Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears (6 page)

Whether we allow for the possibility of rebirth or not, still this kind of thinking can be helpful if it inspires us to put the emphasis on seeing through our shenpa tendencies as they are manifesting right now rather than dwelling on our painful histories. 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. In this very lifetime, I have what it takes to change the movie of my life so that the same things don’t keep happening to me. It does seem that the same things keep coming back to trigger the same feelings in us until we’ve made friends with them. Our attitude can be that we keep getting another chance, rather than that we’re just getting another bad deal.

For just a moment or two, pause and contact whatever you are feeling right now. If you can precede this by recollecting something that’s bothering you, that will be even more helpful. If you can contact feelings such as worry, hopelessness, impatience, resentment, righteous indignation, or craving, that will be especially rewarding.

For a moment or more, touch the quality, the mood, the bodily felt sensation free of the storyline. This uncomfortable experience, this familiar sensation that can sit like a lump in your stomach, that can cause your body and face to tense, that can physically hurt—this experience itself is not a problem. If we can get curious about this emotional reaction, if we can relax and feel it, if we can experience it fully and let it be, then it’s no problem. We might even experience it as simply frozen energy whose true nature is fluid, dynamic, and creative—just an ungraspable sensation free of our interpretation.

Our repetitive suffering does not come from this uncomfortable sensation but from what happens next, what I’ve been calling following the momentum, spinning off, or getting swept away. It comes from rejecting our own energy when it comes in a form we don’t like. It comes from continually strengthening habits of grasping and aversion and distancing ourselves. In particular it comes from our internal conversations—our judgments, embellishments, and labels about what’s happening.

But if we choose to practice by acknowledging, pausing, abiding with the energy, and then moving on, the power of this is not just that it weakens old habits but that it burns up the propensity for these habits altogether. The truly wonderful aspect of living this way is that it leaves the space wide open for a completely fresh experience free of self-absorption. Right here, exactly where we are, we can live from a broader perspective, one that admits all experiences—pleasurable, painful, and neutral. We are free to appreciate the infinite possibilities that are always available, free to recognize the natural openness, intelligence, and warmth of the human mind.

If the teachings on shenpa resonate with us, and we start practicing with them in our meditation and in our daily life, then very likely we’ll begin to ask some truly useful questions. Instead of asking, How can I get rid of my difficult coworker, or how can I get even with my abusive father, we might begin to wonder how to unwind our suffering at the root. We might wonder, How do I learn to recognize I’m caught? How can I see what I do without feeling hopeless? How can I find some sense of humor? Some gentleness? Some ability to let go and not make such a big deal of my problems? What will help me remain present when I’m afraid?

We might also ask, Given my present situation, how long should I stay with uncomfortable feelings? This is a good question, yet there is no right answer. We simply get accustomed to coming back to the present just as it is for a second, for a minute, for an hour—whatever is currently natural—without its becoming an endurance trial. Just pausing for two to three breaths is a perfect way to stay present. This is a good use of our life. Indeed, it is an excellent, joyful use of our life. Instead of getting better and better at avoiding, we can learn to accept the present moment as if we had invited it, and work with it instead of against it, making it our ally rather than our enemy.

This is a work in progress, a process of uncovering our natural openness, uncovering our natural intelligence and warmth. I have discovered, just as my teachers always told me, that we already have what we need. The wisdom, the strength, the confidence, the awakened heart and mind are always accessible, here, now, always. We are just uncovering them. We are rediscovering them. We’re not inventing them or importing them from somewhere else. They’re here. That’s why when we feel caught in darkness, suddenly the clouds can part. Out of nowhere we cheer up or relax or experience the vastness of our minds. No one else gives this to you. People will support you and help you with teachings and practices, as they have supported and helped me, but you yourself experience your unlimited potential.

In my case, I’m trained in a tradition and a lineage where devotion to our teachers is an important way of connecting with openness and warmth. Their very presence can cause the clouds to part. I feel that my teachers would do anything to help me, just as their teachers helped them. However, we’re taught never to depend on the teacher. The teacher’s role is to wean us from leaning on him or her, to wean us from dependency altogether, and to help us finally grow up.

It’s a matter of wisdom resonating with wisdom, of our wisdom resonating with the teacher’s. If we apply their teachings to our lives and practice what they teach, we can realize what they have realized. Our devotion to a teacher has nothing to do with his or her lifestyle or worldly accomplishments. It’s their state of mind, the quality of their heart that we resonate with. When it comes to my teacher Chögyam Trungpa, he was so outrageous in his behavior that I could never model myself after him. But I do try to model myself on his way of being. He showed me by his example that we can rouse ourselves fearlessly and encourage one another to be sane.

There is certainly no one easy answer for how to be free of suffering, but our teachers do all they can to guide us by giving us a sort of spiritual toolbox. The toolbox contains relative, usable teachings and practices, as well as an introduction to the absolute view of reality: that neither thoughts, emotions, nor shenpa are as solid as they appear. The main tool, and one that embodies both the relative and the absolute, is the practice of sitting meditation, especially as it was taught by Chögyam Trungpa. He described the basic practice as being completely present. And emphasized that it allowed the space for our neuroses to come to the surface. It was not, as he put it, “a vacation from irritation.”

He stressed that this basic practice, which is epitomized by the instruction to return again and again to the immediacy of our experience, to the breath, the feeling, or other object of meditation, uncovers a complete openness to things just as they are without conceptual padding. It allows us to lighten up and to appreciate our world and ourselves unconditionally. His advice on how to relate with fear or pain or groundlessness was to welcome it, to become one with it rather than split ourselves in two, one part of us rejecting or judging another part. His instruction on how to relate with the breath was to touch it lightly and let it go. His instruction on how to relate with the thoughts was the same: leave them free to dissolve back into space without making meditation into a self-improvement project.

The attitude toward meditation presented here is one of relaxing. With no feeling of striving to reach some higher state, we simply sit down and, without a goal, without trying to become peaceful or get rid of all thoughts, we stay faithful to the instructions: sitting comfortably, eyes open, be precisely yet lightly aware of the meditation object (it’s not tight concentration), and when mind wanders off, gently come back. Whatever occurs, we do not congratulate or condemn ourselves. The image often used is of an old person, sitting in the sun, watching children at play, with an attitude of nothing left to do.

Naturally, we are wise to be patient with this process and give ourselves unlimited time. It’s as if we’ve been kicking a spinning wheel all our life and it has its own momentum. It’s spinning rapidly, but now finally we’re learning how to stop kicking the wheel. We can expect that the wheel is going to keep spinning for some time. It won’t just abruptly stop. This is where many of us find ourselves: we’ve stopped kicking the wheel, we’re not always strengthening the habit, but we’re in this interesting middle state, somewhere between not always caught and not always able to resist biting the hook. This is called “the spiritual path.” In fact, this path is all there is. How we relate moment by moment to what is happening on the spot is all there really is. We give up all hope of fruition and in the process we just keep learning what it means to appreciate being right here.

A few years ago I was overwhelmed by deep anxiety, a fundamental, intense anxiety with no storyline attached. I felt very vulnerable, very afraid and raw. While I sat and breathed with it, relaxed into it, stayed with it, the terror did not abate. It was unrelenting even after many days, and I didn’t know what to do.

I went to see my teacher Dzigar Kongtrül, and he said, “Oh, I know that place.” That was reassuring. He told me about times in his life when he had been caught in the same way. He said it had been an important part of his journey and had been a great teacher for him. Then he did something that shifted how I practice. He asked me to describe what I was experiencing. He asked me where I felt it. He asked me if it hurt physically and if it were hot or cold. He asked me to describe the quality of the sensation, as precisely as I could. This detailed exploration continued for a while and then he brightened up and said, “Ani Pema, that’s the Dakini Bliss. That’s a high level of spiritual bliss.” I almost fell off my chair. I thought, “Wow, this is great!” And I couldn’t wait to feel that intensity again. And do you know what happened? When I eagerly sat down to practice, of course, since the resistance was gone, so was the anxiety.

I now know that at a nonverbal level the aversion to my experience had been very strong. I had been making the sensation bad. Basically, I just wanted it to go away. But when my teacher said “Dakini bliss,” it completely changed the way I looked at it. So that’s what I learned: take an interest in your pain and your fear. Move closer, lean in, get curious; even for a moment experience the feelings beyond labels, beyond being good or bad. Welcome them. Invite them. Do anything that helps melt the resistance.

Then the next time you lose heart and you can’t bear to experience what you’re feeling, you might recall this instruction: change the way you see it and lean in. That’s basically the instruction that Dzigar Kongtrül gave me. And I now pass it on to you. Instead of blaming our discomfort on outer circumstances or on our own weakness, we can choose to stay present and awake to our experience, not rejecting it, not grasping it, not buying the stories that we relentlessly tell ourselves. This is priceless advice that addresses the true cause of suffering—yours, mine, and that of all living beings.

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hen we begin to see clearly what we do, how we get hooked and swept away by old habits, our usual tendency is to use that as a reason to get discouraged, a reason to feel really bad about ourselves. Instead, we could realize how remarkable it is that we actually have the capacity to see ourselves honestly, and that doing this takes courage. It is moving in the direction of seeing our life as a teacher rather than as a burden. This involves, fundamentally, learning to stay present, but learning to stay with a sense of humor, learning to stay with loving-kindness toward ourselves and with the outer situation, learning to take joy in the magic ingredient of honest self-reflection. Chögyam Trungpa called this “making friends with ourselves.” This friendship is based on knowing all parts of ourselves without prejudice. It’s an unconditional friendliness.

Learning to stay is the basis for connecting with natural warmth; it is the basis for loving ourselves and also for compassion. The more you stay present with yourself, the more you realize what all of us are up against. Just like me, other people feel pain and want it to go away. Just like me, they go about this in a way that only makes matters worse.

When we start to see the chain reaction of shenpa, it’s not as if we then feel superior about this achievement. Instead, this insight has the potential to humble us and cause us to have more sympathy for other people’s confusion. When we see someone else getting hooked and swept away, instead of automatically being irritated, we have more chance of recognizing our sameness. We are definitely all in the same boat, and knowing this can make us very forgiving.

In the Buddhist teachings on compassion there’s a practice called “one at the beginning, and one at the end.” When I wake up in the morning, I do this practice. I make an aspiration for the day. For example, I might say, “Today, may I acknowledge whenever I get hooked.” Or, “May I not speak or act out of anger.” I try not to make it too grandiose, as in, “Today, may I be completely free of all neurosis.” I begin with a clear intention, and then I go about the day with this in mind.