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Book: Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears by Pema Chödrön
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Authors: Pema Chödrön
Tags: Tibetan Buddhism
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look out or if you give your full attention to a detail. You can let the experience be a contrast to being all caught up, let it be like popping a bubble, a moment in time, and then you just go on.
When you meditate, every time you realize that you are thinking and you let the thoughts go, that openness is available. Chögyam Trungpa called it being “free from fixed mind.” Every time the breath goes out into space, that openness is available. In any moment you could put your full attention on the immediacy of your experience, you could look at the floor or the ceiling, or just feel your bottom sitting on the chair. Do you see what I mean? You can just be here. Instead of being not here, instead of being caught up, absorbed in thinking, planning, worrying—caught in the cocoon where you’re cut off from your sense perceptions, cut off from the sounds and the sights, cut off from the power and magic of the moment—instead of that you could choose to pause. When you go out for a walk in the country, in the city, anywhere at all, just stop now and then. Punctuate your life with these moments.
In modern life, it’s so easy to get consumed, particularly by computers and TVs and cell phones. They have a way of hypnotizing us. As long as we are on automatic pilot, just run around by our thoughts and emotions, we’ll feel overwhelmed. It doesn’t make much difference whether we’re at a peaceful meditation center or in the busiest, most caught-up place in the world. In any setting, we can allow a gap and let natural openness come to us. Over and over and over, we can allow the space to realize where we are, to realize how vast our mind is. Find a way to slow down. Find a way to relax your mind and do it often, very, very often, throughout the day, not just when you are hooked but all the time.
The crucial point is that we can relate with our life just as it is right now, not later when things improve. We can always connect with the openness of our minds. We can use our days to wake up rather than go back to sleep. Give this approach a try. Make a commitment to pausing throughout the day, and do that whenever you can. Allow time for your perception to shift. Allow time to experience the natural energy of life as it is manifesting right now. This can bring dramatic changes in your personal life, and if you are worried about the state of the world, this is a way that you can use every moment to help shift the global climate of aggression toward peace.
9
T HE I MPORTANCE OF P AIN
B efore we can know what natural warmth really is, often we must experience loss. We go along for years moving through our days, propelled by habit, taking life pretty much for granted. Then we or someone dear to us has an accident or gets seriously ill, and it’s as if blinders have been removed from our eyes. We see the meaninglessness of so much of what we do and the emptiness of so much we cling to.
When my mother died and I was asked to go through her personal belongings, this awareness hit me hard. She had kept boxes of papers and trinkets that she treasured, things that she held on to through her many moves to smaller and smaller accommodations. They had represented security and comfort for her, and she had been unable to let them go. Now they were just boxes of stuff, things that held no meaning and represented no comfort or security to anyone. For me these were just empty objects, yet she had clung to them. Seeing this made me sad, and also thoughtful. After that I could never look at my own treasured objects in the same way. I had seen that things themselves are just what they are, neither precious nor worthless, and that all the labels, all our views and opinions about them, are arbitrary.
This was an experience of uncovering basic warmth. The loss of my mother and the pain of seeing so clearly how we impose judgments and values, prejudices, likes and dislikes, onto the world, made me feel great compassion for our shared human
When you meditate, every time you realize that you are thinking and you let the thoughts go, that openness is available. Chögyam Trungpa called it being “free from fixed mind.” Every time the breath goes out into space, that openness is available. In any moment you could put your full attention on the immediacy of your experience, you could look at the floor or the ceiling, or just feel your bottom sitting on the chair. Do you see what I mean? You can just be here. Instead of being not here, instead of being caught up, absorbed in thinking, planning, worrying—caught in the cocoon where you’re cut off from your sense perceptions, cut off from the sounds and the sights, cut off from the power and magic of the moment—instead of that you could choose to pause. When you go out for a walk in the country, in the city, anywhere at all, just stop now and then. Punctuate your life with these moments.
In modern life, it’s so easy to get consumed, particularly by computers and TVs and cell phones. They have a way of hypnotizing us. As long as we are on automatic pilot, just run around by our thoughts and emotions, we’ll feel overwhelmed. It doesn’t make much difference whether we’re at a peaceful meditation center or in the busiest, most caught-up place in the world. In any setting, we can allow a gap and let natural openness come to us. Over and over and over, we can allow the space to realize where we are, to realize how vast our mind is. Find a way to slow down. Find a way to relax your mind and do it often, very, very often, throughout the day, not just when you are hooked but all the time.
The crucial point is that we can relate with our life just as it is right now, not later when things improve. We can always connect with the openness of our minds. We can use our days to wake up rather than go back to sleep. Give this approach a try. Make a commitment to pausing throughout the day, and do that whenever you can. Allow time for your perception to shift. Allow time to experience the natural energy of life as it is manifesting right now. This can bring dramatic changes in your personal life, and if you are worried about the state of the world, this is a way that you can use every moment to help shift the global climate of aggression toward peace.
9
T HE I MPORTANCE OF P AIN
B efore we can know what natural warmth really is, often we must experience loss. We go along for years moving through our days, propelled by habit, taking life pretty much for granted. Then we or someone dear to us has an accident or gets seriously ill, and it’s as if blinders have been removed from our eyes. We see the meaninglessness of so much of what we do and the emptiness of so much we cling to.
When my mother died and I was asked to go through her personal belongings, this awareness hit me hard. She had kept boxes of papers and trinkets that she treasured, things that she held on to through her many moves to smaller and smaller accommodations. They had represented security and comfort for her, and she had been unable to let them go. Now they were just boxes of stuff, things that held no meaning and represented no comfort or security to anyone. For me these were just empty objects, yet she had clung to them. Seeing this made me sad, and also thoughtful. After that I could never look at my own treasured objects in the same way. I had seen that things themselves are just what they are, neither precious nor worthless, and that all the labels, all our views and opinions about them, are arbitrary.
This was an experience of uncovering basic warmth. The loss of my mother and the pain of seeing so clearly how we impose judgments and values, prejudices, likes and dislikes, onto the world, made me feel great compassion for our shared human
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