Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

by Pema Chödrön

Taking the leap involves making a commitment to ourselves and to the earth itself—making a commitment to let go of old grudges, to not avoid people and situations and emotions that make us feel uneasy, to not cling to our fears, our closedmindedness, our hard-heartedness, our hesitation. Now is the time to develop trust in our basic goodness and the basic goodness of our sisters and brothers on this earth; a time to develop confidence in our ability to drop our old ways of staying stuck and to choose wisely. We could do that right here and right now.

In highly charged situations, or anytime at all, we could shake up our ancient fear-based habits by simply pausing. When we do that, we allow some space to contact the natural openness of our mind and let our natural intelligence emerge. Natural intelligence knows intuitively what will soothe and what will get us more churned up; this can be lifesaving information.

The three classic styles of looking for relief in the wrong places are pleasure seeking, numbing out, and using aggression: we either zone out, or we grasp. Or perhaps we develop the style of scratching in which we obsess and rage about other people or indulge in self-hatred.

The Buddhist explanation is that we feel this uneasiness because we’re always trying to get ground under our feet and it never quite works. We’re always looking for a permanent reference point, and it doesn’t exist. Everything is impermanent. Everything is always changing—fluid, unfixed, and open. Nothing is pin-down-able the way we’d like it to be. This is not actually bad news, but we all seem to be programmed for denial. We have absolutely no tolerance for uncertainty.

shenpa is the itch and it’s also the urge to scratch.

In general, Buddhism encourages us never to reject what is problematic but rather to become very familiar with it. And so it is here: we are urged to acknowledge our shenpa, see it clearly, experience it fully—without acting out or repressing.

We are never encouraged to experience the ebb and flow of our moods, of our health, of the weather, of outer events—pleasant and unpleasant—in their fullness. Instead we stay caught in a fearful, narrow holding pattern of avoiding any pain and continually seeking comfort. This is the universal dilemma.

No matter what happened to us in the past, right now we can take responsibility for working compassionately with our habits, our thoughts and emotions. We can take the emphasis off who hurt us and put it on disentangling ourselves. If someone shoots an arrow into my chest, I can let the arrow fester while I scream at my attacker, or I can remove the arrow as quickly as possible.

When you meditate, every time you realize that you are thinking and you let the thoughts go, that openness is available. Chögyam Trungpa called it being “free from fixed mind.”

Step one is maitri, a Sanskrit word meaning loving-kindness toward all beings.

Maitri also has the meaning of trusting oneself—trusting that we have what it takes to know ourselves thoroughly and completely without feeling hopeless, without turning against ourselves because of what we see.

When clinging to security and comfort and warding off pain become the focus of our lives, we don’t end up feeling cared for and we certainly don’t feel motivated to extend ourselves to others. We end up feeling more threatened or irritable, more unable to relax.

When we start to develop maitri for ourselves, unconditional acceptance of ourselves, then we’re really taking care of ourselves in a way that pays off. We feel more at home with our own bodies and minds and more at home in the world. As our kindness for ourselves grows, so does our kindness for other people.