How to Meditate (17 page)

Authors: Pema Chödrön

Meditation teaches us to nurture the soft spot, to reopen the heart-mind, to allow love to come and go freely. Dissolving the barriers to the soft spot, dissolving the armor around the soft spot, or dissolving the armor around the heart of bodhichitta (which doesn’t ever actually shut down) isn’t about finding a final answer, a final solution to life. After all, openness means we always need to be willing to be flexible and make it up as we go along. There is always room to open more.

Another definition of the word
bodhichitta
might be “becoming a completely loving person.” If someone says, “What is the purpose of spiritual practice?” I personally feel that the ultimate reason why we practice, why we listen to these teachings, why we try to begin to bring this into every moment of our life, is so that we can become completely loving people. And this is what the world needs.

One of the qualities of bodhichitta is a growing ability to relax with the true nature of reality, which is uncertain and unpredictable. From the average person’s point of view, life is fundamentally insecure. But from the point of view of being more and more awake, life no longer feels so insecure. Life is always uncertain, it is always unpredictable, but to say it’s insecure no longer holds because we begin to feel settled and comfortable in the uncertainty. Meditation allows us to walk more and more into insecurity until it actually becomes more and more our home ground. Life is just as uncertain and unpredictable as it ever was, but we begin to like surprises. Resistance to change and newness starts to melt.

The nature of reality is completely paradoxical. It is not
like this
or
like that
but we definitely think in opposites or polar views. We concretize with our mind because that’s where security comes from; we try to get ground under our feet by saying, “It’s like this.” Taken to its extreme, this becomes fundamentalism, meaning that you hold to a view and you would go to war for it. It’s like
this,
and it is no other way.

To the degree that you relax more into uncertainty and groundlessness, you find your heart opening. Your heart opens to the degree that you can allow difficult situations and step into them. Strangely enough, and I’m sorry to share this with you, you do start to see more and more suffering. In case you think this is a path that leads us someplace where we look like cherubs and have wings and no more pain, on this path, you begin to see that there is suffering in the world, and you see it more and more.

As you become enlightened, you increasingly see how our choices perpetuate suffering. An enlightened person wants to see every one of us get smarter about what escalates suffering, and what de-escalates it. And so this business of stepping more and more into groundlessness, or relaxing with groundlessness, becomes something you wish for everyone. You begin to hear that message.

Meditation is a process of transformation, instead of a process of becoming more and more set in our ways. And, as you know, as we get older it’s very common to become increasingly fixed in our habits. But then you do meet people who, for some reason, are becoming more and more flexible and open as they age. Which kind of person do you want to be?

Often the powerful moment on the spiritual journey is the moment when pain is getting very strong, and we feel we’ve met our edge and there’s no way to pretty it up. Usually we think spiritual practice is about getting rid of that moment—but actually, that is the moment from which all the patterns of concretizing, of grasping, of spinning off into all these habits to try to get ground under our feet—they all come out of that moment. So at that very moment, we can do something different. And by doing something different we can liberate ourselves.

In the practice I’m recommending, doing something different means
staying
with that moment. I talked about this in terms of meditation practice, how we must let the thoughts and words go and
feel
whatever is happening. We must change our whole view about pain and difficulty and realize that pain is a prime time for spiritual practice. You might say,
“This
is prime time?!” But it is prime time because at that moment, you can either harden into an old pattern or you can soften and do something different. And often doing something different, as I say, is really just staying.

It’s said that great suffering creates or brings great compassion. I’ve always been struck by this particular phrase because, more commonly, great suffering brings great bitterness, great anger, great wish for revenge, and great hardening. You can seize that moment: you can cherish that moment of pain, and rather than letting it harden you in the habitual way and create great suffering, that moment can create great compassion. Instead of hardening into revenge, you shed a tear, and you start going in the direction of love and kindness—for both yourself and others.

We find the love in ourselves. This is the point. Love is not “out there”; it’s not in the relationship, and it’s not in having the “right” relationship. It’s not our career or our job or our family or our spiritual path. On the other hand, if you begin to connect with the fact that you have this good heart, and that it can be nurtured and woken up, then all of that—career, family, spiritual path, relationships, everything—becomes the means for awakening bodhichitta. Your life is it. There’s no other place to practice.

Listen to more about the results of meditation.

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Gotsampa’s “Seven Delights” on page 146 was translated under the guidance of Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche by Jim Scott in collaboration with Anne Buchardi, Karmê Choling, Barnet, Vermont, August, 1996. Reprinted with permission from the translator.

Published 2013

Cover and book design by Rachael Murray

Cover photo © Sandy MacKenzie from
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Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chödrön, Pema.

How to meditate : a practical guide to making friends with your mind / Pema Chödrön.