We base our lives on seeking happiness and avoiding suffering, but
the best thing we can do for ourselves—and for the planet—is to turn
this whole way of thinking upside down. Pema Chödrön shows us Buddhism’s
radical side.
Photo by Tachina Lee.
On a very basic level all beings think that they should be happy.
When life becomes difficult or painful, we feel that something has gone
wrong. This wouldn’t be a big problem except for the fact that when we
feel something’s gone wrong, we’re willing to do anything to feel OK
again. Even start a fight.
According to the Buddhist teachings, difficulty is inevitable in
human life. For one thing, we cannot escape the reality of death. But
there are also the realities of aging, of illness, of not getting what
we want, and of getting what we don’t want. These kinds of difficulties
are facts of life. Even if you were the Buddha himself, if you were a
fully enlightened person, you would experience death, illness, aging,
and sorrow at losing what you love. All of these things would happen to
you. If you got burned or cut, it would hurt.
But the Buddhist teachings also say that this is not really what
causes us misery in our lives. What causes misery is always trying to
get away from the facts of life, always trying to avoid pain and seek
happiness—this sense of ours that there could be lasting security and
happiness available to us if we could only do the right thing.
Suffering can humble us. Even the most arrogant among us can be softened by the loss of someone dear.
In this very lifetime we can do ourselves and this planet a great
favor and turn this very old way of thinking upside down. As Shantideva,
author of Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life,
points out, suffering has a great deal to teach us. If we use the
opportunity when it arises, suffering will motivate us to look for
answers. Many people, including myself, came to the spiritual path
because of deep unhappiness. Suffering can also teach us empathy for
others who are in the same boat. Furthermore, suffering can humble us.
Even the most arrogant among us can be softened by the loss of someone
dear.
Yet it is so basic in us to feel that things should go well for us,
and that if we start to feel depressed, lonely, or inadequate, there’s
been some kind of mistake or we’ve lost it. In reality, when you feel
depressed, lonely, betrayed, or any unwanted feelings, this is an
important moment on the spiritual path. This is where real
transformation can take place.
As long as we’re caught up in always looking for certainty and
happiness, rather than honoring the taste and smell and quality of
exactly what is happening, as long as we’re always running away from
discomfort, we’re going to be caught in a cycle of unhappiness and
disappointment, and we will feel weaker and weaker. This way of seeing
helps us to develop inner strength.
And what’s especially encouraging is the view that inner strength is
available to us at just the moment when we think we’ve hit the bottom,
when things are at their worst. Instead of asking ourselves, “How can I
find security and happiness?” we could ask ourselves, “Can I touch the
center of my pain? Can I sit with suffering, both yours and mine,
without trying to make it go away? Can I stay present to the ache of
loss or disgrace—disappointment in all its many forms—and let it open
me?” This is the trick.
There are various ways to view what happens when we feel threatened.
In times of distress—of rage, of frustration, of failure—we can look at
how we get hooked and how shenpa
escalates. The usual translation of shenpa is “attachment,” but this
doesn’t adequately express the full meaning. I think of shenpa as
“getting hooked.” Another definition, used by Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche,
is the “charge”—the charge behind our thoughts and words and actions,
the charge behind “like” and “don’t like.”
It can also be helpful to shift our focus and look at how we put up
barriers. In these moments we can observe how we withdraw and become
self-absorbed. We become dry, sour, afraid; we crumble, or harden out of
fear that more pain is coming. In some old familiar way, we
automatically erect a protective shield and our self-centeredness
intensifies.
We can become intimate with just how we hide out, doze off, freeze
up. And that intimacy, coming to know these barriers so well, is what
begins to dismantle them.
But this is the very same moment when we could do something
different. Right on the spot, through practice, we can get very familiar
with the barriers that we put up around our hearts and around our whole
being. We can become intimate with just how we hide out, doze off,
freeze up. And that intimacy, coming to know these barriers so well, is
what begins to dismantle them. Amazingly, when we give them our full
attention they start to fall apart.
Ultimately all the practices I have mentioned are simply ways we can
go about dissolving these barriers. Whether it’s learning to be present
through sitting meditation, acknowledging shenpa, or practicing
patience, these are methods for dissolving the protective walls that we
automatically put up.
When we’re putting up the barriers and the sense of “me” as separate
from “you” gets stronger, right there in the midst of difficulty and
pain, the whole thing could turn around simply by not erecting barriers;
simply by staying open to the difficulty, to the feelings that you’re
going through; simply by not talking to ourselves about what’s
happening. That is a revolutionary step. Becoming intimate with pain is
the key to changing at the core of our being—staying open to everything
we experience, letting the sharpness of difficult times pierce us to the
heart, letting these times open us, humble us, and make us wiser and
more brave.
Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.
If we’re ready to try staying present with our pain, one of the
greatest supports we could ever find is to cultivate the warmth and
simplicity of bodhichitta. The
word bodhichitta has many translations, but probably the most common one
is “awakened heart.” The word refers to a longing to wake up from
ignorance and delusion in order to help others do the same. Putting our
personal awakening in a larger—even planetary—framework makes a
significant difference. It gives us a vaster perspective on why we would
do this often difficult work.
There are two kinds of bodhichitta: relative and absolute. Relative
bodhichitta includes compassion and maitri. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
translated maitri as “unconditional friendliness with oneself.” This
unconditional friendliness means having an unbiased relationship with
all the parts of your being. So, in the context of working with pain,
this means making an intimate, compassionate heart-relationship with all
those parts of ourselves we generally don’t want to touch.
Some people find the teachings I offer helpful because I encourage
them to be kind to themselves, but this does not mean pampering our
neurosis. The kindness that I learned from my teachers, and that I wish
so much to convey to other people, is kindness toward all qualities of
our being. The qualities that are the toughest to be kind to are the
painful parts, where we feel ashamed, as if we don’t belong, as if we’ve
just blown it, when things are falling apart for us. Maitri means
sticking with ourselves when we don’t have anything, when we feel like a
loser. And it becomes the basis for extending the same unconditional
friendliness to others.
If there are whole parts of yourself that you are always running
from, that you even feel justified in running from, then you’re going to
run from anything that brings you into contact with your feelings of
insecurity.
I’m here to tell you that the path to peace is right there, when you want to get away.
And have you noticed how often these parts of ourselves get touched?
The closer you get to a situation or a person, the more these feelings
arise. Often when you’re in a relationship it starts off great, but when
it gets intimate and begins to bring out your neurosis, you just want
to get out of there.
So I’m here to tell you that the path to peace is right there, when
you want to get away. You can cruise through life not letting anything
touch you, but if you really want to live fully, if you want to enter
into life, enter into genuine relationships with other people, with
animals, with the world situation, you’re definitely going to have the
experience of feeling provoked, of getting hooked, of shenpa. You’re not
just going to feel bliss. The message is that when those feelings
emerge, this is not a failure. This is the chance to cultivate maitri,
unconditional friendliness toward your perfect and imperfect self.
Relative bodhichitta also includes awakening compassion. One of the
meanings of compassion is “suffering with,” being willing to suffer with
other people. This means that to the degree you can work with the
wholeness of your being—your prejudices, your feelings of failure, your
self-pity, your depression, your rage, your addictions—the more you will
connect with other people out of that wholeness. And it will be a
relationship between equals. You’ll be able to feel the pain of other
people as your own pain. And you’ll be able to feel your own pain and
know that it’s shared by millions.
Absolute bodhichitta, also known as shunyata, is the open
dimension of our being, the completely wide-open heart and mind. Without
labels of “you” and “me,” “enemy” and “friend,” absolute bodhichitta is
always here. Cultivating absolute bodhichitta means having a
relationship with the world that is nonconceptual, that is unprejudiced,
having a direct, unedited relationship with reality.
That’s the value of sitting meditation practice. You train in coming
back to the unadorned present moment again and again. Whatever thoughts
arise in your mind, you regard them with equanimity and you learn to let
them dissolve. There is no rejection of the thoughts and emotions that
come up; rather, we begin to realize that thoughts and emotions are not
as solid as we always take them to be.
It takes bravery to train in unconditional friendliness, it takes
bravery to train in “suffering with,” it takes bravery to stay with pain
when it arises and not run or erect barriers. It takes bravery to not
bite the hook and get swept away. But as we do, the absolute bodhichitta
realization, the experience of how open and unfettered our minds really
are, begins to dawn on us. As a result of becoming more comfortable
with the ups and the downs of our ordinary human life, this realization
grows stronger.
We may still get betrayed, may still be hated. We may still feel confused and sad. What we won’t do is bite the hook.
We start with taking a close look at our predictable tendency to get
hooked, to separate ourselves, to withdraw into ourselves and put up
walls. As we become intimate with these tendencies, they gradually
become more transparent, and we see that there’s actually space, there
is unlimited, accommodating space. This does not mean that then you live
in lasting happiness and comfort. That spaciousness includes pain.
We may still get betrayed, may still be hated. We may still feel
confused and sad. What we won’t do is bite the hook. Pleasant happens.
Unpleasant happens. Neutral happens. What we gradually learn is to not
move away from being fully present. We need to train at this very basic
level because of the widespread suffering in the world. If we aren’t
training inch by inch, one moment at a time, in overcoming our fear of
pain, then we’ll be very limited in how much we can help. We’ll be
limited in helping ourselves, and limited in helping anybody else. So
let’s start with ourselves, just as we are, here and now.
Excerpted from “Practicing Peace in Times of War,” by Pema
Chödrön. © 2006 Pema Chödrön. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala
Publications.
With
her powerful teachings, bestselling books, and retreats attended by
thousands, Pema Chödrön is today’s most popular American-born teacher of
Buddhism. In
The Wisdom of No Escape,
The Places that Scare You,
and other important books, she has helped us discover how difficulty
and uncertainty can be opportunities for awakening. She serves as
resident teacher at Gampo Abbey Monastery in Nova Scotia and is a
student of Dzigar Kongtrul, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, and the late
Chögyam Trungpa. For more, visit
pemachodronfoundation.org.
