The Wisdom of No Escape: And the Path of Loving-Kindness

by Pema Chödrön

Early each morning these talks were presented. They were intended to inspire and encourage the participants to remain wholeheartedly awake to everything that occurred and to use the abundant material of daily life as their primary teacher and guide.

to be with oneself without embarrassment or harshness.

THERE’S A COMMON MISUNDERSTANDING AMONG all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just try to get comfortable.

To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, to lead a more passionate, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is, how we tick and how our world ticks, how the whole thing just is. If we’re committed to comfort at any cost, as soon as we come up against the least edge of pain, we’re going to run; we’ll never know what’s beyond that particular barrier or wall or fearful thing.

When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they’re going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are.

Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.

One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are.

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.

You probably would see that you do all those things for which you criticize all those people you don’t like in your life, all those people that you judge. Basically, making friends with yourself is making friends with all those people too, because when you come to have this kind of honesty, gentleness, and goodheartedness, combined with clarity about yourself, there’s no obstacle to feeling loving-kindness for others as well.

It’s also helpful to realize that this body that we have, this very body that’s sitting here right now on this shrine room floor, this very body that perhaps aches because it’s only day two of the dathun, and this mind that we have at this very moment, are exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, and fully alive. Furthermore, the emotions that we have right now, the negativity and the positivity, are what we actually need. It is just as if we had looked around to find out what would be the greatest wealth that we could possibly possess in order to lead a decent, good, completely fulfilling, energetic, inspired life, and found it all right here.

Being satisfied with what we already have is a magical golden key to being alive in a full, unrestricted, and inspired way.

Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, and therefore it doesn’t do any good to try to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness.

We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we’re doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we’re doing. The key is to wake up, to become more alert, more inquisitive and curious about ourselves.

It’s about finding our own true nature and speaking from that, acting from that. Whatever our quality is, that’s our wealth and our beauty; that’s what other people respond to.

So he encouraged me by saying that as long as you have these kinds of doubts, your practice will be good. When you begin to think that everything is just perfect and feel complacent and superior to the others, watch out!

At Gampo Abbey we had a Tibetan monk, Lama Sherap Tendar, teaching us to play the Tibetan musical instruments. We had forty-nine days in which to learn the music; we were also going to learn many other things, we thought, during that time. But as it turned out, for forty-nine days, twice a day, all we did was learn to play the cymbals and the drum and how they are played together. Every day we would practice and practice. We would practice on our own, and then we would play for Lama Sherap, who would sit there with this pained little look on his face. Then he would take our hands and show us how to play. Then we would do it by ourselves, and he would sigh. This went on for forty-nine days. He never said that we were doing well, but he was very sweet and very gentle. Finally, when it was all over and we had had our last performance, we were making toasts and remarks and Lama Sherap said, “Actually you were very good. You were very good right from the beginning, but I knew if I told you that you were good, you would stop trying.” He was right. He had such a gentle way of encouraging us that it didn’t make us angry with him and it didn’t make us lose heart. It just made us feel that he knew the proper way to play the cymbals; he’d been playing these cymbals since he was a little boy, and we just had to keep trying. So for forty-nine days we really worked hard.

You might consider that you yourself are an arrogant person or you might consider that someone else is an arrogant person, but everybody who has ever felt even a moment of arrogance knows that arrogance is just a cover-up for really feeling that you’re the worst horse, and always trying to prove otherwise.

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.

He taught that there is a kind of innocent misunderstanding that we all share, something that can be turned around, corrected, and seen through, as if we were in a dark room and someone showed us where the light switch was. It isn’t a sin that we are in the dark room. It’s just an innocent situation, but how fortunate that someone shows us where the light switch is. It brightens up our life considerably. We can start to read books, to see one another’s faces, to discover the colors of the walls, to enjoy the little animals that creep in and out of the room.

In the same way, if we see our so-called limitations with clarity, precision, gentleness, goodheartedness, and kindness and, having seen them fully, then let go, open further, we begin to find that our world is more vast and more refreshing and fascinating than we had realized before.

Instead, there’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy. That is the innocent, naive misunderstanding that we all share, which keeps us unhappy.

Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives. It’s about seeing how we react to all these things. It’s seeing our emotions and thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment, in this very room, on this very seat. It’s about not trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness.

The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself. The other problem is that our hangups, unfortunately or fortunately, contain our wealth. Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material.

That means not judging yourself as a bad person, but also not bolstering yourself up by saying, “It’s good that I’m this way, it’s right that I’m this way. Other people are terrible, and I’m right to be so angry at them all the time.”

So whether it’s anger or craving or jealousy or fear or depression—whatever it might be—the notion is not to try to get rid of it, but to make friends with it. That means getting to know it completely, with some kind of softness, and learning how, once you’ve experienced it fully, to let go.

So we give the instruction, “Be mindful of your out-breath, be with your out-breath,” and that’s what you do. But the instruction that the awareness is only twenty-five percent really brings home the idea that it’s not a concentration practice—there’s a very light touch on the breath as it goes out. Touch the breath and let it go. The touch is the precision part and also the softness part. Touch it very softly and let it go.

This technique with the breath is said to be without a goal. You are not doing it to achieve anything except to be fully present. Being fully present isn’t something that happens once and then you have achieved it; it’s being awake to the ebb and flow and movement and creation of life, being alive to the process of life itself. That also has its softness. If there were a goal that you were supposed to achieve, such as “no thoughts,” that wouldn’t be very soft. You’d have to struggle a lot to get rid of all those thoughts, and you probably couldn’t do it anyway. The fact that there is no goal also adds to the softness.

But letting go is not so easy. Rather, it’s something that happens as a result of working with precision and gentleness. In other words, as you work with being really faithful to the technique and being as precise as you can and simultaneously as kind as you can, the ability to let go seems to happen to you.

The discovery of your ability to let go spontaneously arises; you don’t force it. You shouldn’t be forcing accuracy or gentleness either, but while you could make a project out of accuracy, you could make a project out of gentleness, it’s hard to make a project out of letting go.

You may have wondered why we are mindful of our out-breath and only our out-breath. Why don’t we pay attention to the out-breath and the in-breath? There are other excellent techniques that instruct the meditator to be mindful of the breath going out and mindful of the breath coming in. That definitely sharpens the mind and brings a sense of one-pointed, continuous mindfulness, with no break in it. But in this meditation technique, we are with the out-breath; there’s no particular instruction about what to do until the next out-breath. Inherent in this technique is the ability to let go at the end of the out-breath, to open at the end of the out-breath, because for a moment there’s actually no instruction about what to do. There’s a possibility of what Rinpoche used to call “gap” at the end of the out-breath: you’re mindful of your breath as it goes out, and then there’s a pause as the breath comes in. It’s as if you…pause. It doesn’t help at all to say, “Don’t be mindful of the in-breath”—that’s like saying, “Don’t think of a pink elephant.” When you’re told not to be mindful of something, it becomes an obsession. Nevertheless, the mindfulness is on the out-breath, and there’s some sense of just waiting for the next out-breath, a sense of no project. One could just let go at the end of the out-breath. Breath goes out and dissolves, and there could be some sense of letting go completely. Nothing to hold on to until the next out-breath.

The experience of labeling your thoughts “thinking” also, over time, becomes much more vivid. You may be completely caught up in a fantasy, in remembering the past or planning for the future, completely caught up, as if you had gotten on an airplane and flown away someplace. You’re elsewhere and you are with other people and you’ve redecorated a room or you’ve relived a pleasant or unpleasant experience or you’ve gotten all caught up in worrying about something that might happen or you’re getting a lot of pleasure from thinking about something that may happen, but you’re completely involved as if in a dream. Then suddenly you realize, and you just come back. It happens automatically. You say to yourself, “Thinking,” and as you’re saying that, basically what you are doing is letting go of those thoughts. You don’t repress the thoughts. You acknowledge them as “thinking” very clearly and kindly, but then you let them go.

Now, sometimes the teachings emphasize the wisdom, brilliance, or sanity that we possess, and sometimes they emphasize the obstacles, how it is that we feel stuck in a small, dark place. These are actually two sides of one coin: when they are put together, inspiration (or well-being) and burden (or suffering) describe the human condition. That’s what we see when we meditate.

We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: humanness. This is what we are here to see for ourselves.

Both the brilliance and the suffering are here all the time; they interpenetrate each other. For a fully enlightened being, the difference between what is neurosis and what is wisdom is very hard to perceive, becau...

So we sit here on these red cushions in this brightly lit room with this fancy, colorful shrine and this huge picture of the Karmapa. Outside, the snow is falling and the wind howling. Hour after hour we sit here and just come back to the present moment as much as we can, acknowledge what’s going on in our minds, come back to the present moment as much as we can, acknowledge what’s going on in our minds, follow the out-breath, label our thoughts “thinking,” come back to the present moment, acknowledge what’s going on in our minds. The instruction is to be as honest and warmhearted in the process as you can, to learn gradually what it means to let go of holding on and holding back.

In a little book called A Guide to Walking Meditation, in the chapter “The World Contains All the Wonders of the Pure Land,” Thich Nhat Hanh says, “I don’t think that all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the three times will criticize me for giving you a little secret, that there is no need to go somewhere else to find the wonders of the Pure Land.”

The greatest obstacle to connecting with our joy is resentment. Joy has to do with seeing how big, how completely unobstructed, and how precious things are.

Resentment, bitterness, and holding a grudge prevent us from seeing and hearing and tasting and delighting.

There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs, and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly.

Thich Nhat Hanh, in his Guide to Walking Meditation, begins by talking about how everybody carries around this burden, and if you want to put it off, if you want to lay it down, you can do it. You can connect with the joy in your heart.

On a day of silence like today, when things are very still, you may find that you are feeling grim and doing everything with a grim expression: grimly opening the door, grimly drinking your tea, concentrating so hard on being quiet and still and moving slowly that you’re miserable. On the other hand, you could just relax and realize that, behind all the worry, complaint, and disapproval that goes on in your mind, the sun is always coming up in the morning, moving across the sky, and going down in the evening. The birds are always out there collecting their food and making their nests and flying across the sky. The grass is always being blown by the wind or standing still. Food and flowers and trees are growing out of the earth. There’s enormous richness. You could develop your passion for life and your curiosity and your interest. You could connect with your joyfulness. You could start right now.

Along with being very precise about our world, there’s also always space around us that is called gentleness: we allow ourselves to experience how large and fluid and full of color and energy our world is. This space is our circle.

When we talk about mindfulness and awareness, we’re not talking about something stern, a discipline that we impose on ourselves so that we can clean up our act and be better and stand up straighter and smell nicer. It’s more that we practice some sense of loving-kindness toward microphones and oryoki bowls and our hands and each other and this room and all the doors we go in and out of. Mindfulness is loving all the details of our lives, and awareness is the natural thing that happens: life begins to open up, and you realize that you’re always standing at the center of the world.

Some of you may have read a book called Black Elk Speaks, in which an old Plains Indian man tells how he had a great vision when he was nine years old. He became so sick that everyone thought he was dead. He was in a coma for a week or more, during which he was shown how the sacred way in which his people lived was going to be lost. He was also shown ways to help save it from being completely lost. In this coma he was taken to the top of Harney Peak, in the Black Hills of Dakota, which the Native Americans of the United States regard as the center of the world. But after he had been taken to Harney Peak and been given this great vision, Black Elk said that he realized that everywhere ...

People often say, “Meditation is all very well, but what does it have to do with my life?” What it has to do with your life is that perhaps through this simple practice of paying attention—giving loving-kindness to your speech and your actions and the movements of your mind—you begin to realize that you’re always standing in the middle of a sacred circle, and that’s your whole life. This room is not the sacred circle. Gampo Abbey is not the sacred circle. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’re always in the middle of the universe and the circle is always ar...

In that case you no longer realize that you’re standing at the center of the world, that you’re in the middle of a sacred circle, because you’re so concerned with your worries, pains, limitations, desires, and fears that you are blind to the beauty of existence. All you feel by being caught up like this is misery, as well as enormous resentment about life in general. How strange! Life is such a miracle, and a lot of the time we feel only resentment about how it’s all working out for us.

There was once a woman who was arrogant and proud. She decided she wanted to attain enlightenment, so she asked all the authorities how to do that. One said, “Well, if you climb to the top of this very high mountain, you’ll find a cave there. Sitting inside that cave is a very wise old woman, and she will tell you.” So the woman thought, “Good, I’ll do that. Nothing but the best.” Having endured great hardships, she finally found this cave, and sure enough, sitting there was this very gentle, spiritual-looking old woman in white clothes who smiled at her beatifically. Overcome with awe and respect, she prostrated at the feet of this woman and said, “I want to attain enlightenment. Show me how.” The wise woman looked at her with her beatific smile and asked, “Are you sure you want to attain enlightenment?” And the woman said, “Of course I’m sure.” Whereupon the smiling woman turned into a demon, stood up brandishing a great big stick, and started chasing her, saying, “Now! Now! Now!” For the rest of her life, that lady could never get away from the demon who was always saying, “Now!”

Now. That’s the key. Now, now, now. Mindfulness trains you to be awake and alive, fully curious, about what? Well, about now, right? You sit in meditation and the out-breath is now and waking up from your fantasies is now and even the fantasies are now, although they seem to take you into the past and into the future. The more you can be completely now, the more you realize that you’re in the center of the world, standing in the middle of a sacred circle. It’s no small affair, whether you’re brushing your teeth or cooking your food or wiping your bottom. Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it now.

You can experiment with this. You can go out there to the cliffs overlooking the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and the first hit is always, “Wow! It’s so big,” and your mind opens. But if you stand there long enough, you’ll start to worry about something. Then you realize (if you want to do this as an exercise) that it feels as if everything is closing down and getting very small. The trick about nowness is that you can let go and open up again to that space. You can do that at any moment, always. But it does take making friends with yourself. It does take coming to know your anger, coming to know your self-deprecation, coming to know your craving and wanting, coming to know your boredom, and making friends with those things.

A big burly samurai comes to the wise man and says, “Tell me the nature of heaven and hell.” And the roshi looks him in the face and says: “Why should I tell a scruffy, disgusting, miserable slob like you?” The samurai starts to get purple in the face, his hair starts to stand up, but the roshi won’t stop, he keeps saying, “A miserable worm like you, do you think I should tell you anything?” Consumed by rage, the samurai draws his sword, and he’s just about to cut off the head of the roshi. Then the roshi says, “That’s hell.” The samurai, who is in fact a sensitive person, instantly gets it, that he just created his own hell; he was deep in hell. It was black and hot, filled with hatred, self-protection, anger, and resentment, so much so that he was going to kill this man. Tears fill his eyes and he starts to cry and he puts his palms together and the roshi says, “That’s heaven.”