Here &
Now:
The Perfect Teacher
by Pema Chödrön
We can meet our match with a
poodle
or with a raging guard dog,
but the interesting question is — what
happens next?
Generally speaking, we regard
discomfort in any form as bad news. But for practitioners or spiritual warriors
— people who have a certain hunger to know what is true — feelings like
disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and
fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us
where it is that we're holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in, when
we feel we'd rather collapse and back away. They're like messengers that show
us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we're stuck. This very moment is the
perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it's with us wherever we are.
Those events and people in our
lives who trigger our unresolved issues could be regarded as good news. We don't
have to go hunting for anything. We don't need to try to create situations in
which we reach our limit. They occur all by themselves, with clockwork
regularity.
Each day, we're given many
opportunities to open up or shut down. The most precious opportunity presents
itself when we come to the place where we think we can't handle whatever is
happening. It's too much. It's gone too far. We feel bad about ourselves. There's no way we can
manipulate the situation to make ourselves come out looking good. No matter how
hard we try, it just won't work. Basically, life has just nailed
us.
It's as if you just looked at
yourself in the mirror, and you saw a gorilla. The mirror's there; it's showing
"you", and what you see looks bad. You try to angle the mirror so you will look
a little better, but no matter what you do, you still look like a gorilla.
That's being nailed by life, the place where you have no choice except to
embrace what's happening or push it away.
Most of us do not take these
situations as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use
all kinds of ways to escape — all addictions stem from this moment when we meet
our edge and we just can't stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with
something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain.
In fact, the rampant materialism that we see in the world stems from this
moment. There are so many ways that have been dreamt up to entertain us away
from the moment, soften its hard edge, deaden it, so we don't have to feel the
full impact of the pain that arises when we cannot manipulate the situation to
make us come out looking fine.
Meditation is an invitation to
notice when we reach our limit, and to not get carried away by hope and fear.
Through meditation, we're able to see clearly what's going on with our thoughts
and emotions, and we can also let them go. What's encouraging about meditation
is that even if we shut down, we can no longer shut down in ignorance. We see
very clearly that we're closing off. That in itself begins to illuminate the
darkness of ignorance. We're able to see how we run and hide, and keep ourselves
busy, so that we never have to let our hearts be penetrated. And we're also able
to see how we could open and relax.
Basically, disappointment,
embarrassment, and all these places where we just cannot feel good, are a sort
of death. We've just lost our ground completely; we are unable to hold it
together and feel that we're on top of things. Rather than realizing that it
takes death for there to be birth, we just fight against the fear of
death.
Reaching our limit is not some
kind of punishment. It's actually a sign of health that, when we meet the place
where we are about to die, we feel fear and trembling. A further sign of health
is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a
message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's
threatening us. Things like disappointment and anxiety are messengers telling us
that we're about to go into unknown territory.
Our bedroom closet can be unknown
territory for some of us. For others, it's going into outer space. What evokes
hope and fear for me is different from what brings it up for you. My aunt
reaches her limit when I move a lamp in her living room. My friend completely
loses it when she has to move to a new apartment. My neighbor is afraid of
heights. It doesn't really matter what causes us to reach our limit. The point
is that sooner or later it happens to all of us.
The first time I met Trungpa
Rinpoche was with a class of fourth graders who asked him a lot of questions
about growing up in Tibet and about escaping from the Chinese Communists into
India. One boy asked him if he was ever afraid. Rinpoche answered that his
teacher had encouraged him to go to places like graveyards that scared him and
to experiment with approaching things he didn't like. Then he told a story about
traveling with his attendants to a monastery he'd never seen before. As they
neared the gates, he saw a large guard dog with huge teeth and red eyes. It was
growling ferociously and struggling to get free from the chain that held it. The
dog seemed desperate to attack them. As Rinpoche got closer, he could see its bluish tongue and spittle
spraying from its mouth. They walked past the dog, keeping their distance, and
entered the gate. Suddenly the chain broke and the dog rushed at them. The
attendants screamed and froze in terror. Rinpoche turned and ran as fast as he
could — straight at the dog. The dog was so surprised that he put his tail
between his legs and ran away.
We can meet our match with a
poodle or with a raging guard dog, but the interesting question is — what
happens next?
The spiritual journey involves
going beyond hope and fear, stepping into unknown territory, continually moving
forward. The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path may be to just
keep moving. Usually, when we reach our limit, we feel exactly like Rinpoche's
attendants and freeze in terror. Our bodies freeze and so do our
minds.
How do we work with our minds when
we meet our match? Rather than indulge or reject our experience, we can somehow
let the energy of the emotion, the quality of what we're feeling, pierce us to
the heart. This is easier said than done, but it's a noble way to live. It's
definitely the path of compassion — the path of cultivating human bravery and
kindheartedness.
In the teachings of Buddhism, we
hear about egolessness. It sounds difficult to grasp: what are they talking
about, anyway? When the teachings are about neurosis, however, we feel right at
home. That's something we really understand. But egolessness? When we reach our
limit, if we aspire to know that place fully — which is to say that we aspire to
neither indulge nor repress — a hardness in us will dissolve. We will be
softened by the sheer force of whatever energy arises — the energy of anger, the
energy of disappointment, the energy of fear. When it's not solidified in one
direction or another, that very energy pierces us to the heart, and it
opens us. This is the discovery of
egolessness. It's when all our usual schemes fall apart. Reaching our limit is
like finding a doorway to sanity and the unconditional goodness of humanity,
rather than meeting an obstacle or a punishment.
The safest and most nurturing
place to begin working this way is during formal meditation. On the cushion, we
begin to get the hang of not indulging or repressing, and of what it feels like
to let the energy just be there. That is why it's so good to meditate every
single day and continue to make friends with our hopes and fears again and
again. This sows the seeds that enable us to be more awake in the midst of
everyday chaos. It's a gradual awakening, and it's cumulative, but that's
actually what happens. We don't sit in meditation to become good meditators. We
sit in meditation so that we'll be more awake in our lives.
The first thing that happens in
meditation is that we start to see what's happening. Even though we still run
away, and we still indulge, we see what we're doing clearly. One would think
that our seeing it clearly would immediately make it just disappear, but it
doesn't. So for quite a long time, we just see it clearly. To the degree that
we're willing to see our indulging and our repressing clearly, they begin to
wear themselves out. Wearing out is not exactly the same as going away. Instead,
a wider, more generous, more enlightened perspective arises.
How we stay in the middle, between
indulging and repressing, is by acknowledging whatever arises without judgment,
letting the thoughts simply dissolve, and then going back to the openness of
this very moment. That's what we're actually doing in meditation. Up come all
these thoughts, but rather than squelch them or obsess with them, we acknowledge
them and let them go. Then we come back to just being here. As Sogyal Rinpoche
puts it, we simply "bring our mind back home".
After a while, that's how we
relate with hope and fear in our daily lives. Out of nowhere, we stop struggling
and relax. We stop talking to ourselves and come back to the freshness of the
present moment.
This is something that evolves
gradually, patiently, over time. How long does this process take? I would say it
takes the rest of our lives. Basically, we're continually opening further,
learning more, connecting further with the depths of human suffering and human
wisdom, coming to know both those elements thoroughly and completely, and
becoming more loving and compassionate people. And the teachings continue.
There's always more to learn. We're not just complacent old fogies who've given
up and aren't challenged by anything anymore. At the most surprising times, we
still meet those ferocious dogs.
We might think, as we become more
open, that it's going to take bigger catastrophes for us to reach our limit. The
interesting thing is that, as we open more and more, it's the big ones that
immediately wake us up and the little things that catch us off guard. However,
no matter what the size, color, or shape is, the point is still to lean toward
the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from
it.
In practicing meditation, we're
not trying to live up to some kind of ideal — quite the opposite. We're just
being with our experience, whatever it is. If our experience is that sometimes
we have some kind of perspective, and sometimes we have none, then that's our
experience. If sometimes we can approach what scares us, and sometimes we
absolutely can't, then that's our experience. "This very moment is the
perfect teacher, and it's always with us" is really a most profound
instruction. Just seeing what's going on — that's the teaching right there. We
can be with what's happening and not dissociate. Awakeness is found in our
pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of
our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.
 This article
was excerpted from:
When
Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
by Pema
Chödrön.
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About The
Author
Pema Chödrön is an American Buddhist nun and one of
the foremost students of Chögyam Trungpa, the renowned meditation master. She is
the resident teacher at Gampo Abbey, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan
monastery in North America established for Westerners. She is also the author of
"The Wisdom of No Escape" and "Start Where You Are". This article
was excerpted with permission from her book "When Things Fall Apart",
©1997. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, In., Boston. www.shambhala.com.
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