Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change by Pema Chödrön Page B
Authors: Pema Chödrön
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level, the fear can last a long time. The way to work with it is to drop the story line and not pull back or buy into the idea, “This isn’t okay,” but instead to smile at the panic, smile at this dreadful, bottomless, gaping hole that’s opening up in the pit of your stomach. When you can smile at fear, there’s a shift: what you usually try to escape from becomes a vehicle for awakening you to your fundamental, primordial goodness, for awakening you to clear-mindedness, to a caring that holds nothing back.
The image of the warrior is of a person who can go into the worst of hells and not waver from the direct experience of cruelty and unimaginable pain. So that’s our path: even in the most difficult situations, we do our best to smile atfear, to smile at our righteous indignation, our cowardliness, our avoidance of vulnerability.
Traditionally, there are three ways of entering the warrior path, three approaches to making the commitment to benefit others. The first is called entering like a monarch—like a king or a queen. This means getting our own kingdom together, then on the basis of that strength, taking care of our subjects. The analogy is, I work on myself and get my own life together so that I benefit others. To the degree that I’m not triggered anymore, I can stay present and not close my mind and heart. Our motivation is to be there for other people more and more as the years go by.
Parents get good training in this. Most mothers and fathers aspire to give their children a good life—one free of aggression or meanness. But then there’s the reality of how infuriating children can be. There’s the reality of losing your temper and yelling, the reality of being irritable, unreasonable, immature. When we see the discrepancy between our good intentions and our actions, it motivates us to work with our minds, to work with our habitual reactions and our impatience. It motivates us to get better at knowing our triggers and refraining from acting out or repressing. We gladly work on ourselves in order to be more skillful and loving parents.
People in the caring professions also get plenty of training in entering like a monarch. Maybe you want to work with homeless teenagers because you were once one yourself. Your desire is to make a difference in even one person’s life, so that they can feel that someone is there for them. Then before long, you find yourself so activated by the behavior of young people that you totally lose it and can’t be there for them anymore. At that point, you turn to meditation or to the first commitment to support you in beingpresent and open to whatever presents itself, including feelings of inadequacy, incompetence, or shame.
The next way to approach the warrior commitment is with the attitude of the ferryman. We cross the river in the company of all sentient beings—we open to our true nature together. Here the analogy is, my pain will become the stepping-stone for understanding the pain of others. Rather than our own suffering making us more self-absorbed, it becomes the means by which we genuinely open to others’ suffering.
A number of cancer survivors have told me that this attitude is what gave them the strength to go through the physical and psychological misery of chemotherapy. They couldn’t eat or drink because everything hurt too much. They had sores in their mouths. They were dehydrated. They had tremendous nausea. Then they received instruction in tonglen. Their world got bigger and bigger as they opened to all the other people who were experiencing the same physical pain that they were, as well as the loneliness, anger, and other emotional distress that goes along with it. Their pain became a stepping-stone to understanding the distress of others in the same boat.
I remember one woman telling me, “It couldn’t have gotten any worse, so I had no problem breathing in and saying, ‘Since the pain is here anyway, may I take it in fully and completely with
The image of the warrior is of a person who can go into the worst of hells and not waver from the direct experience of cruelty and unimaginable pain. So that’s our path: even in the most difficult situations, we do our best to smile atfear, to smile at our righteous indignation, our cowardliness, our avoidance of vulnerability.
Traditionally, there are three ways of entering the warrior path, three approaches to making the commitment to benefit others. The first is called entering like a monarch—like a king or a queen. This means getting our own kingdom together, then on the basis of that strength, taking care of our subjects. The analogy is, I work on myself and get my own life together so that I benefit others. To the degree that I’m not triggered anymore, I can stay present and not close my mind and heart. Our motivation is to be there for other people more and more as the years go by.
Parents get good training in this. Most mothers and fathers aspire to give their children a good life—one free of aggression or meanness. But then there’s the reality of how infuriating children can be. There’s the reality of losing your temper and yelling, the reality of being irritable, unreasonable, immature. When we see the discrepancy between our good intentions and our actions, it motivates us to work with our minds, to work with our habitual reactions and our impatience. It motivates us to get better at knowing our triggers and refraining from acting out or repressing. We gladly work on ourselves in order to be more skillful and loving parents.
People in the caring professions also get plenty of training in entering like a monarch. Maybe you want to work with homeless teenagers because you were once one yourself. Your desire is to make a difference in even one person’s life, so that they can feel that someone is there for them. Then before long, you find yourself so activated by the behavior of young people that you totally lose it and can’t be there for them anymore. At that point, you turn to meditation or to the first commitment to support you in beingpresent and open to whatever presents itself, including feelings of inadequacy, incompetence, or shame.
The next way to approach the warrior commitment is with the attitude of the ferryman. We cross the river in the company of all sentient beings—we open to our true nature together. Here the analogy is, my pain will become the stepping-stone for understanding the pain of others. Rather than our own suffering making us more self-absorbed, it becomes the means by which we genuinely open to others’ suffering.
A number of cancer survivors have told me that this attitude is what gave them the strength to go through the physical and psychological misery of chemotherapy. They couldn’t eat or drink because everything hurt too much. They had sores in their mouths. They were dehydrated. They had tremendous nausea. Then they received instruction in tonglen. Their world got bigger and bigger as they opened to all the other people who were experiencing the same physical pain that they were, as well as the loneliness, anger, and other emotional distress that goes along with it. Their pain became a stepping-stone to understanding the distress of others in the same boat.
I remember one woman telling me, “It couldn’t have gotten any worse, so I had no problem breathing in and saying, ‘Since the pain is here anyway, may I take it in fully and completely with
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