Authors: Pema Chödrön
Coming to terms with the intangibility of our thoughts, with their lack of reality, can liberate us from enormous suffering and anguish. A thought or a fear can develop into a full-blown story line that can cause us incredible pain and upset. This tendency has the potential to destroy the quality of our life and our ability to connect with others. Our thoughts often escalate, and meditation helps us learn to de-escalate suffering. We make a huge deal out of our thoughts, but just like dreams, they have no real substance. They are like bubbles, or like clouds.
So when you realize you’ve been thinking, you can just touch the thought and let it dissolve back into the vast blue sky. You’re not shooting down the thoughts like clay pigeons, and you’re not cutting through the thoughts with a sword or smashing the thoughts over the head with a hammer. There’s really nothing there to fight—you just let thoughts dissolve back into the vast blue sky, like touching a bubble with a feather.
Have you ever had the experience of waking up in a dream? It’s called lucid dreaming, which means becoming lucid while in the dream state. It’s quite a powerful experience if you wake up in a dream and actually realize that you’re only having a dream. I’ve had some experience with lucid dreaming, and it’s very interesting because once you begin to pay attention to these kinds of dreams, you realize that the way things appear often make it feel as though the dream is entirely real. If you throw something in a lucid dream, it drops and makes a noise and possibly breaks. You walk down streets and there’s a whole landscape, and it’s just like being awake. If you have continued experience with lucid dreaming, you begin to question if there is any difference at all between the waking state and the dreaming state.
Our thoughts are no different—they are just like dreams. And we can choose to wake up from them, to reenter the present moment where things are alive and vivid. We can give ourselves an enormous break by learning to let our mind relax, and not grasp and concretize things. We don’t need to hold on so tightly with our mind, or make such a big deal out of our thoughts, or allow our thoughts to take us down some deep, labyrinthine rabbit hole.
When you say “everything is a dream,” another way to say that is, “there is just so much room.” We have an enormous amount of room to move around in. Our minds are really vast. We’re not constricted by anything. But the opposite is our habitual experience. Our experience is usually quite claustrophobic, and we carry with us a very strong sense of burden, of things being solid. If we can loosen the grip of our thoughts, regarding them as dreams, we’ve just made the world and our ability to experience this world evermore larger.
Part Three
W
ORKING WITH
E
MOTIONS
So the intelligent way of working with emotions is to try to relate with their basic substance. The basic “isness” quality of the emotions, the fundamental nature of the emotions, is just energy. And if one is able to relate with the energy, then the energies have no conflict with you.
They become a natural process.
—
CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE,
The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation
12
BECOMING INTIMATE WITH OUR EMOTIONS
W
orking with emotions in meditation practice is a big subject for me. Very often, our thoughts are pretty lightweight. Just light, discursive thoughts. We’re thinking, “What’s for lunch?” or, “Did I remember to run the dishwasher this morning?” Sometimes we’re just having the strangest thoughts. Perhaps you are having a memory of your grandmother eating raw onions. Where does that come from?
Sometimes these thoughts take you away. Usually they do. But many times, they don’t have a lot of emotion in them. These little things passing through your mind come and go like the wind. You can get completely caught up in this fantasy world, but on the other hand, it’s somewhat lightweight. When you realize you’re thinking, you say “thinking.” You let the thoughts go, and there you are in the present moment. Maybe it lasts only half a second.
But if you sit longer, the more you sit, then—no question—painful memories will come up. Suddenly you are struggling against how you’re feeling, and a lot of emotion is involved.
The instruction I’ve been giving for years is: when you’re meditating, and even in your everyday life, notice when you’re hooked. Notice when you’re triggered or activated. That’s the first step: you acknowledge that emotion has arisen.
Next, I advise students to drop the story line and lean in. Just pause, and for a second connect in with spaciousness, with openness. I call this the “pause practice.” It’s like taking a time-out for yourself. Then you lean in to the quality or the texture or the experience, completely touching in to the emotion, without the story. How does the sadness feel? How does the anger feel? Where is it in your body? You let the feeling of the emotion become the object of your meditation. And the reason that I’ve been so committed to teaching on this is emotion itself is a radical and very potent way of awakening.
Without a doubt, this is where everyone loses it. We have so much fear of our emotions, so much aversion to them. You get caught in the momentum of the emotion, and it sweeps you away as if you were in its control. But I’ve found that we can take another approach, which is to enter the emotions that arise in our practice. Emotions are actually very empowering; I call working with the emotions “accelerated transformation.” When you experience difficult emotions in your sitting practice, and you let go of the words and the story behind the experience, then you’re sitting with just the energy. And yes, it can feel painful to do this.
It’s so funny, because sometimes when I give retreats, the TV cameras come in and take pictures of people meditating, and it looks like everyone’s sitting there in complete serenity. If you could see the speech balloons above people’s heads, or feel what’s going on with them, you might be knocked over in shock! The person next to you doesn’t know that you’re reliving a horror story from your childhood in graphic, heartbreaking detail, or that you’re in a deep depression, or that you’re having the world’s most pornographic fantasy. What we look like and what’s actually going on are often so completely different. We’re just sitting there in a Buddha-like posture, and it might appear that we are experiencing nothing but openness and calm—and nothing could be further from the truth. But I think the Buddha had the same experience that we do. For him, as for us, meditation isn’t always about sitting in a state of absolute calm. There is a scene in the movie
Little Buddha
where special effects are used to reflect the myriad emotions and temptations that are trying to seduce the Buddha. So much is coming at him—everything from gorgeous women to opportunities for power to things that are frightening, everything. The idea that the Buddha was completely chilled out and didn’t experience emotion around any of these things simply isn’t true. When the Buddha achieved enlightenment, he learned to be settled with all of those feelings coursing through him.
Like the Buddha, you can come to know your own energy, and you can feel quite settled with it. You become intimate with your own energy, and it no longer rules your life. Your conditioning doesn’t go away, but it no longer controls you.
In many ways, it is critical that we do become intimate with our emotions. Sometimes it is even a matter of life and death. I want to tell you a story about my granddaughter. Her mother, my daughter-in-law, died of alcoholism at age forty-eight when my granddaughter was seventeen years old. The addiction had been going on for a long time, from the time my granddaughter was about two. Her mother had a recovery and was sober for ten years, but then she relapsed.
So my granddaughter was applying to college and she had to write an essay. One of the essays for the college was to write about a transformative experience, and the first line of her essay was, “My mother died on December 1, 2009.” And this essay was so remarkable to me because in it she explained how her mother had died of alcoholism, and she said, “all my mother’s friends from Alcoholics Anonymous were telling me, and I knew it to be true, that alcohol is a disease and once it has you in its grip it’s pretty hard to shake it, and they said that’s what happened with my mother.” She said, “I knew that to be true, but I felt that her drinking was a symptom of something else. So while my mother was in the hospital in a coma, I wrote and wrote and wrote, trying to remember everything about my mother—my own memories, things she had said about herself, things her friends had said about her. I was trying to figure out who my mother was because I’m so much like her, and I wanted to figure out where she went wrong and what happened that ended in her dying so young.”
In her essay, my granddaughter came to the conclusion that her mother had a fixed idea of herself as being a certain way. And one of my granddaughter’s conclusions was that we’re changing all the time; everything about us is always changing. My granddaughter said, “When you hold a fixed idea of yourself, you have to leave out all the parts that you find boring, embarrassing, difficult, or sad. You leave out the emotions you don’t want to feel. And then when you do that, when you leave out all those parts, when those parts are not acceptable, then it eats away at you underneath. These unacknowledged parts are like a hum in the background that’s eating away at you, and you have to find an escape to get away from that. And my mother’s escape was alcohol.”
In order for us to be fully present, to experience life fully, we need to acknowledge and accept all our emotions and all parts of ourselves—the embarrassing parts as well as our anger, our rage, our jealousy, our envy, our self-pity, and all these chaotic emotions that sweep us away. Looking for an exit from experiencing the full range of our humanity leads to all kinds of pain and suffering. Meditation gives us the opportunity to experience our emotions naked and fresh, free from the labels of “right” and “wrong,” “should” and “shouldn’t.”
13
THE SPACE WITHIN THE EMOTION
O
ne of the lines that I really like in Gaylon Ferguson’s book
Natural Wakefulness
is “Distraction is married to discontent.” You could test this out in your own experience. There’s nothing as real and direct and counterhabitual as being present, just as it is, with yourself just as you are, with your emotions just as they are. As difficult as that can be, the result of that training is nonstruggle: not rejecting your experience, fully engaged with yourself, with the world, there for other people. Another result of coming back to being with yourself, just as you are, is that emotions don’t escalate.
Drop a stone in the water and what happens? The ripples go out. If the stone is big enough, it can rock a rowboat on the other side of the lake. It’s the same, generally speaking, when an emotion arises and you acknowledge, “Oh, I’m getting worked up. Oh, my heartbeat is going faster. Oh, I’m feeling fear. Oh, I’m feeling resentment.” Or just, “Oh, I’m activated, triggered.” At that moment, when you acknowledge it, there’s a space. Just by the very act of acknowledging or being present enough, conscious enough, you’ll find that space—and in that space lies your ability to choose how you’re going to react. You can either stay present with whatever it is you’re feeling—with the intensity or heat or edginess or shakiness of the emotion—or you can spin off. You can be caught in the momentum and carried away, which usually means you start talking to yourself about what’s going on. You churn it all up more and more, and it’s like the ripples go out and out and out.
When you choose to reinforce the emotion, when you choose to exaggerate it, when you choose to let the emotion run you, to let the emotion carry you away, then a whole chain reaction of suffering starts. It just sets off an automatic chain reaction like those ripples. So in meditation, we train in letting the rock, the emotion, drop without the ripples. You stay with the emotion rather than turning to the automatic reaction, a reaction that has been habitual for you for years and years.
And believe me, two seconds of doing something so radical, so counterhabitual, of not setting off the chain reaction, completely opens your life to this working from the space of open awareness. And if you don’t reject the emotions, they actually become your friends. They become your support. Your rage becomes your support for stabilizing, for returning the mind to its natural, open state. Emotions become your support for being fully awake and present, for being conscious rather than unconscious, for being present rather than distracted. That which has been an ogre in your life has the ability to just sweep you away—or it can become your actual friend, your support. It’s a whole different way of living, a whole different way of looking at the same old stuff.
14
EMOTIONS AS THE OBJECT OF MEDITATION
E
motions are the arising of the natural dynamic energy of life. Thoughts are also natural and spontaneously arising. Everything that happens is naturally occurring; you don’t actually invent any of it. Something occurs and you can invite it in to become your friend, your support for awakening. Emotions don’t have to be so evil and scary; they are just energy. We are the ones who ascribe the labels of “good” and “bad” to our emotions.
Even though we each have a unique experience with our emotions, emotions are a universal experience. When an emotion arises, everybody has the same choice. Everyone knows how to strengthen the old habits of anger, and everyone knows how to feel resentment and self-pity. We’re very good at it. But at the same time, you’re the only one having that emotion, and even though your friends and relatives might tell you what you’re thinking and feeling, actually you’re the only one who thinks those thoughts and feels those feelings. So each emotion is unique, and it doesn’t have to be called “good” or “bad” or anything at all. It’s just as it is.