Pema Chodron's Notes
Dakini's Bliss
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Today at 9:06am
Excerpted from "Taking the Leap", by Pema Chodrön
A few years ago, I was overwhelmed by deep anxiety, a fundamental, intense anxiety with no storyline attached. I felt very vulnerable, very afraid and raw. While I sat and breathed with it, relaxed into it, stayed with it, the terror did not abate. It was unrelenting after many days, and I didn't know what to do.
I went to see my teacher Dzigar Kongtrül, and he said, "Oh, I know that place." That was reassuring. He told me about times in his life when he had been caught in the same way. He said it had been an important part of his journey and had been a great teacher for him. Then he did something that shifted how I practice. He asked me to describe what I was experiencing. He asked me where I felt it. He asked me if it hurt physically and if it was hot or cold. He asked me to describe the quality of the sensation, as precisely as I could. This detailed exploration continued for a while, and then he brightened up and said "Ani Pema, that's the Dakini's Bliss. That's a high-level of spiritual bliss." I almost fell out of my chair. I thought, "Wow, this is great!" And I couldn't wait to feel that intensity again. And do you know what happened? When I eagerly sat down to practice, of course, since the resistance was gone, so was the anxiety.
I now know that at a nonverbal level the aversion to my experience had been very strong. I had been making the sensation bad. Basically, I just wanted it to go away. But when my teacher said "Dakini's bliss," it completely changed the way I looked at it. So that's what I learned: take an interest in your pain and your fear. Move closer, lean in, get curious; even for a moment, experience the feelings without labels, beyond being good or bad. Welcome them. Invite them. Do anything that helps melt the resistance.
Then the next time you lose heart and you can't bear to experience what you are feeling, you might recall this instruction: change the way you see it and lean in. That's basically the instruction that Dzigar Kongtrül gave me. And now I pass it on to you. Instead of blaming our discomfort on outer circumstances or on our own weakness, we can choose to stay present and awake to our experience, not rejecting it, not grasping it, not buying the stories that we relentlessly tell ourselves. This is priceless advice that addresses the true cause of suffering - yours, mine, and that of all living beings.
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Making a lot out of no thing
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Yesterday at 8:39am
Excerpted from "Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living" by Pema Chodron; from her commentary on this Lojong slogan of Atisha:
Regard all dharmas as dreams
More simply, regard everything as a dream. Life is a dream. Death is also a dream, for that matter; waking is a dream and sleeping is a dream. Another way to put this is: "Every situation is a passing memory".
It is said that with these slogans that are pointing to absolute truth - openness - one should not say "Oh, yes, I know," but that one should just allow a mental gap to open, and wonder, "Could it be? Am I dreaming this?" Pinch yourself. Dreams are just as convincing as waking reality. You could begin to contemplate the fact that things are not as solid or as reliable as they seem.
Have you ever been caught in the heavy-duty scenario of feeling defeated and hurt, and then somehow, for no particular reason, you just drop it? It just goes, and you wonder why you made "Much ado about nothing." What was that all about?
Excerpted from Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living
by Pema Chodron
a commentary on this Lojong slogan:
Seeing confusion as the four kayas is unsurpassable shunyata protection
This slogan is saying that when confusion arises not only do you practice tonglen and connect with the heart, but also you flash on the nonsolidity of phenomena at any time. In other words, you can just drop it. Out of the blue, you just drop it.
For instance, on a meditation retreat there are noodles for breakfast. Maybe in the beginning it seems funny, but halfway through breakfast you find yourself - instead of being mindful of the food, the chopsticks in your hand, the other people, and the good instructions you've received - talking to yourself about what a good breakfast would be, how you'd like to have a good breakfast like your mother used to make you in Brooklyn. It might be matzo ball soup or tortillas or beans or ham and eggs, but you want a good breakfast: burned bacon, like mother used to make. You resent these noodles.
Then, not through any particular effort, you just drop it. To your surprise, there's a big world there. You see all these lights glimmering in your empty lacquered bowl. You notice the sadness in someone's face. You realize that the man across from you is also thinking about breakfasts, because he has a resentful look on his face, which makes you laugh because you were there just a second ago.
The world opens up and suddenly we're there for what's happening. The solidity of our thoughts becomes transparent, and we can connect automatically with this space - shunyata -in ourselves. We have the ability to drop the story line, to rouse ourselves.
That's an everyday experience of shunyata. But it's also a very advanced practice if you can do it when you don't happen to feel like it.
If everything is solid and intense and you're wallowing in self-pity or something else, if someone says to you at that point, "Just drop it", even in the sweetest, kindest, most gentle voice, you want to punch that person in the nose.
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Limitless Joy
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Sunday, April 4, 2010 at 8:03am
Excerpted from "The Wisdom of No Escape"
by Pema Chodron
There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs, and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly.
Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life, it might be the only strawberry that we'll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.
Trungpa Rinpoche always used to say, "You can do it." That was probably one of his main teachings, "You can do it." Thich Nhat Hanh, in his Guide to Walking Meditation, begins by talking about how everybody carries around this burden, and if you want to put it off, if you want to lay it down, you can do it. You can connect with the joy in your heart.
On a day of silence like today, when things are still, you may find that you are feeling grim and doing everything with a grim expression: grimly opening the door, grimly drinking your tea, concentrating so hard on being quiet and still and moving slowly that you're miserable. On the other hand, you could just relax and realize that, behind all the worry, complaint, and disapproval that goes on in your mind, the sun is always coming up in the morning, moving across the sky, and going down in the evening. The birds are always out there collecting their food and making their nests and flying across the sky. The grass is always being blown by the wind or standing still. Food and flowers and tress are growing out of the earth. There's enormous richness. You could develop your passion for life and your curiosity and your interest. You could connect with your joyfulness. You could start right now.
The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, its a brand-new sun. Its born each morning, it lives for the duration of one day, and in the evening it passes on, never to return again. As soon as the children are old enough to understand, the adults take them out at dawn and they say, "The sun has only one day. You must live this day in a good way, so that the sun won't have wasted precious time." Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect with our basic joy.
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Simmering with Patience
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Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 6:52pm
Excerpted from "The Answer to Anger & Aggression is Patience", Shambhala Sun, March 2005.
That’s what it’s like with aggression: you can’t speak because everyone will feel the vibes. No matter what is coming out of your mouth, it’s like you’re sitting on top of a keg of dynamite and it’s vibrating.
Patience has a lot to do with getting smart at that point and just waiting: not speaking or doing anything. On the other hand, it also means being completely and totally honest with yourself about the fact that you’re furious. You’re not suppressing anything—patience has nothing to do with suppression. In fact, it has everything to do with a gentle, honest relationship with yourself. If you wait and don’t feed your discursive thought, you can be honest about the fact that you’re angry. But at the same time you can continue to let go of the internal dialogue. In that dialogue you are blaming and criticizing, and then probably feeling guilty and beating yourself up for doing that. It’s torturous, because you feel bad about being so angry at the same time that you really are extremely angry, and you can’t drop it. It’s painful to experience such awful confusion. Still, you just wait and remain patient with your confusion and the pain that comes with it.
Patience has a quality of enormous honesty in it, but it also has a quality of not escalating things, allowing a lot of space for the other person to speak, for the other person to express themselves, while you don’t react, even though inside you are reacting. You let the words go and just be there.
This suggests the fearlessness that goes with patience. If you practice the kind of patience that leads to the de-escalation of aggression and the cessation of suffering, you will be cultivating enormous courage. You will really get to know anger and how it breeds violent words and actions. You will see the whole thing without acting it out. When you practice patience, you’re not repressing anger, you’re just sitting there with it—going cold turkey with the aggression. As a result, you really get to know the energy of anger and you also get to know where it leads, even without going there. You’ve expressed your anger so many times, you know where it will lead. The desire to say something mean, to gossip or slander, to complain—to just somehow get rid of that aggression—is like a tidal wave. But you realize that such actions don’t get rid of the aggression; they escalate it. So instead you’re patient, patient with yourself.
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Hearing the song of the sirens
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Sunday, February 21, 2010 at 10:52am
Excerpted from "Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears"
By Pema Chodron
Ulysses, the hero of ancient Greek mythology, exemplifies the courage it takes to consciously choose staying receptive and present when the temptation to get swept away is intense.
When he was making the sea voyage home to Greece after the Trojan War, Ulysses knew that his ship would have to pass through a very dangerous area that was inhabited by beautiful maidens known as the sirens. He had been warned that the call of these women was irresistible, and that sailors couldn't help but steer towards the sirens, crash their boats onto the rocks, and drown.
Nevertheless, Ulysses wanted to hear the song of the sirens. He knew the prophecy that if anyone could hear their voices and not go towards them, the sirens would lose their power forever and wither away. This was a challenge that drew him.
As his ship neared the sirens' homeland, Ulysses told his men to put wax plugs in their ears and to tie him tightly to the mast, instructing them that no matter how hard he struggled and gestured, no matter how wrathfully he appeared to be ordering them to cut his ropes, they were not to untie him until the ship reached a familiar point of land well out of earshot of the sirens' song. This story, as you might expect, has a happy ending. The men followed his instructions and Ulysses made it though.
To a greater or lesser degree we will all have to go through similar discomfort in order not to follow the call of our own personal sirens, in order to step through the open doorway to awakening.
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The ever-brilliant jewel of awakened heart
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Sunday, February 14, 2010 at 1:27pm
Excerpted from the chapter "The Love That Will Not Die"
from "When Things Fall Apart"
by Pema Chodron
In the midst of loneliness, in the midst of fear. In the middle of feeling misunderstood and rejected is the heartbeat of all things - the genuine heart of sadness.
Just as a jewel that has been buried in the Earth for a million years is not discolored or harmed, in the same way this noble heart is not affected by all of our kicking and screaming. The jewel can be brought out into the light at any time and it will glow as brilliantly as if nothing had ever happened.
No matter how committed we are to unkindness, selfishness or greed, the genuine heart of bodhicitta cannot be lost. It is here in all that lives, never marred and completely whole.
We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us, a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears, and to caring only for the people nearest to us.
Curiously enough if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet, when we don't close off and let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.
His Holiness The Dalai Lama describes two kind of selfish people - the wise and the unwise. Unwise selfish people only think of themselves, and the result is confusion and pain. Wise selfish people know that the best thing they can do for themselves is to be there for others. As a result they experience joy.
When we see a woman and her child begging on the street, when we see a man mercilessly beating his terrified dog, when we see a teenager who has been badly beaten, or see fear in the eyes of a child, do we turn away because we can't bear it? Most of us probably do.
Someone needs to encourage us not to brush aside what we feel. Not to be ashamed of the love and grief that it arouses in us. Not to be afraid of pain.
Someone needs to encourage us that this soft spot in us could be awakened and that to do this would change our lives.
The practices of Tonglen, sending and receiving, is designed to awaken bodhicitta. To put us in touch with genuine noble heart. It is a practice of taking in pain, and sending out pleasure, and therefore completely turns around our well-established habit of doing just the opposite.
Tonglen is a practice of creating space. Ventilating the atmosphere of our lives, so that people can breathe freely and relax. Whenever we encounter suffering in any form, the Tonglen instruction is to breathe it in with the wish that everyone could be free of pain. Whenever we encounter happiness in any form, the instruction is to breathe it out, send it out with the wish that everyone could feel joy.
It a practice that allows people to feel less burdened and less cramped, a practice that shows us how to love without conditions.
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Coemergent Moments
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Friday, February 5, 2010 at 7:54pm
Answering the question of a monastic in a talk at Gampo Abbey.
Monastic: I have trouble understanding how Shenpa can be the experience of ego-clinging, and at the same time neutral.
Pema Chodron: Its just my attempt to have this whole thing not be loaded with good-bad thinking. And you know the teachings on ego-clinging. Its not supposed to be seen as a demon. When you look, look, look, look, you can't even find it. So its like a phantom more than a demon. But it is such a powerful all pervasive phantom that keeps causing us a lot of suffering.
So what Dzigar Kongtrul says is you have to know what ego-clinging feels like. What does it feel like to cling to a self? Then it's important to be able to identify the feeling, so thats where the teachings on Shenpa come in, which is ego-clinging.
So thats a classic Buddhist approach, which it isn't that you call it "good" or "bad" or that you are refraining or rejecting it in the sense of "wrong" and "evil", its just some kind of prajna that sees that its a tendency that continues to make us suffer.
And from the point of view of the study of the brain with meditation, its staying in the same conventional mindset. That's what's really interesting. It's a feeling that keeps you stuck in the box. There's never any fresh take, cause you are always staying on secure ground and staying stuck.
So I think personally that it is really helpful to don't think "oh oh, bad, ego clinging or shenpa."
You just think "moment of truth", "moment in time", physical experience, something with a tug and here is this great coemergent moment, to use the vajrayana language, its a coemergent moment, and it can go either way.
Excerpted from a talk by Pema Chodron
titled "Guidelines for Living Dangerously"
recorded at Gampo Abbey
available from Great Path
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How to taste the quality of the moment
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Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 6:08pm
It could be the main koan of your life:
How to taste the quality of the moment, of the week, without the labels of good and bad, or succeeding and failing. But really just get used to tasting or knowing or experiencing the quality of what you are going through, not as some final thing.
I think Rilke said "no feeling is final". Its a great line in one of his poems. No feeling is final, but somehow in the moment, we often feel, a sort of - this is how it is - in such a heavy way. And then so much story line goes with that that it drags us down.
So sometimes we like what we are feeling and then we don't like what we're feeling. And then we like it again, and then we don't like it again. And then it just sort of goes like that - it's actually fine for it to be like that.
Enlightened people, from what I have heard, the moods come and go, the energy shifts come and go. Its not like suddenly you are enlightened and then the rain never comes. It doesn't mean you don't wake up with a headache, or a heavy feeling in your heart.
But basically it never goes beyond that, its just the quality of awakened energy as it is manifesting right now. So it is a really profound deep shift of attitude towards our moods and thoughts and our emotions.
The path of liberation depends on not taking everything so personally.
I remember Trungpa Rinpoche saying to a group of students, one of which was complaining about their very very difficult work situation with a very difficult boss, and his answer began with the statement "well the trouble is, we all take everything so personally". And I remember we all laughed and it seemed like a really funny comment. But I now see exactly what he meant.
Taking it personally means investing so much energy and time as if you are like this, and the situation is like this, and its fixed, instead of realizing that its always shifting and changing.
Sometimes the sun is brightly shining, and sometimes it hasn't shone for the last three days. And you feel what you feel about that. But of course what we are really talking about is the emotional weather.
excerpted from a talk entitled "Guidelines for Living Fearlessly"
Recorded in Gampo Abbey, July 2008
Great Path, Pema Chodron Books and Tapes
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