Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change by Chödrön, Pema

The Overview

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what is next or how. The moment you know-how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.—AGNES DE MILLE

1. The Fundamental Ambiguity of Being Human

• What a predicament! We seem doomed to suffer simply because we have a deep-seated fear of how things really are. Our attempts to find lasting pleasure, lasting security, are at odds with the fact that we’re part of a dynamic system in which everything and everyone is in process.
• This refers, I think, to an essential choice that confronts us all: whether to cling to the false security of our fixed ideas and tribal views, even though they bring us only momentary satisfaction, or to overcome our fear and make the leap to living an authentic life. That phrase, “the moral ambiguity of human existence,” resonated strongly with me because it’s what I’ve been exploring for years: How can we relax and have a genuine, passionate relationship with the fundamental uncertainty, the groundlessness of being human?
• Happily, the Buddha gave many instructions on how to do just this. Among these instructions are what are known in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as the Three Vows, or Three Commitments.
  • Pratimoksha Vow is the foundation for personal liberation. This is a commitment to doing our best to not cause harm with our actions or words or thoughts, a commitment to being good to each other. It provides a structure within which we learn to work with our thoughts and emotions and to refrain from speaking or acting out of confusion.
  • The next step toward being comfortable with groundlessness is a commitment to helping others. Traditionally called the Bodhisattva Vow, it is a commitment to dedicate our lives to keeping our hearts and minds open and to nurturing our compassion with the longing to ease the suffering of the world.
  • The last of the Three Commitments, traditionally known as the Samaya Vow, is a resolve to embrace the world just as it is, without bias. It is a commitment to see everything we encounter, good and bad, pleasant and painful, as a manifestation of awakened energy. It is a commitment to see anything and everything as a means by which we can awaken further.

• But it’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the Buddha taught. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness.
• When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for this is freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human.
• The root of these fundamentalist tendencies, these dogmatic tendencies, is a fixed identity—a fixed view we have of ourselves as good or bad, worthy or unworthy, this or that. With a fixed identity, we have to busy ourselves with trying to rearrange reality, because reality doesn’t always conform to our view.
• Ego clinging is our means of denial. Once we have the fixed idea “this is me,” then we see everything as a threat or a promise—or something we couldn’t care less about. Whatever we encounter, we’re either attracted to it or averse to it, or indifferent to it, depending on how much of a threat to our self-image it represents. The fixed identity is our false security. We maintain it by filtering all of our experiences through this perspective.
• When we like someone, it’s generally because they make us feel good. They don’t blow our trip, don’t disturb our fixed identity, so we’re buddies. When we don’t like someone—they’re not on our wavelength, so we don’t want to hang out with them—it’s generally because they challenge our fixed identity. We’re uncomfortable in their presence because they don’t confirm us in the ways we want to be confirmed, so we can’t function in the ways we want to function. Often we think of the people we don’t like as our enemies, but in fact, they’re all-important to us. They’re our greatest teachers: special messengers who show up just when we need them, to point out our fixed identity. Similar to Jim Dethmers everyone as Allies 

• The discomfort associated with groundlessness, with the fundamental ambiguity of being human, comes from our attachment to wanting things to be a certain way. The Tibetan word for attachment is shenpa. My teacher Dzigar Kongtrül calls shenpa the barometer of ego clinging, a gauge of our self-involvement and self-importance. Shenpa has a visceral quality associated with grasping or, conversely, pushing away. This is the feeling of I like, I want, I need and I don’t like, I don’t want, I don’t need, I want it to go away. I think of shenpa as being hooked. It’s that stuck feeling, that tightening or closing down or withdrawing we experience when we’re uncomfortable with what’s going on. Shenpa is also the urge to find relief from those feelings by clinging to something that gives us pleasure.
• For the most part, our attachment, our shenpa, arises involuntarily—our habitual response to feeling insecure. When we’re hooked, we turn to anything to relieve the discomfort—food, alcohol, sex, shopping, being critical or unkind. But there is something more fruitful we can do when that edgy feeling arises. It’s similar to the way we can deal with pain. One popular way of relating to physical pain is mindfulness meditation. It involves directing your full attention to the pain and breathing in and out of the spot that hurts. Instead of trying to avoid the discomfort, you open yourself completely to it. You become receptive to the painful sensation without dwelling on the story your mind has concocted: It’s bad; I shouldn’t feel this way; maybe it will never go away.
• Shantideva said that the suffering we experience with physical pain is entirely conceptual. It comes not from the sensation itself but from how we view it. He used the example of the Karna, a sect in ancient India in which the members burned and cut themselves as part of their ritual practice. They associated the extreme pain with spiritual ecstasy, so it had a positive meaning for them. Many athletes experience something similar when they “feel the burn.” The physical sensation in itself is neither good nor bad; it’s our interpretation of it that makes it so.
• Rather than retreat from, feelings like fear and aversion. If we can get in touch with the sensation as sensation and open ourselves to it without labeling it good or bad, then even when we feel the urge to drawback, we can stay present and move forward into the feeling.
• An emotion like anger that’s an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it’s triggered until it runs its course. One and a half minutes, that’s all. When it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it’s because we’ve chosen to rekindle it.
• Acknowledge the feeling, give it your full, compassionate, even welcoming attention, and even if it’s only for a few seconds, drop the story line about the feeling. This allows you to have a direct experience of it, free of interpretation. Don’t fuel it with concepts or opinions about whether it’s good or bad. Just be present with the sensation. Where is it located in your body? Does it remain the same for very long? Does it shift and change?
• Ego or fixed identity doesn’t just mean we have a fixed idea about ourselves. It also means that we have a fixed idea about everything we perceive. I have a fixed idea about you; you have a fixed idea about me. And once there is that feeling of separation, it gives rise to strong emotions. In Buddhism, strong emotions like anger, craving, pride, and jealousy are known as kleshas—conflicting emotions that cloud the mind. The kleshas are our vehicle for escaping groundlessness, and therefore every time we give in to them, our preexisting habits are reinforced. In Buddhism, going around and around, recycling the same patterns, is called samsara. And samsara equals pain.
• We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.
• So the challenge is to notice the emotional tug of shenpa when it arises and to stay with it for one and a half minutes without the story line. Can you do this once a day, or many times throughout the day, as the feeling arises? This is the challenge. This is the process of unmasking, letting go, opening the mind and heart.

Life without the Story Line 

• The practice is to train in not following the thoughts, not in getting rid of thought altogether. That would be impossible. You may have thought-free moments and, as your meditation practice deepens, longer expanses of time that are thought-free, but thoughts always come back. That’s the nature of mind. You don’t have to make thoughts the villain, however. You can just train in interrupting their momentum. The basic instruction is to let the thoughts go—or to label them “thinking”—and stay with the immediacy of your experience.
• In a book I read recently, the author talked about humans as transitional beings—beings who are neither fully caught nor fully free but are in the process of awakening. I find it helpful to think of myself this way. I’m in the process of becoming, in the process of evolving. I’m neither doomed nor completely free, but I’m creating my future with every word, every action, every thought. I find myself in a very dynamic situation with unimaginable potential. I have all the support I need to simply relax and be with the transitional, in-process quality of my life. I have all I need to engage in the process of awakening.
• Buddhism holds that the true nature of the mind is as vast as the sky and that thoughts and emotions are like clouds that, from our vantage point, obscure it. We’re taught that if we want to experience the boundlessness of the sky, we’ll need to get curious about those clouds. When we look deeply into the clouds, they fall apart, and there’s the expanse of sky. It never went anywhere. It has always been here, momentarily hidden from us by the fleeting, shifting clouds.

Life without the Story Line 

• The way to weaken the habit of clinging to fixed ideas and contact the fluidity of thoughts and emotions is to shift your focus to a wider perspective. Instead of getting caught in the drama, see if you can feel the dynamic energy of the thoughts and emotions. See if you can experience the space around the thoughts: experience how they arise in space, dwell for a while, and then return into space. If you don’t suppress the thoughts and emotions and don’t run with them, then you find yourself in an interesting place. The place of not rejecting or justifying is right in the middle of nowhere. It is here that you can finally embrace what you’re feeling. It is here that you can look out and see the sky.
• Our identity, which seems so reliable, so substantial, is in fact very fluid, very dynamic. There are unlimited possibilities to what we might think, what we might feel, and how we might experience reality. We have what it takes to free ourselves from the suffering of a fixed identity and connect with the fundamental slipperiness and mystery of our being, which has no fixed identity. Your sense of yourself—who you think you are at the relative level—is a very restricted version of who you truly are. But the good news is that you can use your direct experience—who you seem to be at this very moment—as the doorway to your true nature. By fully touching this relative moment of time—the sound you’re hearing, the smell you’re smelling, the pain or comfort you’re feeling right now—by being fully present to your experience, you contact the unlimited openness of your being.
• Be fully present. Feel your heart. And engage the next moment without an agenda.

The First Commitment: Committing to Not Cause Harm

3. Laying the Foundation

• The first commitment is about refraining from speech and actions that are harmful to ourselves and others. It liberates us by making us far more aware of what we’re feeling, so that whenever the urge to lie or slander or take something that isn’t given to us comes up—whenever we have the urge to act out our desires or aggression or escape in any form—we refrain.
• As support in refraining from harmful speech and actions, it can be really helpful to commit to four traditional precepts, or directives: the precepts to not kill, do not steal, do not lie, and do not harm others with our sexual activity. We can commit to these precepts for one day or one week or a lifetime. There are hundreds of rules for fully ordained monks and nuns, but the Buddha said that the most important were these four. Basically, following the precepts gives us space to examine every nuance of the urge to express ourselves negatively and then, while fully acknowledging our feelings, make the choice to not do anything that would cause harm.
• When you come from the view that you’re fundamentally good rather than fundamentally flawed, as you see yourself speak or act out, as you see yourself repress, you will have a growing understanding that you’re not a bad person who needs to shape up but a good person with temporary, malleable habits that are causing you a lot of suffering. And then, in that spirit, you can become very familiar with these temporary but strongly embedded habits. You can see them so clearly and so compassionately that you don’t continue to strengthen them.
• When you’re refraining—when you’re feeling the pull of habitual thoughts and emotions but you’re not escaping by acting or speaking out—you can try this inner renunciation exercise: Notice how you feel: What does it feel like in the body to have these cravings or aggressive urges? Notice your thinking: What sort of thoughts do these feelings give birth to? Notice your actions: How do you treat yourself and other people when you feel this way?
• To further get at what inner renunciation means, you could try the following practice of renouncing one thing: For one day (or one day a week), refrain from something you habitually do to run away, to escape. Pick something concrete, such as overeating or excessive sleeping or overworking or spending too much time texting or checking e-mails. Make a commitment to yourself to gently and compassionately work with refraining from this habit for this one day. Really commit to it. Do this with the intention that it will put you in touch with the underlying anxiety or uncertainty that you’ve been avoiding. Do it and see what you discover.
• There’s a practice in Buddhism called Sojong that gives us an opportunity to reflect on where we are in terms of refraining and, when we feel that we’ve really made a mess of things, to put that behind us and start anew. Traditionally, Sojong takes place twice a month, on the full and new moon days. The day before, each person reviews the preceding two weeks and reflects: What have I done with my body? What have I done with my speech? What about my mind: is it steady or all over the place and never present? As much as possible, we explore these questions without self-criticism or blame.
• Sojong itself is a little like the fourth and fifth steps in a Twelve Step program, which call for making “a searching and fearless” self-inventory, recognizing where we’ve gone off course, then sharing this with another person. Sojong is a kind of antiguilt process that allows us to assess ourselves honestly, acknowledge what we’ve done and where we are, then let go of self-judgment and move on. Instead of holding on to the view, “I’m hopeless. Week after week, month after month, year after year go by, and I can never stop lying” (or whatever your habit is), you can say, “Well, this is where I am now. I fully declare what’s happened now and in the past, and I go forward with a sense of a fresh start.”
• One time, a group of students was asking Chögyam Trungpa about guilt. Among them was a man who had killed people in the Vietnam War and was tortured by self-loathing and guilt. Chögyam Trungpa told him, “That was then. This is now. You can always connect with your true nature at any time and be free of everything that went before.” Instead of letting our regrets drag us down, we can use them to spur us on to not repeat harmful acts but to learn from them how to be wiser in the future. We are fundamentally good, not fundamentally flawed, and we can trust this.
• Patrul Rinpoche, a Buddhist master who lived in the eighteenth century, basically said there is no way to escape harming. He devotes an entire section of his book The Words of My Perfect Teacher to all the ways we cause harm: countless beings suffer from making the clothes we wear, from bringing us the food we eat. Beings suffer even when we walk. “Who is not guilty of having crushed countless tiny insects underfoot?” he asks. Our situation is inescapable because of our interconnectedness with all things. What makes the difference is our intention to not harm. On an everyday level, the intention to not harm means using our body, our speech, and our mind in such a way that we don’t knowingly hurt people, animals, birds, insects—any being—with our actions or words. And we not only vow to not harm, Patrul Rinpoche says, we also commit to doing the opposite: We help. We heal. We do everything we can to benefit others.

4. Be Fully Present, Feel Your Heart, and Leap

• THE ON-THE-SPOT practice of being fully present, feeling your heart, and greeting the next moment with an open mind can be done at any time: when you wake up in the morning, before a difficult conversation, whenever fear or discomfort arises. This practice is a beautiful way to claim your warriorship, your spiritual warriorship. In other words, it is a way to claim your courage, your kindness, your strength. Whenever it occurs to you, you can pause briefly, touch in with how you’re feeling both physically and mentally, and then connect with your heart—even putting your hand on your heart, if you want to. This is a way of extending warmth and acceptance to whatever is going on for you right now. You might have an aching back, an upset stomach, panic, rage, impatience, calmness, joy—whatever it is, you can let it be there just as it is, without labeling it good or bad, without telling yourself you should or shouldn’t be feeling that way. Having connected with what is, with love and acceptance, you can go forward with curiosity and courage. I call this third step “taking a leap.”
• The meditation that I was taught and that I practice has three main parts: posture, the object of meditation, and the way we relate to thoughts.
• The basic instruction starts with posture—with the way our body supports us while we’re meditating. We begin by being fully present in our body with awareness of our seat, our legs, our arms, our torso. We take a noble, upright but relaxed posture, which helps us settle internally and contact a feeling of confidence and dignity within ourselves. We are claiming our warriors, claiming our bravery, claiming a fundamental feeling of all-rightness. If the body is uplifted, the mind will be uplifted. The six points of good posture taught by Chögyam Trungpa help us in this process. They are the seat, the legs, the torso, the hands, the eyes, and the mouth.
• To bring our attention back to the breath, we use a technique called labeling. Whenever we notice that we’re distracted, we make a mental note, “thinking,” then gently return our attention to the breath. It’s important to have a kind attitude as we meditate, to train in making friends with ourselves rather than strengthening rigidity and self-criticism. Therefore, we try to label with a good-hearted, nonjudgmental mind. I like to imagine that thoughts are bubbles and that labeling them is like touching a bubble with a feather. That’s very different from attacking thoughts as if they were clay pigeons we were trying to shoot down.
• Shantideva enthusiastically urges us to stay present even with extreme discomfort. “There is nothing that does not grow light, through habit and familiarity,” he says. “Putting up with little cares, I’ll train myself to bear with great adversity.”
• As we continue the practice, we will come to experience life’s impermanent and changing energy not just as threatening but also as refreshing, liberating, and inspiring. It’s the same energy—we just experience it in two different ways. Either we can relax into it, seeing it as the true nature of our mind, our unconditional goodness, or we can react against it.
• First, contemplate your intention for this practice session. Then run through the six points of good posture to settle your body. If you like, you can then count breaths from 1 to 10, or from 1 to 20, to settle the mind. Then drop the counting and simply bring light awareness to the breath. As you continue to meditate, maintain gentle awareness of the breath as it comes in and goes out, or just as it goes out. When the mind wanders, gently label the thoughts “thinking” and joyfully, without judgment, bring your attention back to the breath.

5. Staying in the Middle

• There’s Buddhist teaching called the eight worldly concerns that describes this predicament. It points out our main preoccupations in life—what drives us, what we hope for, what we fear. It points out how we continually try to avoid the uncertainty inherent in our condition, how we continually try to get solid ground under our feet. The eight worldly concerns are presented as four pairs of opposites: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, fame and disgrace, praise and blame.