Pema Chödrön

Essence of Life

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From: When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

by Pema Chodron

“We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough
or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from
the point of view of someone who is awake, that’s death.
Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed
and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of
death. It doesn’t have any fresh air. There’s no room for something
to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by
controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for
failure, because sooner or later, we’re going to have an experience
we can’t control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love
is going to die, we’re going to find out we have cancer, a brick is
going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head, somebody’s going
to spill tomato juice all over our white suit, or we’re going to arrive
at our favorite restaurant and discover that no one ordered produce
and seven hundred people are coming for lunch.

“The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet,
and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes
it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you
feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie
up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it
involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something
aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the
rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be
continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in
no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and
fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the
awakened point of view, that’s life.”

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Life Is Very Brief

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From: The Wisdom of No Escape

By Pema Chödrön

Life is very brief. Even if we live to be a hundred, it’s very brief. Also, its length is unpredictable. Our lives are impermanent. I myself have, at the most, thirty more years to live, maybe thirty-five, but that would be tops. Maybe I have only twenty more years to live. Maybe I don’t even have one more day to live. It’s sobering to me to think that I don’t have all that long left. It makes me feel that I want to use it well. If you realize that you don’t have that many more years to live and if you live your life as if you actually had only a day left, then the sense of impermanence heightens that feeling of preciousness and gratitude. Traditionally it’s said that once you are born, you immediately start dying. I remember that in Boulder, every year the Hare Krishna people put up a display of life-sized figures starting with a newborn baby, through all the stages of life. You couldn’t help but identify with this figure getting bigger and stronger, in the prime of life, until the whole thing starts going downhill and the figure is shown getting older, with the final one a corpse. You don’t even know if you’re going to have the privilege of going through that whole process. Even if you do, impermanence is very real.

When you’re depressed, you may say to yourself, “Why bother to sit? Why bother to find out, for my own sake and for the sake of others, what this depression is about? Why does it drag me down? How come the sky was so blue yesterday and now everything is so gray? How come everyone was smiling at me yesterday and now they’re all frowning at me? How come yesterday I felt like I was doing everything right and today it seems I’m doing everything wrong? How come? How come? How come?” If you’re alone in retreat, you still get depressed. There’s no one to blame it on; it’s just this feeling that happens. You ask yourself, what is it? What is it? What is it? I want to know. How can I rouse myself? What can I do that’s not completely habitual? How can I get out of this rut? How do we stop the habitualness of our process? The teachings say, “Well, that’s why we sit. That’s what mindfulness is about. Look carefully. Pay attention to details.”

Remembering impermanence motivates you to go back and look at the teachings, to see what they tell you about how to work with your life, how to rouse yourself, how to cheer up, how to work with emotions. Still, sometimes you’ll read and read and you can’t find the answer anywhere. But then someone on a bus will tell you, or you’ll find it in the middle of a movie, or maybe even in a commercial on TV. If you really have these questions, you’ll find the answers everywhere. But if you don’t have a question, there’s certainly no answer.

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Satisfaction

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 From: The Wisdom of No Escape

By Pema Chödrön

It’s very helpful to realize that being here, sitting in meditation, doing simple everyday things like working, walking outside, talking with people, bathing, using the toilet, and eating, is actually all that we need to be fully awake, fully alive, fully human. It’s also helpful to realize that this body that we have, this very body that’s sitting here right now on this shrine room floor, this very body that perhaps aches because it’s only day two of the dathun, and this mind that we have at this very moment, are exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, and fully alive. Furthermore, the emotions that we have right now, the negativity and the positivity, are what we actually need. It is just as if we had looked around to find out what would be the greatest wealth that we could possibly possess in order to lead a decent, good, completely fulfilling, energetic, inspired life, and found it all right here.

Being satisfied with what we already have is a magical golden key to being alive in a full, unrestricted, and inspired way. One of the major obstacles to what is traditionally called enlightenment is resentment, feeling cheated, holding a grudge about who you are, where you are, what you are. This is why we talk so much about making friends with ourselves, because, for some reason or other, we don’t feel that kind of satisfaction in a full and complete way. Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists, exists in what we already have. Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, and therefore it doesn’t do any good to try to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness. We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we’re doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we’re doing. The key is to wake up, to become more alert, more inquisitive and curious about ourselves.

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves. We can become the world’s greatest experts on anger, jealousy, and self deprecation, as well as on joyfulness, clarity, and insight. Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.

We’re talking about loving-kindness again, in a slightly different way. The ground of loving-kindness is this sense of satisfaction with who we are and what we have. The path is a sense of wonder, becoming a two- or three-year-old child again, wanting to know all the unknowable things, beginning to question everything. We know we’re never really going to find the answers, because these kinds of questions come from having a hunger and a passion for life-they have nothing to do with resolving anything or tying it all up into a neat little package. This kind of questioning is the journey itself. The fruition lies in beginning to realize our kinship with all humanity. We realize that we have a share in whatever everyone else has and is. Our journey of making friends with ourselves is not a selfish thing. We’re not trying to get all the goodies for ourselves. It’s a process of developing loving-kindness and a true understanding for other people as well.

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Inconvenience

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From: Comfortable With Uncertainty

By Pema Chödrön

When you start to take the warrior’s journey, you’re going to find that it’s often extremely inconvenient. When you start to want to live your life fully instead of opting for death, you discover that life itself is inconvenient. Wholeheartedness is a precious gift, but no one can actually give it to you. You have to find the path that has heart and then walk it impeccably. In doing that, you again and again encounter the inconvenience of your own uptightness, your own headaches, your own falling flat on your face. But in wholeheartedly practicing and wholeheartedly following the path, this inconvenience is not an obstacle. It’s simply a certain texture of life, a certain energy of life.

Not only that, sometimes when you just get flying and all feels so good and you think, “This is it, this is that path that has heart,” you suddenly fall flat on your face. Everybody’s looking at you. You say to yourself, “What happened to that path that had heart? This feels like the path full of mud in my face. Since you are wholeheartedly committed to the warrior’s journey, it pricks you, it pokes you. It’s like someone laughing in your ear, challenging you to figure out what to do when you don’t know what to do. It humbles you. It opens your heart.

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Shooting Arrows

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From: Start Where You Are

By Pema Chödrön

In terms of “Three objects, three poisons, and three seeds of virtue, when these poisons arise, the instruction is to drop the story line, which means-instead of acting out or repressing-use the situation as an opportunity to feel your heart, to feel the wound; Use it as an opportunity to touch that soft spot. Underneath all that craving or aversion or jealousy or feeling wretched about yourself, underneath all that hopelessness and despair and depression, there’s something extremely soft, which is called bodhichitta.

When these things arise, train gradually and very gently without making it into a big deal. Begin to get the hang of feeling what’s underneath the story line. Feel the wounded heart that’s underneath the addiction, self-loathing, or anger: If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart and to relate to that wound. When we do that, the three poisons become three seeds of how to make friends with ourselves. They give us the chance to work on patience and kindness, the chance not to give up on ourselves and not to act out or repress. They give us the chance to change our habits completely. This is what helps both ourselves and others. This is instruction on how to turn unwanted circumstances into the path of enlightenment. By following it, we can transform all that messy stuff that we usually push away into the path of awakening: reconnecting with our soft heart, our clarity, and our ability to open further.

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Confident And Fearless

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By Pema Chödrön

The only reason we don’t open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don’t feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else’s eyes.

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Compassion – difficult people

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From: a talk on The Practice of Compassion

By Pema Chödrön

Then you do it for the difficult ones. You think of the difficult person or people and you wish for them to be free of suffering and the root of suffering. Now, a very interesting thing often happens here. You can really get into wishing them to be free of suffering, because you think if they could be free … basically you want them to be the way you want them to be, you know (laughter). Could they be free of their lousy personality so that I could feel better? (Laughter) This you might call not quite compassion. It’s more like justifying your dislike of them by using a compassion practice.

And the other thing is, of course, being glad that they’re suffering (laughter). Hard to face, but true. When we really dislike people, maybe we’re well aware; or maybe we’ll get more in touch with it by doing this practice; but there’s a lot of rejoicing, almost, about their misfortune. Because basically they hurt you and you want them to suffer too. So you’re glad when you hear that things aren’t going well for them. And you feel pretty unhappy when you hear that everything is fine for them. Those kinds of feelings come up about people that we find difficult. So, rather than feeling bad about that just notice that that’s what happening. Have a sense of humor. Whatever it is, let the words go and notice the effect.

Sometimes with difficult people, I find it is also quite helpful to actually imagine different scenarios for them. I have actually cooked up some real genuine compassion for some of the very difficult people in my life by beginning to think of, for instance, something happening to one of their children or something that I know that, if that degree of misfortune happened to them, I wouldn’t be glad, that I would really feel compassion for them. So you can use your imagination here if it helps you to feel some kind of compassion for someone who your heart is shut to, a difficult person.

In other words, you find the person or people and you encourage this feeling by saying the words, “May they be free of suffering and the root of suffering.” And then you notice the effect. Then you expand the whole thing by moving onto the next stage. So we keep expanding it in this way, and just notice what happens.

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