Read Online The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World by Pema Chödrön - Free Book Online Page A

clearly.
    How do we renounce? How do we work with this tendency to block and to freeze and to refuse to take another step toward the unknown? If our edge is like a huge stone wall with a door in it, how do we learn to open that door and step through it again and again, so that life becomes a process of growing up, becoming more and more fearless and flexible, more and more able to play like a raven in the wind?
    The wilder the weather is, the more the ravens love it. They have the time of their lives in the winter, when the wind gets much stronger and there’s lots of ice and snow. They challenge the wind. They get up on the tops of the trees and they hold on with their claws and then they grab on with their beaks as well. At some point they just let go into the wind and let it blow them away. Then they play on it, they float on it. After a while, they’ll go back to the tree and start over. It’s a game. Once I saw them in an incredible hurricane-velocity wind, grabbing each other’s feet and dropping and then letting go and flying out. It was like a circus act. The animals and the plants here on Cape Breton are hardy and fearless and playful and joyful; the elements have strengthened them. In order to exist here, they have had to develop a zest for challenge and for life. As you can see, it adds up to tremendous beauty and inspiration and uplifted feeling. The same goes for us.
    If we understand renunciation properly, we also will serve as an inspiration for other people because of our hero quality, our warrior quality, the fact that each of us meets our challenges all the time. When somebody works with hardship in an openhearted humorous way like a warrior, when somebody cultivates his or her bravery, everyone responds, because we know we can do that too. We know that this person wasn’t born perfect but was inspired to cultivate warriorship and a gentle heart and clarity.
    Whenever you realize you have met your edge – you’rescared and you’re frozen and you’re blocked – you’re able to recognize it because you open enough to see what’s happening. It’s already a sign of your aliveness and the fact that you’ve shed a lot, that you can see so clearly and so vividly. Rather than think you have made a mistake, you can acknowledge the present moment and its teaching, or so we are instructed. You can hear the message, which is simply that you’re saying ‘No.’ The instruction isn’t then to ‘smash ahead and karate-chop that whole thing’; the instruction is to soften, to connect with your heart and engender a basic attitude of generosity and compassion toward yourself, the archetypal coward.
    The journey of awakening – the classical journey of the mythical hero or heroine – is one of continually coming up against big challenges and then learning how to soften and open. In other words, the paralyzed quality seems to be hardening and refusing, and the letting go or the renunciation of that attitude is simply feeling the whole thing in your heart, letting it touch your heart. You soften and feel compassion for your predicament and for the whole human condition. You soften so that you can actually sit there with those troubling feelings and let them soften you more.
    The whole journey of renunciation, or starting to say yes to life, is first of all realizing that you’ve come up against your edge, that everything in you is saying no, and then at that point, softening. This is yetanother opportunity to develop loving-kindness for yourself, which results in playfulness – learning to play like a raven in the wind.
* The vicious cycle of existence – the round of birth and death and rebirth – which arises out of ignorance and is characterized by suffering; in ordinary reality, the vicious cycle of frustration and suffering generated as the result of karma (one’s actions).

twelve
sending and taking
    T his morning I’m going to talk about tonglen , the practice of ‘sending and taking.’ Some