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by
Pema Chödrön
Curiosity encourages cheering up. So does simply remembering to do something different.
Anything out of the ordinary will help. You can go to the window and look at the sky, you can splash cold water on your face, you can sing in the shower, you can go jogging—anything that’s against your usual pattern. That’s how things start to lighten up.
“Tell me the nature of heaven and hell.” The Zen master looks him in the face and says, “Why should I tell a scruffy, disgusting, miserable slob like you? A worm like you, do you think I should tell you anything?” Consumed by rage, the samurai draws his sword and raises it to cut off the master’s head. The Zen master says, “That’s hell.” Instantly, the samurai understands that he has just created his own hell—black and hot, filled with hatred, self-protection, anger, and resentment. He sees that he was so deep in hell that he was ready to kill someone. Tears fill his eyes as he puts his palms
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THREE habitual methods that human beings use for relating to troubling habits such as laziness, anger, or self-pity. I call these the three futile strategies—the strategies of attacking, indulging, and ignoring.
Try fully experiencing whatever you’ve been resisting—without exiting in your habitual ways. Become inquisitive about your habits. Practice touching in with the fundamental tenderness and groundlessness of your being before it hardens into habit.
What do you do when you find yourself anxious because your world is falling apart? How do you react when you’re not measuring up to your image of yourself, everybody is irritating you because no one is doing what you want, and your whole life is fraught with emotional misery and confusion and conflict?
At these times it helps to remember that you’re going through an emotional upheaval because your coziness has just been, in some small or large way, addressed.
To begin, we start just where we are. We connect with the place where we currently feel loving-kindness, compassion, joy, or equanimity, however limited it may be. (You can even make a list of people or animals who inspire these feelings in you.)
First, we wish for ourselves one of the four limitless qualities. “May I enjoy loving-kindness.” Then we include a loved one in the aspiration: “May you enjoy loving-kindness.” We then extend our wish to all sentient beings: “May all beings enjoy loving-kindness.” Or for compassion: “May I be free from suffering and the root of suffering. May you be free of suffering and the root of suffering. May all beings be free of suffering and the root of suffering.”
The instruction for cultivating limitless maitri is to first find the tenderness that we already have.
For arousing compassion, the nineteenth-century yogi Patrul Rinpoche suggests imagining beings in torment—an animal about to be slaughtered, a person awaiting execution. To make it more immediate, he recommends imagining ourselves in their place.
When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain.
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals.
Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
Like all the bodhichitta practices, the aspiration practice of compassion is best done within a session of sitting meditation.
When we extend attention and appreciation toward our environment and other people, our experience of joy expands even further.
Equanimity
Training in equanimity is learning to open the door to all, welcoming all beings, inviting life to come visit. Of course, as certain guests arrive, we’ll feel fear and aversion. We allow ourselves to open the door just a crack if that’s all that we can presently do and we allow ourselves to shut the door when necessary. Cultivating equanimity is a work in progress.
Equanimity is bigger than our usual limited perspective. It’s the vast mind that doesn’t narrow reality into for-or-against, liking-or-disliking.
we can contact the vulnerability and rawness of resentment or rage or whatever it is, a bigger perspective can emerge.
As we continue to relax where we are, our opening expands.
Fear is a natural reaction of moving closer to the truth. If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid.
Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward.
The basic ground of compassionate action is the importance of working with rather than struggling against. What I mean by that is working with your own unwanted, unacceptable stuff. Then when the unacceptable and unwanted appears out there, you relate to it based on having worked with loving-kindness for yourself.
tonglen
Exchanging self for other, or tonglen, begins when we can see where someone is because we’ve been there.
We do our best to stay with the strong energy without acting out or repressing. In so doing, our habits become more porous. Our patterns are, of course, well established, seductive, and comforting. Just wishing for them to be ventilated isn’t enough. Mindfulness and awareness are key. Do we see the stories that we’re telling ourselves and question their validity?
And when we can’t practice when distracted but know that we can’t, we are still training well.
messy emotional stuff is called klesha, which means poison. There are three main poisons: passion, aggression, and ignorance.
The irony is that what we most want to avoid in our lives is crucial to awakening bodhichitta. These juicy emotional spots are where a warrior gains wisdom and compassion.
When you catch yourself grasping at beliefs or thoughts, just see what is. Without calling your belief right or wrong, acknowledge it. See it clearly without judgment and let it go.
Start taking off that armor. That’s all anyone can tell you. No one can tell you how to do it because you’re the only one who knows how you locked yourself in there to start.
Mindfulness trains us to be awake and alive, fully curious, about now. The out breath is now, the in-breath is now, waking up from our fantasies is now, and even the fantasies are now.
People get into a heavy-duty sin-and-guilt trip. They feel that if things are going wrong, it means they did something bad and they’re being punished. But that’s not the idea at all. The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings you need in order to open your heart.
We can thank others, but we should give up all hope of getting thanked in return. Simply keep the door open without expectations.
they challenge our habitual reactions. Paramita training has a way of humbling us and keeping us honest. When we practice generosity we become intimate with our grasping. Practicing the discipline of not causing harm, we see our rigidity and desire to control. Practicing patience helps us train in abiding with the restlessness of our energy and letting things evolve at their own speed.
When we work with generosity, we see our nostalgia for wanting to hold on. Working with discipline, we see our nostalgia for wanting to zone out and not relate at all. As we work with patience, we discover our longing to speed. When we practice exertion, we realize our laziness.
With meditation we see our endless discursiveness, our restlessness, and our attitude of “couldn’t care less.”
Pain is always a sign that we are holding on to something—usually ourselves.
When we feel unhappy, when we feel inadequate, we get stingy; we hold on tight. Generosity is an activity that loosens us up. By offering whatever we can—a dollar, a flower, a word of encouragement—we are training in letting go.
opposite of patience is aggression—
Letting the World Speak for Itself (“Don’t Misinterpret”)
For example, trying to smooth everything out to avoid confrontation, to not rock the boat, is not what’s meant by compassion or patience. That’s what is meant by control. Then you are not trying to step into unknown territory, to find yourself more naked with less protection and therefore more in contact with reality. Instead, you use the idiot forms of compassion and so forth just to get ground.
It’s like lying in bed before dawn and hearing rain on the roof. This simple sound can be disappointing because we were planning a picnic. It can be pleasing because our garden is so dry. But the flexible mind of prajna doesn’t draw conclusions of good or bad. It perceives the sound without adding anything extra, without judgments of happy or sad.
“Abandon any hope of fruition” FRUITION” IMPLIES that at some future time you will feel good. One of the most powerful Buddhist teachings is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will. As long as you’re wanting yourself to get better, you won’t. As long as you are oriented toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or already are.
We can gradually drop our ideas of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are.
Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying.
You can practice making your actions, your speech, and your thoughts inseparable from this yearning to communicate from the heart. Everything you say can further polarize the situation and convince you of how separate you are. On the other hand, everything you say and do and think can support your desire to communicate, to move closer and step out of this myth of isolation and separateness that we’re all caught in.
bodhichitta,
There’s a discrepancy between our inspiration and the situation as it presents itself. It’s the rub between those two things—the squeeze between reality and vision—that causes us to grow up, to wake up to be 100 percent decent, alive, and compassionate.
