Aloha Sangha

ancient wisdom for crazy times

Category: Pema Chodron

meeting your edge
The mind throws up resistance to the process of liberation- but we can metabolize this, allowing deep change and a graceful opening into a timeless presence.
The American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön tells a story about meeting your edge- of a group of people climbing up a very steep mountain. Some made it to the top, and some, gripped by fear, had to stop halway up.
She observes:
Life is a journey of meeting your edge again and again. That’s where you’re challenged and ask yourself questions like, “Now, why am I so scared? What is it I don’t want to see? Why can’t I go any further than this?”
Meeting your edge can happen in different places. The people who got to the top were not special, maybe they were just not afraid of heights. The ones gripped by fear met their edge sooner and got their lessons earlier.
Everybody meets their own edge on this path. The late Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa taught that the essence of a mature and transformative practice is to “meeting your edge and softening.”
Our meditation practice asks the same question a seasoned therapist would ask:
What am I avoiding? What am I afraid of?
The mind can throw up very interesting resistance to the process of liberation and purification. This resistance has to be metabolized before deep change can occur.
This is precisely what our mindfulness meditation does.
Then meeting your edge can be a graceful opening into a t im eless presence.
Last year a sangha member gave me a very inspiring book by Mary O’Malley, the title of which I love: What Is In The Way Is The Way. In her bio on the back cover Mary writes that she “barely survived childhood.”
Her bio chronicles her “descent into darkness.” After several suicide attempts, she had a “life-changing realization in which she saw through the games of the struggling mind and experienced a full connection with life which is the foundation of her work.”
There is one line which truly spoke to me, perfectly describing this kind of graceful opening:
When we dissolve our cloud banks of struggle through mindfulness and heartfulness, we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell the exquisite sacredness of all of life.
How does this look in practice?
We’re going along and everything is fine, but then we reach an edge of what we feel comfortable with. It might be a fear of physical pain or unpleasant emotions.
It can be a fear of change and insecurity; or it may be fear of the unknown.
Our meditation gently takes us to our edge and invites us to open and soften.
We don’t just do this once; we do this many times a day, metabolizing our resistance to what is bit by bit.
In the ancient Buddhist texts, the Buddha would often talk to people suffering from a grave illness. The descriptions they use for their symptoms are sometimes very graphic.
The Buddha then would ask them something like:
Even though your body is experiencing all these painful feelings, can your mind be at peace?
This is a possibility for us, but it takes training and time.
As mindfulness metabolizes our fear and resistance, we see unhappiness as optional, a habit we no longer need–the emotional analog of an appendix.
This frees us to love the life that is right here and right now. Sure, it takes training and time- but, oh, what a bargain!
06/03/2024
basic human sanity
We breathe, and open our hearts no matter how difficult it feels, bringing some peace to our minds as we ask what is compassion?
The ongoing events in Gaza are hard to take in. I am sorry to bring this up, but I can’t shake these feelings. If I could draw a picture of my inner being, it would look like the young woman’s face in Mikuláš Galanda’s work above.
Yes, mindfulness reveals a certain truth power to just sitting with your emotions, thoughts and feelings as they are, without interfering or trying to change or fix anything.
Yes, allowing what is there to arise in this way brings peace, even though it may not feel particularly peaceful.
And yes, I can re-direct myself to settle more easily into the feeling-space those times when I feel my heart turning to stone, out of numbness.
But what is compassion here? What does it look like?
It’s still hard to practice with confused and difficult feelings.
How do we do this?
For a start, we practice letting thinking be. I can’t stop myself from feeling upset. I have fearful, sometimes angry thoughts, and I can’t do anything to stop them.
But when we sit with awareness of our body sitting and breathing, we tap into a basic human sanity that is freely available to all of us.
We create an inner space for all the thoughts and emotions, anger, fear, all of it, to arise- and simply notice the conditioning to interfere, to meddle, to push away, to zone out or to cling.
As Pema Chrodon observes,
When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid.
Little by little, we learn what it is like to allow everything we think and feel to arise within us without being caught by them or identifying with them.
This is not another way to deny or escape our feelings, on the contarary.
When we do this, as the Zen teacher Norman Fischer often says,
… we forgive ourselves for being human. And when we do that, he says, we forgive everyone else for being human, too.
Suffering Opens The Real Path
What is compassion
If we sit long enough, we get in touch with profound human pain and the compassion to meet that pain. Wth practice, over the years, this compassion becomes the center of our lives, little by little.
We breathe, and open our hearts no matter how difficult it feels, bringing some peace to our minds and compassion deeper into our hearts.
11/05/2023
not a caravan of despair
Do you have a fear of missing out on a more spiritual experience doing a mountain of laundry, washing a sinkful of dishes, or raking leaves till kingdom come?
The meditation teacher Karen Maezen Miller, in a piece published in Lion’s Roar, rightfully calls us on this thought, while describing how the domestic lives of the communal Zen masters of old offered many a critical course correction:
Rather than think of daily life chores as something to get through; it’s fully experiencing the “getting through” part that frees the mind more profoundly than running off to a cave in the misty mountains.
In Do Dishes, Rake Leaves, she asks:
Tell me, while I’m sweeping leaves till kingdom come, is it getting in the way of my life? Is it interfering with my life? Keeping me from my life?
Do Dishes, Rake Leaves
There is a break in this piece while she makes simple observations about folding clothes and washing dishes. Then she answers her own question:
Only my imaginary life, that life of what-ifs and how-comes: the life I’m dreaming of.
Then another short narrative digression, ending with:
At the moment that I’m raking leaves, at the moment I’m doing anything, it is my life; it is all of time, and it is all of me.
Pause and ask yourself:
do you really and truly feel you are missing out on some more spiritual experience by being saddled with a mountain of laundry, a sink overflowing with dishes, or a yard full of leaves to rake?
I like Josh Korda’s line, that our mindfulness practice is
not really about being above it all; it’s about being with it all.
Whether in sitting meditation or raking leaves or doing the laundry, our core practice is to notice what is happening.
When you feel irritated, bothered, or bored, just be aware of mind states and their underlying feeling tones. Or the feeling tones and their undelying mind states.
As soon as you notice these feelings, and the awareness in which they arise, you are no longer lost in them.
As the Korean monk Haemin Sunim writes:
Awareness is inherently pure, like the open sky. Stress, irritation, and anger can temporarily cloud the sky, but they can never pollute it.
The wave of irritation, anger, boredom, or whatever it is, naturally recedes on its own as long as you don’t feed it by dwelling or spinning an interesting narrative around it.
This is not just detachment; we also learn to turn towards and gently open to the sadness or grief that seeks our attention, triggering perhaps sadness, shame or fear.
I love how Pema Chodron describes this essential skill:
We join our loss of heart with honesty and kindness. Instead of pulling back from the pain of irritation we move closer. We lean into the wave. We swim into the wave.
Mindful poetry
Mindfulness is this simple: we pay attention to what’s happening in the moment, let go of any stories we may tell ourselves about our experiences, and “swim into the wave.”
As Jiddu Krishnamurti put it:
Pure attention without judgment is not only the highest form of human intelligence but also the highest expression of love.
As you get better at it, you realize that challenging mental states are just the resistance to what is. And they rise and recede within the silent space of your awareness.
When you sit down to meditate today, feel any resistance which may come up — to aches, pains, or mental states such as boredom, restlessness, or doubt.
Savor the resistance, like a fine wine or a smooth boba tea.
As it dissipates, feel the joy of the quieting mind, which is always there.
Ours is a practice of uncovering joy and fulfillment in our lives just as they are, regardless of our circumstances.
Rumi has the last word this week; on his tomb is purportedly written:
Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of life. Though you have broken your vow a hundred times, ours is not a caravan of despair.
Poems of Rumi
read another?
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07/13/2023
eating the blame
If we know how to experience our discomfort gracefully, we suffer much less. We’re no longer afraid of eating the blame when this is called for.
One of my favorite Zen stories goes like this:
One day at a certain monastery in 10th century China, ceremonies delayed preparation of the noon meal, and when they were over, the cook took up his sickle and hurriedly gathered vegetables from the garden. In his haste, he lopped off part of a snake, and, unaware that he had done so, threw it into the soup pot with the vegetables.
At the meal, the monks thought they had never tasted such delicious soup, but the head monk found something remarkable in his bowl. Summoning the cook, he held up the head of the snake, and demanded, “What is this?”
The cook took the morsel, saying, “Oh thank you,” and immediately ate it.
Finding a way to deflect blame is a waste of energy.
We could choose to make excuses for ourselves, explaining to the head monk why we had to make the soup in a rush and how we did it.
Or we could choose to dance graciously and deflate the matter in an instant. Eating the snake’s head…crunch crunch, swallow…the cook owned up to his carelessness, gracefully and without fanfare, without beating around the bush.
This is what the path is about, dancing gracefully with our life, and eating the blame when this is called for. I love the way the late Vietnamese master Thích Nhat Hạnh describes our practice:
Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.
Yes, a serene encounter, but not evasion. And how do we dance on this edge?
Gracefully.
This being graceful gives our life dance fluidity, suppleness, and a kind of precision.
Improvisational dancers and jazz musicians, when they are in the moment of creative play, aren’t thinking about a million things–they’re right in the experience itself.
Flying crane by Kōno Bairei (1844-1895)
Just like we are when we sit and settle on the feeling of the breath sensations flowing through our body. We relax into what’s true here and now, even when there’s difficulty. From Thich Nhat Hanh again:
Handling difficulty is an art.
If we know how to experience our discomfort gracefully, we suffer much less. We’re no longer afraid of being overwhelmed by the suffering. It’s a beautiful understanding of the grace of our path. The novelist Flannery O’Connor wrote:
Give me the courage to stand the pain to get to the grace.
The secret to getting to this grace is mindfully feeling into all the inevitable pains and discomforts of this being human. The teacher Pema Chödrön said it this way:
When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on the brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell.
She elaborates:
To stay with the shakiness, to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with a feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge, that is the path of true awakening.
That really nails it. For me, this is Primo Buddhism.
The poet and novelist James Baldwin said that things cannot be changed until they are faced. But it’s how we face things that matter.
Yes, gracefully.
Meditation allows us to get still enough to see what is arising, and how to dance with it.
And own our stuff, eating the blame gracefully, like the cook did in our story.
Read another?
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08/03/2022
mindfulness: unfolding into wholeness
I was recently reading a very inspiring book by Mary O’Malley, the title of which I love: What is in the Way is the Way. In the bio blurp on inside back cover Mary writes that she “barely survived childhood.”
The compact bio continues: “Throughout her youth, she experienced an ever-deepening descent into darkness, culminating in hospitalization in 1968. After a number of suicide attempts, she had a life-changing realization in which she saw through the games of the struggling mind and experienced a full and complete connection with life which is the foundation of her work.”
I saw elsewhere in the book that she was born in 1945, and has been in private practice as a social worker and counselor for over forty years.
There is one line which truly spoke to me in her book:
When we dissolve our cloud banks of struggle through mindfulness and heartfulness, we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell the exquisite sacredness of all of life.
Most of us find ourselves living from a place of struggle more often than we may care to see. Our days can be visited by many little struggles, an occasional big one, and some that are just nonsensical. Mindfulness and this “heartfulness” Mary talks about can truly allow us to live from a place of openness and ease, even while experiencing deep challenges and struggles.
Back in the late 1930’s Carl Jung described a paradigm shift in understanding the spiritual path — rather than climbing up a ladder seeking perfection, he explored an unfolding into wholeness. He clearly saw the inherent flaws of trying to transcend or vanquish the difficult aspects of our life, our struggles and challenges, which we often associate with something being wrong with us.
Without an appreciation of our difficulties in a way which truly accepts and honors them as a part of us, fear, shame, jealousy, and anger, and other reactive patterns tend to become emboldened by our disdain for them.
But, as Mary O’Malley wrote so eloquently, mindfulness and heartfullness can dissolves these cloud banks of struggle. But we need to develop the patience and the emotional maturity to allow our stuff to marinate in mindfulness, and tenderize with heartfullness. Otherwise they simply harden into anxiety, depression, or stuffing or numbing ourselves.
Mindfulness helps us turn around and embrace life in all its messy brokenness.
Pema Chodron points out what can really keep the struggles going is a feeling that we can fix the stuff that we struggle about, or somehow fully resolve everything, though pushing through for some sort of magic breath through in our spiritual practice.
Consider this from Pema:
“We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.”
Pause here a moment. Let this sink in.
Things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall part again.
I talk to a few folks in our group who tell me they are having a very difficult 2016 so far. But after a little prodding, sometimes I get a “but …”
As in: “Its been hell, but it’s weird, at times I feel more grounded and open than I have ever felt before.”
A kind of trust emerges in the wholeness, or holiness, of the ways things are.
There are two lines I am particularly fond of from the Persian poet Rumi:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.
What he seems to be saying is that right outside of this world of your mind that is always liking/ disliking (AKA struggling) a completely other deal is happening.
Maybe at first it’s just a glimpse, or an intuition, of spaciousness, ease, joy.
Mindfulness allows us to be open to these small moments of joy and peace, such that we don’t cut them short like we always do, as we scurry back into worry, regret or second-guessing ourselves.
This “other place” is actually really a deep inner place which is always here for you. And it is absolutely trustable. It is not always likable, but it can be trusted, no matter what is happening.
It is possible to know deeply what Pema Chodron means when she says “enlightenment is all about relaxing into our life just as it is right now” — imperfect as hell, messy at times, but it’s here and now that glimpses come.
And as they come, we begin the process Jung wrote about above, that rather than trying to climb up a ladder seeking perfection and to fix or resolve things, we are unfolding into the wholeness moment by moment of the way things are.
03/03/2016