The second book has seen a lot of use these past three days as well:
The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron, is a series of talks about meditation and Buddhism. It's brisk, genuine, and striaghtforward, with surprisingly practical advice. I've carried around a small book of Pema Chodron quotes for some time now, as I've become more interested in Buddhism, and started calling myself a Buddhist the way you might eventually call a rocky shore a beach: gradually admitting that's what all the parts resemble when you step back, after some time, and see what's happened.
I didn't know this particular book was what I would need right now.
At first I was pretty skeptical of the title. No escape? Sounds grim, and I'm not the type to give up. I don't just roll over and resign myself to whatever comes along next - can't do a thing, might as well not fight, peace out with inaction. That's not me. I know psychologically, people tend to freeze up in a crisis, or even just when made uncomfortable. I try to shake myself out of that, to say "why not me?" instead of "someone else will do it". I picture someone hurt and an entire crowd not helping them; someone hurting others and no one saying a thing. I love peace, but that's not my idea of peace.
So at first I was indignant. It took me a while to realize I was basically misunderstanding.
When the Buddha taught, he didn't say that we were bad people or that there was some sin we had committed - original or otherwise - that made us more ignorant than clear, more harsh than gentle, more closed than open. He taught that there is a kind of innocent misunderstanding that we all share, something that can be turned around, corrected, and seen through, as if we were in a dark room and someone showed us where the light switch was.There are two big revelations that have hit me like a ton of bricks. It's as if I've been trying and trying to do a martial arts move and I keep getting frustrated, tighter, sore, and even hurting myself, then my coach points out "did you know you're tense here and here - and if you change your foot this way it's easier to keep your balance?" and it worked. Sometimes it's easy and sometimes it takes work, but the 'trick' becomes clearer because someone pointed it out. They've been there before, and they know the struggle. They know it's hard.
It felt like that with meditation, and for me, about compassion and awareness.
With compassion, it's sometimes the hardest thing in the world to realize that other people are essentially like us: good, with struggles. Personally, I get mad, and impatient. I want people to fix themselves, right now, you know? I do that to myself, too. Why do I still have problems, after all these years? Why haven't I figured it all out yet? I do that to the whole country and all of humanity sometimes. Pema Chodron seems to get that - she speaks from a place of being a messy, imperfect, emotional, flawed human being with a lot of neurosis. I can sure relate to that.
It's a major change of thinking to look at all the brilliance and all the neurosis as mixed up together, inseparable, in what all makes us essentially human. And instead of getting tense and hard and mad about it, resisting the way everything is - instead to soften, and be flexible, and open to just see the way things are.
Far from running away or giving up on myself, it's the opposite.It's staying with it no matter what, and getting used to that idea: not going anywhere. Might as well relax and take a look around. Maybe there's wealth to be found.
It isn't a sin that we are in a dark room. It's just an innocent situation, but how fortunate that someone shows us where the light switch is. It brightens up our life considerably. We can start to read books, to see one another's faces, to discover the colors of the walls, to enjoy the little animals that creep in and out of the room.
With awareness, the second big revelation is that I don't have to get caught up in the stories that I tell myself. What my mind, or my feelings - my depression, anger, superiority or inferiority, or my knee-jerk reactions - tell me. That I could just notice them. That I didn't have to hate them or beat myself up for them. I could even make friends with them. I could learn what they had to teach me, relax, smile, let it go. And instead of spending all that time caught up in the dark, I could be awake instead.
The wisdom I think, is that I don't turn to a wise person, they snap their fingers, then suddenly I'm awake and all my problems are fixed. Not to close down into happy thoughts and ignore work I'm called to do. But to take a couple of interesting tips that someone pointed out and see if they work for me.
I've found it helpful to pick up writings like these. It's not like I get it all perfect right away. But it often seems to speak so directly to the heart of what people (like me) seem to struggle with, I want to share and exchange and see how you feel, and at the same time I want to apologize for getting so excited. Sometimes finding that fitting piece to a conversation feels like spotting the door key we dropped and were fumbling around to find. Or I guess in a modern sense, as if I found the perfect meme that's just so true for my friends and family.
This book is like that. I hope you find it useful too.
P.S. - One last bit from Zen Dogs.
“You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day - unless you're too busy. Then you should sit for an hour.”