Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change by Pema Chödrön Page A
Authors: Pema Chödrön
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conscious or distracted. The contrast is pretty obvious. Chögyam Trungpa emphasized mindfulness and paying attention to the details of our lives as ways to develop appreciation for ourselves and our world, ways to free ourselves from suffering.
You build inner strength through embracing the totality of your experience, both the delightful parts and the difficult parts. Embracing the totality of your experience is one definition of having loving-kindness for yourself. Loving-kindness for yourself does not mean making sure you’re feeling good all the time—trying to set up your life so that you’re comfortable every moment. Rather, it means setting up your life so that you have time for meditation and self-reflection, for kindhearted, compassionate self-honesty. In this way you become more attuned to seeing when you’re biting the hook, when you’re getting caught in the undertow of emotions, when you’re grasping and when you’re letting go. This is the way you become a true friend to yourself just as you are, with both your laziness and your bravery. There is no step more important than this.
It’s a tricky business—not rejecting any part of yourself at the same time that you’re becoming acutely aware of how embarrassing or painful some of those parts are. What most of us have been doing is gearing our lives toward avoiding unpleasant feelings while clinging to whatever we think will make us feel good and feel secure. From a conventional point of view, this makes perfect sense. But from the vantage point of remaining with our direct experience, the vantage point of opening to the tentativeness of life, this strategy is self-defeating, the very thing that keeps us stuck.
There’s an exercise that can help us reflect on this kneejerk tendency to cling to what makes us feel good and push away what makes us feel bad:
Sit quietly for a few minutes and become mindful of your breath as it goes in and out. Then contemplate what you do when you’re unhappy or dissatisfied and want to feel better. Even make a list if you want to. Then ask yourself: Does it work? Has it ever worked? Does it soothe the pain? Does it escalate the pain? If you’re really honest, you’ll come up with some pretty interesting observations.
One of the insights many people have when they do this exercise is yes, those efforts to make myself feel good do work—but not for very long. And the reason they stop working is that our strategies contain an inherent contradiction. We try to hold on to fleeting pleasures and avoid discomfort in a world where everything is always changing. Our strategies are not dependable. How we go about trying to feel secure and happy is at odds with the facts of life.
There’s a Buddhist teaching called the eight worldly concerns that describes this predicament. It points out our main preoccupations in life—what drives us, what we hope for, what we fear. It points out how we continually try to avoid the uncertainty inherent in our condition, how we continually try to get solid ground under our feet. The eight worldly concerns are presented as four pairs of opposites: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, fame and disgrace, praise and blame.
Pleasure and pain drive us all the time. The attraction is simple: we want pleasure; we don’t want pain. Our attachmentto them is very strong, very visceral at either extreme. We can get that clenching-in-the-gut feeling of being hooked both when we crave something—when we’re consumed with wanting or needing—and when we’re averse to something and try to push it away.
We can spend a lifetime chasing after pleasure and trying to get away from pain, never staying present with the underlying feeling of discontent. But at some point it might hit us that there’s more to liberation than trying to avoid discomfort, more to lasting happiness than pursuing temporary pleasures, temporary relief.
Our attachment to gain and loss also keeps us running in the rat
You build inner strength through embracing the totality of your experience, both the delightful parts and the difficult parts. Embracing the totality of your experience is one definition of having loving-kindness for yourself. Loving-kindness for yourself does not mean making sure you’re feeling good all the time—trying to set up your life so that you’re comfortable every moment. Rather, it means setting up your life so that you have time for meditation and self-reflection, for kindhearted, compassionate self-honesty. In this way you become more attuned to seeing when you’re biting the hook, when you’re getting caught in the undertow of emotions, when you’re grasping and when you’re letting go. This is the way you become a true friend to yourself just as you are, with both your laziness and your bravery. There is no step more important than this.
It’s a tricky business—not rejecting any part of yourself at the same time that you’re becoming acutely aware of how embarrassing or painful some of those parts are. What most of us have been doing is gearing our lives toward avoiding unpleasant feelings while clinging to whatever we think will make us feel good and feel secure. From a conventional point of view, this makes perfect sense. But from the vantage point of remaining with our direct experience, the vantage point of opening to the tentativeness of life, this strategy is self-defeating, the very thing that keeps us stuck.
There’s an exercise that can help us reflect on this kneejerk tendency to cling to what makes us feel good and push away what makes us feel bad:
Sit quietly for a few minutes and become mindful of your breath as it goes in and out. Then contemplate what you do when you’re unhappy or dissatisfied and want to feel better. Even make a list if you want to. Then ask yourself: Does it work? Has it ever worked? Does it soothe the pain? Does it escalate the pain? If you’re really honest, you’ll come up with some pretty interesting observations.
One of the insights many people have when they do this exercise is yes, those efforts to make myself feel good do work—but not for very long. And the reason they stop working is that our strategies contain an inherent contradiction. We try to hold on to fleeting pleasures and avoid discomfort in a world where everything is always changing. Our strategies are not dependable. How we go about trying to feel secure and happy is at odds with the facts of life.
There’s a Buddhist teaching called the eight worldly concerns that describes this predicament. It points out our main preoccupations in life—what drives us, what we hope for, what we fear. It points out how we continually try to avoid the uncertainty inherent in our condition, how we continually try to get solid ground under our feet. The eight worldly concerns are presented as four pairs of opposites: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, fame and disgrace, praise and blame.
Pleasure and pain drive us all the time. The attraction is simple: we want pleasure; we don’t want pain. Our attachmentto them is very strong, very visceral at either extreme. We can get that clenching-in-the-gut feeling of being hooked both when we crave something—when we’re consumed with wanting or needing—and when we’re averse to something and try to push it away.
We can spend a lifetime chasing after pleasure and trying to get away from pain, never staying present with the underlying feeling of discontent. But at some point it might hit us that there’s more to liberation than trying to avoid discomfort, more to lasting happiness than pursuing temporary pleasures, temporary relief.
Our attachment to gain and loss also keeps us running in the rat
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