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

by Pema Chödrön

The resulting collaboration of nature, solitude, meditation, and vows made an alternatingly painful and delightful “no exit” situation.

A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet.

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.

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.

On the contrary, the idea isn’t to get rid of ego but actually to begin to take an interest in ourselves, to investigate and be inquisitive about ourselves.

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.

Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists, exists in what we already have.

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.

In his talk, Suzuki Roshi says that meditation and the whole process of finding your own true nature is one continuous mistake, and that rather than that being a reason for depression or discouragement, it’s actually the motivation.

We can prostrate to them as an example of our own wisdom mind of enlightened beings, but perhaps it’s also good to prostrate to them as confused, mixed-up people with a lot of neurosis, just like ourselves. They are good examples of people who never gave up on themselves and were not afraid to be themselves, who therefore found their own genuine quality and their own true nature.

This is not an improvement plan; it is not a situation in which you try to be better than you are now.

Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom.

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.

But the breath is very elusive; even if you wanted to give it one hundred percent attention, it would be difficult because it is so ephemeral, so light, so airy and spacious.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nobody else can really begin to sort out for you what to accept and what to reject in terms of what wakes you up and what makes you fall asleep. 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.

We have basic energy coursing through us. Sometimes it manifests as brilliance and sometimes it manifests as confusion. Because we are decent, basically good people, we ourselves can sort out what to accept and what to reject. We can discern what will make us complete, sane, grown-up people, and what—if we are too involved in it—will keep us children forever.

The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, it’s a brand-new sun. It’s born each morning, it lives for the duration of one day, and in the evening it passes on, never to return again. As soon as the children are old enough to understand, the adults take them out at dawn and they say, “The sun has only one day. You must live this day in a good way, so that the sun won’t have wasted precious time.” Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect with our basic joy.

I’ve come to see that it’s good to stick to one vehicle and go deeper and deeper and deeper. But by doing this, I’ve begun to see the sacredness of everybody’s wisdom and the fact that people discover the same truths through many avenues.

The biggest obstacle to taking a bigger perspective on life is that our emotions capture and blind us. The more sensitive we become to this, the more we realize that when we start getting angry or denigrating ourselves or craving things in a way that makes us feel miserable, we begin to shut down, shut out,

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.

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

Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will.

The first noble truth recognizes that we also change like the weather, we ebb and flow like the tides, we wax and wane like the moon. We do that, and there’s no reason to resist it. If we resist it, the reality and vitality of life become misery, a hell.

I began to recognize the opportunity of experiencing the realness of the four elements, feeling what it’s like to be weather. Of course that didn’t make the discomfort go away, but it removed the resistance, and somehow the world was there again. When I didn’t resist, I could see the world.

It’s as if, curiously enough, instead of sitting still in the middle of the fire, we have developed this self-created device for fanning it, keeping it going. Fan that fire, fan that fire. “Well, what about if I don’t do this, then that will happen, and if that happens then this will happen, maybe I better get rid of such-and-such and get this and do that. I better tell so-and-so about this, and if I don’t tell them that, surely the whole thing is going to fall apart, and then what will happen? Oh, I think I want to die and I want to get out of here. This is horrible and—” Suddenly you want to jump out of your seat and go screaming out of the room. You’ve been fanning the fire. But at some point you think, “Wait a minute. Thinking.” Then you let go and come back to that original fluttering feeling that might be very edgy but is basically the wind, the fire, the earth, the water.

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.

I was taught that it has to do with letting go of holding back. What one is renouncing is closing down and shutting off from life. You could say that renunciation is the same thing as opening to the teachings of the present moment.

Renunciation is realizing that our nostalgia for wanting to stay in a protected, limited, petty world is insane. Once you begin to get the feeling of how big the world is and how vast our potential for experiencing life is, then you really begin to understand renunciation.

It’s about saying yes to whatever is put on your plate, whatever knocks on your door, whatever calls you up on your telephone.

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 wilder the weather is, the more the ravens love it. They have the time of their lives in the winter, when the wind gets much stronger and there’s lots of ice and snow. They challenge the wind.

You begin to realize that fear has to do with wanting to protect your heart:

In tonglen, though, not only are we willing to breathe in painful things, we are also willing to breathe out our feelings of well-being, peace, and joy. We are willing to give these away, to share them with others.

The second step is working with the abstract quality of pain by visualizing it as black, heavy, and hot, and breathing that in, and working with the abstract quality of pleasure by visualizing it as white, light, and cool, and breathing that out.

You don’t prefer the pain to the pleasure or the pleasure to the pain; you go back and forth continually.

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.

You have a certain life, and whatever life you’re in is a vehicle for waking up.

If you wanted to pare phenomena down, all there would be are stillness and occurrence: space, and that which is continually born out of space, and returns into space—stillness and occurrence.

There is a bias in many religious groups toward wanting to get away from the earth and the pain of the earth and never having to experience this awfulness again—“Let’s

“Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun. Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.”

One can hold them both in one’s heart, which is actually the purpose of practice.

We could reconnect with the weather that is ourselves, and we could realize that it’s sad. The sadder it is, the vaster it is, and the vaster it is, the more our heart opens.

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 point is that it’s best to stick to one boat, so to speak, whatever that boat may be, because otherwise the minute you really begin to hurt, you’ll just leave or you’ll look for something else.

It’s best to stick with one thing and let it put you through your changes. When you have really connected with the essence of that and you already are on the journey, everything speaks to you and everything educates you.