feel squeezed, there’s a tendency for mind to become small. We feel miserable, like a victim, like a pathetic, hopeless case. So believe it or not, at that moment of hassle or bewilderment or embarrassment, our minds could become bigger. Instead of taking what’s occurred as a statement of personal weakness or someone else’s power, instead of feeling we are stupid or someone else is unkind, we could drop all the complaints about ourselves and others. We could be there, feeling off guard, not knowing what to do, just hanging out there with the raw and tender energy of the moment.
We’re so used to running from discomfort, and we’re so predictable. If we don’t like it, we strike out at someone or beat up on ourselves. We want to have security and certainty of some kind when actually we have no ground to stand on at all.
Finally, after all these years, we could truly grow up.
it’s our chance to realize that this mundane world is all there is, and we could see it with new eyes and at long last wake up from our ancient sleep of preconceptions.
The state of nowness is available in that moment of squeeze. In that awkward, ambiguous moment is our own wisdom mind.
There’s absolutely nothing to lose. We could experiment with not getting tossed around by right and wrong and with learning to relax with groundlessness.
We practice to liberate ourselves from a burden—the burden of a narrow perspective caused by craving, aggression, ignorance, and fear.
Through practice, we realize that we don’t have to obscure the joy and openness that is present in every moment of our existence. We can awaken to basic goodness, our birthright. When we are able to do this, we no longer feel burdened by depression, worry, or resentment.
How do we learn to relax and connect with fundamental joy?
connect with joy and discover our innermost essence.
When we sit down to meditate, whatever arises in our minds we look at directly, call it “thinking,” and go back to the simplicity and immediacy of the breath. Again and again, we return to pristine awareness free from concepts. Meditation practice is how we stop fighting with ourselves, how we stop struggling with circumstances, emotions, or moods.
Whatever or whoever arises, train again and again in looking at it and seeing it for what it is without calling it names, without hurling rocks, without averting your eyes. Let all those stories go.
The innermost essence of mind is without bias. Things arise and things dissolve forever and ever. That’s just the way it is.
our practice is not about accomplishing anything—not about winning or losing—but about ceasing to struggle and relaxing as it is. That is what we are doing when we sit down to meditate. That attitude spreads into the rest of our lives.
The three poisons are passion (this includes craving or addiction), aggression, and ignorance (which includes denial or the tendency to shut down and close out). We
Poison
Instead of pushing it away or running from it, we breathe in and connect with it fully. We do this with the wish that all of us could be free of suffering. Then we breathe out, sending out a sense of big space, a sense of ventilation or freshness. We do this with the wish that all of us could relax and experience the innermost essence of our mind.
Everything that occurs is not only usable and workable but is actually the path itself. We can use everything that happens to us as the means for waking up. We can use everything that occurs—whether it’s our conflicting emotions and thoughts or our seemingly outer situation—to show us where we are asleep and how we can wake up completely, utterly, without reservations.
In Tibet the ground was frozen, so the bodies were chopped up after people died and taken to the charnel grounds, where the vultures would eat them.
How do we walk into those dramas? How do we deal with those demons, which are basically our hopes and fears? How do we stop struggling against ourselves?
Machig Labdrön advises that we go to places that scare us. But how do we do that?
https://www.lionsroar.com/welcome-to-the-charnel-ground/amp/
Each time Milarepa surrendered to the situation, each time he dropped his resentment, depression, and pride, he was dropping his ancient habitual baggage. At a certain point, he was so naked that he had nothing left to lose.
In the beginning, our habit of running away is so deep-seated that we just experiment with this trick of being bound. We do this by practicing meditation.
working closely with a nonjudgmental therapist allows us to overcome our fears and finally develop loving kindness for ourselves.
dharma itself supplies the tools and support we need to find our own beauty, our own insight, our own ability to work with neurosis and pain.
we create our situation by how we use our mind, by how we keep patterning our responses to life in the same old, very
seeing when I’d spin off and then just coming back to the present.
until we stop clinging to the concept of good and evil, the world will continue to manifest as friendly goddesses and harmful demons.
making friends with my thoughts and emotions. Somehow, without cultivating unlimited friendliness for ourselves, we don’t progress along the path.
instruction to notice our tone of voice when we label our thoughts “thinking” and, if it’s harsh, to say it again with gentleness. “I really took that to heart,” he said, “and now when my mind wanders off, I just say to myself, ‘Thinkin’, good buddy.’”
what we’re doing is unlocking a softness that is in us and letting it spread.
Some of us can accept others right where they are a lot more easily than we can accept ourselves. We feel that compassion is reserved for someone else, and it never occurs to us to feel it for ourselves.
Gradually, without any agenda except to be honest and kind, we assume responsibility for being here in this unpredictable world, in this unique moment, in this precious human body.
my curiosity about the teachings was stronger than the yearning to do what I’d always done.
