Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears (4 page)

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.

If we are willing to acknowledge our shenpa and to experience it without sidetracks, then our natural intelligence begins to guide us. We begin to foresee the whole chain reaction and where it will lead. There’s some wisdom that becomes accessible to us—wisdom based on compassion for oneself and others that has nothing to do with ego’s fears. It’s the part of us that knows we can connect and live from our basic goodness, our basic intelligence, openness, and warmth. Over time, this knowledge becomes a stronger force than the shenpa, and we naturally interrupt the chain reaction before it even starts. We naturally become able to prevent an epidemic of aggression before it even begins.

In my own training, I have always been instructed not to get caught up in accepting and rejecting, not to get caught by biased mind. Chögyam Trungpa was particularly emphatic about this. At one time, this presented a question for me: Did it mean I should not have preferences such as liking one kind of flower or one kind of food far better than another? Was it problematic not to like the taste of raw onions or the smell of patchouli oil? Or to feel more at home with Buddhism than with another philosophy or religion?

When I heard the teaching on shenpa, my dilemma was resolved. The issue isn’t with preferences but with the shenpa behind them. If I get worked up when presented with raw onions, if the very sight of them triggers aversion in me, then the bias is deep. I’m clearly hooked. If I start an anti-raw-onion campaign or write an anti-patchouli-oil book or begin to attack another philosophy or religion, then it’s shenpa, big time. My mind and heart are closed. I’m so invested in my views and opinions that those who think differently are my adversaries. I become a fundamentalist: one who feels strongly that I am right and who closes my mind to those who think otherwise. On the other hand, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gandhi are both examples of how we can take a stand and speak out without shenpa. As they demonstrated, being without shenpa does not lead to complacency, it leads to open-mindedness and compassionate action.

Of course, we get hooked by positive experiences as well as negative experiences. When we really want something, shenpa is usually there. This becomes a fairly common experience for meditators. You meditated and you felt a settling, a calmness, a sense of well-being. Maybe thoughts came and went, but they didn’t seduce you, and you were able to come back to the present. There wasn’t a sense of struggle. So, ironically, then you get attached to your success. “I did it right, I got it right, that’s how it should always be. That’s the model.” But it wasn’t “right” or “good,” it was just what it was. Because of shenpa, you get hooked by positive experience.

Then the next time you meditate, you obsess about someone at home, some unfinished project at work, something delicious to eat. You worry and you fret, or you feel fear or craving, and when you try to rope in your wild-horse mind, it refuses to be tamed. At the end you feel like it was a horrible meditation and you condemn yourself because you’ve failed. But it wasn’t “bad.” It was just what it was. Because of shenpa, you get attached to a self-image of failure. That’s where it gets sticky.

The sad part is that all we’re trying to do is not feel that underlying uneasiness. The sadder part is that we proceed in such a way that the uneasiness only gets worse. The message here is that the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch and urge of shenpa, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn’t continue to rule our lives, and the patterns that we consider unhelpful don’t keep getting stronger as the days and months and years go by. Someone once sent me a bone-shaped dog tag that you could wear on a cord around your neck. Instead of a dog’s name, it said, “Sit. Stay. Heal.” We can heal ourselves and the world by training in this way.

Once you see what you do, how you get hooked, and how you get swept away, it’s hard to be arrogant. This honest recognition softens you up, humbles you in the best sense. It also begins to give you confidence in your basic goodness. When we are not blinded by the intensity of our emotions, when we allow a bit of space, a chance for a gap, when we pause, we naturally know what to do. We begin, due to our own wisdom, to move toward letting go and fearlessness. Due to our own wisdom, we gradually stop strengthening habits that only bring more pain to the world.

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HE
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ATURAL
M
OVEMENT OF
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IFE

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e are all a mixture of aggression and loving-kindness, hard-heartedness and tender open-heartedness, small-mindedness and forgiving open mind. We are not a fixed, predictable, static identity that anyone can point to and say, “You are always like this. You are always the same.”

Life’s energy is never static. It is as shifting, fluid, changing as the weather. Sometimes we like how we’re feeling, sometimes we don’t. Then we like it again. Then we don’t. Happy and sad, comfortable and uncomfortable alternate continually. This is how it is for everyone.

But behind our views and opinions, our hopes and fears about what’s happening, the dynamic energy of life is always here, unchanged by our reactions of like and dislike.

How we relate to this dynamic flow of energy is important. We can learn to relax with it, recognizing it as our basic ground, as a natural part of life; or the feeling of uncertainty, of nothing to hold on to, can cause us to panic, and instantly a chain reaction begins. We panic, we get hooked, and then our habits take over and we think and speak and act in a very predictable way.

Our energy and the energy of the universe are always in flux, but we have little tolerance for this unpredictability, and we have little ability to see ourselves and the world as an exciting, fluid situation that is always fresh and new. Instead we get stuck in a rut—the rut of “I want” and “I don’t want,” the rut of shenpa, the rut of continually getting hooked by our personal preferences.

The source of our unease is the unfulfillable longing for a lasting certainty and security, for something solid to hold on to. Unconsciously we expect that if we could just get the right job, the right partner, the right
something
, our lives would run smoothly. When anything unexpected or not to our liking happens, we think something has gone wrong. I believe this is not an exaggeration of where we find ourselves. Even at the most mundane level, we get so easily triggered—someone cuts in front of us, we get seasonal allergies, our favorite restaurant is closed when we arrive for dinner. 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.

When we pause, allow a gap, and breathe deeply, we can experience instant refreshment. Suddenly we slow down, look out, and there’s the world. It can feel like briefly standing in the eye of the tornado or the still point of a turning wheel. Our mood may be agitated or cheerful. What we see and hear may be chaos or it may be the ocean, the mountains, or birds flying across a clear blue sky. Either way, momentarily our mind is still and we are not pulled in or pushed away by what we are experiencing.

Or we may experience this pause as awkward, as fearful, as impatient, as embarrassingly self-conscious.

The approach here is radical. We are encouraged to get comfortable with, begin to relax with, lean in to,
whatever
the experience may be. We are encouraged to drop the storyline and simply pause, look out, and breathe. Simply be present for a few seconds, a few minutes, a few hours, a whole lifetime, with our own shifting energies and with the unpredictability of life as it unfolds, wholly partaking in all experiences just exactly as they are.

On this journey of awakening, this journey of learning to be present, it is very helpful to recognize shenpa when it’s happening. It may be subtle, just a slight pulling back, an involuntary tightening, or it may be full blown and highly charged. It doesn’t matter, really, whether you catch shenpa as an ember or as a raging forest fire. If you can take the first step and acknowledge you’re hooked—that already is interrupting an ancient habitual response. That already is interrupting the momentum, even if very briefly, of going on automatic pilot and exiting. You’re wide awake, conscious that you’re hooked and that right now you have a choice: you can empower shenpa or you can do something different. It’s a highly charged moment in which you can escalate the intensity further or you can choose to pause and experience the uncomfortable energy without struggling.

Instead of seeing shenpa as an obstacle to be overcome, it is more helpful to consider it an opportunity for transformation, an open doorway to awakening. When I realize I’m triggered, I think of it as a neutral moment, a moment in time, a moment of truth that can go either way. What I’m advocating is that in that precious moment we start to make choices that lead to happiness and freedom rather than choices that lead to unnecessary suffering and the obscuration of our intelligence, our warmth, our capacity to remain open and present with the natural movement of life.

Ulysses, the hero of ancient Greek mythology, exemplifies the courage it takes to consciously choose staying receptive and present when the temptation to get swept away is intense. When he was making the sea voyage home to Greece after the Trojan War, Ulysses knew that his ship would have to pass through a very dangerous area that was inhabited by beautiful maidens known as the sirens. He had been warned that the call of these women was irresistible, and that sailors couldn’t help but steer toward the sirens, crash their boats onto the rocks, and drown. Nevertheless, Ulysses wanted to hear the song of the sirens. He knew the prediction that if anyone could hear their voices and not go toward them, the sirens would lose their power forever and wither away. This was a challenge that drew him.

As his ship neared the sirens’ homeland, Ulysses told his men to put wax plugs in their ears and to tie him tightly to the mast, instructing them that no matter how hard he struggled and gestured, no matter how wrathfully he appeared to be ordering them to cut his ropes, they were not to untie him until the ship reached a familiar point of land well out of earshot of the sirens’ song. This story, as you might expect, has a happy ending. The men followed his instructions and Ulysses made it through. To a greater or lesser degree we will all have to go through similar discomfort in order not to follow the call of our own personal sirens, in order to step through the open doorway to awakening.

Each of us can be an active participant in creating a nonviolent future simply by how we work with shenpa when it arises. How individuals like you and I relate to being hooked, these days, has global implications. In that neutral moment, that often highly charged moment, when we can go either way, do we consciously strengthen old fear-based habits, or do we stay on the dot, fully experiencing the agitated, restless energy and letting it naturally unwind and flow on? There will be no lack of opportunities and no lack of material to work with.

Looking closely at this process, as I have for some years, it’s easy to see that it takes courage to simply relax with our own dynamic energy, just as it is, without splitting off and trying to escape. It takes the courage, determination, and curiosity of a Ulysses to stay open and receptive to the energy of shenpa—to the itch and urge of shenpa—and not scratch in a habitual way.

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G
ETTING
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NSTUCK

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here are three things that I’ve observed about shenpa. One, our storyline fuels it. Two, it comes with an undertow. And three, it always has consequences—which frequently are not pleasant. For instance, we feel lonely and automatically shenpa is there—that neutral moment of shenpa is right there. But instead of recognizing what’s happening, instead of waking up and riding the energy, we bite the hook and overeat, go on a binge, or strike out at others aggressively. Then there’s the post-shenpa shenpa. We become hooked by guilt and self-denigration for having been taken over once again. The story can go on and on for years, with one shenpa setting off a chain reaction that gives birth to further shenpa and so on and on.